“A heav’nly feast, no hunger can consume; A light unseene, yet shines in every place; A sound, no time can steale; a sweet perfume No winds can scatter; an intire embrace That no satietie can ere unlace.” (Stz. 41–42.) Such was the powerful hold of the doctrines of Platonism upon the minds of these religious poets. Strong as were the forces leading them into a degenerate form of Christian love, these were overcome by the one fundamental conception of Platonism that the highest love the soul can know is the love of a purely intellectual principle of beauty and goodness; and that this love is one in which passion and reason are wedded into the one supreme desire of the seeker after wisdom and beauty. Such a conception saved a large body of English poetry from degenerating into that form of erotic mysticism which Crashaw’s later poems reveal; and in which there is no elevation of the mind away from the lower range of sense enjoyment, but only an introversion of the physical life into the intimacies of spiritual experience. II. EARTHLY LOVE The influence of Platonism upon the love poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England is felt in two distinct forms. In the first place, the teachings of that philosophy were used to explain and dignify the conception of love as a passion having its source in a desire for the enjoyment of beauty; and in the second place, the emphasis laid by Platonism upon the function of the soul as opposed to the senses resulted in a tendency to treat love as a purely spiritual passion devoid of all sensuous pleasure. In the first phase the teachings of Platonic theory were made to render service according to the conventional love theory known as Petrarchism; and in its second phase Platonism contributed its share in keeping alive the so-called metaphysical mood of the seventeenth-century lyric. According to the conventional method of Petrarchism, the object of the poet’s love was always a lady of great beauty and spotless virtue, and of a correspondingly great cruelty. Hence the subjects of the Petrarchian love poem were either the praise of the mistress’s beauty or an account of the torment of soul caused by her heartless indifference. By applying the doctrines of Platonism to this conventional manner, a way was found to explain upon a seemingly philosophic basis the power of the lover’s passion and of beauty as its exciting cause. The best example in English of this application of Platonic theory is Spenser’s two hymns,—“An Hymne in Honour of Love” and “An Hymne in Honour of Beautie.” The professed aim of Spenser in these hymns differs in no wise from the purpose of the Petrarchian lover. Both are written to ease the torments of an unrequited passion. In the “Hymne in Honour of Love” he addresses love in his invocation: