The poem, then, which had begun with a recognition of the beauty of the Babe’s eyes in whose beauty the East had come to seek itself, ends in a desire not to know what may be seen with the eyes, but to press on, upward to a purely intellectual object,—Christ in heaven.
“Thus we, who when with all the noble powres
That (at Thy cost) are call’d not vainly, ours:
We vow to make brave way
Upwards, and presse on for the pure intelligentiall prey.”
(ll. 220–223.)
In those passages in Henry More, where the mystic union of the soul with Christ or God is symbolized as a sensuous experience, the elevating power of Platonism is noticeable in the progression of the poet’s mind out of this lower plane into a higher region of pure thought. Thus in “Psychathanasia” the advance is made from a treatment of the communion, which the blest have with Christ in their partaking His body and blood, to a contemplation of the beauty of God. In this union, which is shared by those
“whose souls deiform summitie
Is waken’d in this life, and so to God
Are nearly joynd in a firm Unitie,”