He is in little all the sphere:

Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Find their acquaintance there."

Mysticism is naturally monotonous, for it has but one theme, and that the most abstruse of all, a theme too vast to be taken in pieces, examined in detail, and subjected to varied treatment, and made preternaturally vast by the nebulous form under which the mystic undertook its survey. Were it not, therefore, for this picturesque and genial side of symbolism, the mystical books would be harder to read than any books whose study is a weariness to the flesh. But the combination of the dim, immense, and shadowy with the sharply cut and gleaming and fantastical, gives precisely the charm which no other literature possesses.

But the genuine mystics carried their symbolism very much further than we have indicated in this brief reference to their books. The finest symbols in which the truths of the spiritual world take form are actions. The true poet is the noble doer, who, instead of singing poems, enacts them in the lofty figurative style of deeds; and, judged by this standard, the mystic was a poet. No mistake is greater than that which associates mysticism with dreamy inactivity. Its history proves it to have been a very practical spirit, rarely an idle one; and when it has been idle, it has owed its idleness to the times in which it flourished, and to the influences to which it was exposed. The Roman Catholic mysticism of Spain was a languishing, sentimental, useless thing. Mr. Vaughan tells us, and tells us very truly, that Saint Theresa "knew little of that charity which makes gracious inroads on the outer world, -no feet-washing do we read of, no hospital-tending, no ministry among the poor. Her ascetic zeal was directed not for, but against, the mitigation of suffering. It made many monks and nuns uncomfortable; but we are not aware that it made any sinners better, or any wretched happy." But Madame Guyon was a woman of most lovely, gracious, and constant beneficence, a model in her way of what woman may do in the world for the temporal as well as eternal well-being of her human kind; and Fénelon was by all eminence the man of charity. All Christendom shows no grander example

of the patient, industrious, humble Christian worker than the mystical Archbishop of Cambray. What phase of outward goodness, wherein the happiness of others was implicated, did he not illustrate? It was he who, mightier in his virtue than an army in steel, went alone, unescorted, among the insurgent Huguenots of Picton, and bade the troubled waters, which the French Xerxes would have whipped into calmness, subside at a word. It was he who found the poor peasant's cow, drove it home at night himself, alone, through an unsafe country, and that too when he had already given the man golden words of comfort for his loss, and golden Louis too for the purchase of another milk-bearer. It would not be fair to say that mysticism made the good Fénelon the saint he was, but it is fair to say that this saint was a mystic, and that mysticism did not mar his morality.

Bunsen pays the noble tribute to the German "Friends of God," that "they were, like the Apostles, men of the people, and practical Christians; while as men of thought their ideas contributed powerfully to the great efforts of the European nations in the sixteenth century." Eckart was mainly a theologian, living in the region of speculation; but he was a very brave theologian, and his speculations had outlooks and tendencies which were so decidedly practical in their effects on the popular mind, that he was summoned as a heretic before the Archbishop of Cologne, to whom he refused to submit, and in spite of whom he went on bravely preaching his doctrine. Slander and persecution had no more power to break his patience, than praise and honors had to change his meekness into pride. John Tauler had a standard of duty that would have made him a hero in any age. A truly loyal and courageous soul he was. In the long and terrible conflict between Pope Benedict XII. and the Emperor Louis, Tauler uncompromisingly took part with the Emperor in advocating his independence of the Papal judgment. And when the Pope laid an interdict upon the Emperor, Tauler went on with his preaching and ministering precisely as if no bull had escaped from the enclosure of the Vatican. It was a bold thing in the fourteenth century to brave a Papal excommunication. The Black Death visited Strasburg, and fearfully augmented the

