it is as old as Plato and the Bible. Only modern thinking has given new and convincing grounds of its reasonableness and truth. From the transcendental it is but a step to the mystical. The mystic experience occurs when the total personality, with volitional intensity, reaches forward to commune with the powers, or Power, outside itself, identifies itself with such Power. If it conceives Power as impersonal and just Nature it is naturalistic mysticism; if it conceives Power as Deity and as Personal it is theistic or pietistic mysticism. This mystic principle lies at the root of all poetry of high seriousness and deep spirituality. In setting forth an abstruse matter Wordsworth somewhere complains of "the sad incompetence of human speech," which may well be applied to the foregoing definitions. The terms, for instance, immanence, transcendence, and mysticism, vastly overlap in meaning and up to a certain point are interchangeable. Immanence gives the sense of the deepest power in the universe, or Deity, as within Nature and within the individual; transcendence asserts that the human individuality possesses something that is not derived from sensation and that makes it independent of the sense world in which we move; mysticism implies the communion of this individuality with the universal power, or Deity, giving a sense of blending, or becoming one with that Power. Beyond this perhaps words are mere words and sadly incompetent. Vital conviction, however, concerning any of these matters at any time is of the greatest importance to the individual. COLERIDGE Coleridge and Wordsworth were more responsible than any two other men in changing the current of thought in English poetry from characteristic eighteenth to characteristic nineteenth century ways. Their early writings were deeply tinged with the eighteenth century tradition, from which both emancipated themselves as they grew to maturity. Their emancipation is not concerned merely or even primarily with matters of poetic diction, but with ideas, particularly ethical and religious. They did not gain the distinction of being prophets and seers without travail of spirit; this implied a change of attitude on certain important issues, for which they have been either praised or soundly berated by critics, according to the lights of the individual critic. But the fact of their spiritual struggle and its great significance to the thought of the world together with its special influence on nineteenth century literature cannot be gainsaid. Though Wordsworth left us a much larger body of creative literature, and is a more lasting influence, Coleridge, extraordinarily responsive to new ideas, eclectic from the beginning, and always something of a propagandist, registered swiftly in his writings the changing spirit of the age. But Coleridge's outlook on life was always essentially religious. From his college days onward he considered himself, and was considered by his intimate friends, the champion of religion, and particularly of the Christian 17 |