terror and distress which a renewal of the ban had brought on the people. But Tauler, amid a superabundance of corpses and a dearth of priests, continued his loving ministry to the sickening and the dying, with a devotion that endeared him to the hearts of the simplest people in the city. The clergy could not waste their substance in riotous living when this good man was nigh, and sorely they hated him for bringing his doctrine of the inward life so close to certain vile practices of theirs. "The measure with which we shall be measured is the faculty of love in the soul, the will of a man," said this plain mender of morals. "I tell you, if I were not a priest, I would esteem it a great gift that I was able to make shoes, and would try to make them so well as to be a pattern to all." Very well that for a mystic in the fourteenth century. "If a man, while busy in lofty inward work, were called to cease therefrom, and cook a broth for some sick person, or any other such service, he should do so willingly and with great joy." It would not be easy to find anything more "practical" than that among those who are not mystics. Nicholas of Basel was unmystical enough to march straight to the stake that loomed up from an ugly pile of fagots; and two of his friends had so much beside the dream element in them, that they perished with him rather than be parted from his side. Heidelberg, Cologne, and Vienne had the honor of putting to the fiery proof the mystic's power of endurance. Several times in the course of this essay we have had occasion to mention the great mystic of New England, the "sage of Concord." His pages are redolent of the sacred lore of the East, and carry about them an air of contemplation which is very far above the dust and hurry of the street: he even ventures in the public lecture to commend Plotinus and Jamblichus to Boston audiences in 1861. But all who know Mr. Emerson, know that he is a practical man; that he can distinguish as well as another between a good bargain and a bad one; that he is singularly well acquainted with the events which transpire in the social world; that he is interested in every species of fact, scientific, historical, literary, artistic, and personal; and that he stands on firm and manly feet, with those terribly earnest and practical men who face the frown and the hiss as they do

battle for popular liberty against the aristocracy and the mob. Affected spirituality seeks the cloister, and finds expression for its sentimentalism in ecstasy and song. Genuine spirituality goes into the street, and will accept no forms as representative or expressive of its character, but the living forms of truth, justice, and humanity.

But while we earnestly vindicate mysticism against the charge of dreaminess and inutility, we confess that it is not on account of its charities that we hold mysticism dear. We love the mystics for their inward, not for their outward life; because they lift us up above the world, not because they make us faithful in it. There are others, and enough of them, who will keep us up to that. We crave more mist and moonlight in America; and that the mystics give to us. They come to us as evening comes, and take us into the cool, gray shadows of the border-land which stretches its irresolute line of shore between night and day. What they show us is little when compared with what they conceal from us; but what they show us is the vast expanse of the Infinite, dotted here and there with the faintly shining stars that stand as outposts to the invisible courts of the Godhead; what they conceal from us is the hard surface, the straight line, the sharp angle, the precise, individual form, which the simple mistake for positiveness, but which the wise know as limitation and narrow

ness.

The atmosphere that surrounds the mystic is an atmosphere of religion, of worship, where fretfulness and care and impatient sorrow are quieted by the peace that reigns over the bottomless deep of the Infinite. The light that shines about the mystic is the twilight where the prying glance of criticism is at fault, and eyes that have no wonder in them, but only speculation, close for lack of objects to look on, and controversy lays down its weapon because it cannot descry a foe, and knowledge passes away and sinks into awe and faith. We love the mystics; we love them all the more for the age we live in, as we love the midsummer night best; and right glad should we be if such books as Mr. Vaughan's might be multiplied, and grace might be given unto men to read them and to enjoy them.

VOL. LXXI. ·

- 5TH S. VOL. IX. NO. II.

20

E. E.

1. Prolusiones Academicæ præmiis annuis dignatæ et in Curia Cantabrigiensi [Anglica] Recitata Comittiis Maximis A. D. M.DCCC.LXI. Cantabrigia [Anglorum]. The Prince of Wales at the Tomb of Washington. A Poem which obtained the Chancellor's Medal at the Cambridge Commencement. By FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS, Trinity College.

2. Poem delivered at the Phi Beta Kappa Annual Meeting at Cambridge [Massachusetts], July 15. By ELBRIDGE JEFFERSON CUTLER, ESQ., of Holliston.

Two college poems reach us, within the same month, from the two Cambridges. This, indeed, happens every year, but that seldom happens which we now record, that the subjects of the two are in the least akin to each other. Mr. Myers's poem, "The Prince of Wales at the Tomb of Washington," obtained the Chancellor's medal at the English Cambridge. Prince Albert had selected that striking subject for the competition. The treatment of the subject is careful, perhaps too careful, scholarly, perhaps too scholarly, -philosophical, certainly too philosophical,- in face of which one defect, however, the poem rises much above the level of “occasional poetry," and very much above the level of prize poems. The danger of the subject is, like the danger of most sermons, that the text will eclipse the comment; and Mr. Myers had, in fact, begun and finished one poem in his opening stanza :

"Behold, he reared a race and ruled them not,
And he shall rule a race he did not rear;
Warrior and prince, their former feud forgot,
Have found a meeting here."

The criticism is superficial, that Washington, the warrior, never had any feud with Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, excepting as he was included, on the Calvinistic scheme, in his great-grandfather, and that Albert Edward certainly never had any feud with Washington. But, passing this, the stanza is a good one, and well versifies the text, which indeed it exhausts. The poet then lays out his new work into divisions. The first compares Washington to a fossil masto