Thy straying thoughts henceforth for ever rest.”
(ll. 298–304.)
The second form which the doctrine of heavenly love assumed in English is found in William Drummond’s “Song II—It autumn was, and on our hemisphere.” The conception of heavenly beauty is not the ethical notion of Spenser’s “Hymne,” but a less stimulating idea of the beauty of an intelligible world of which this world is but a copy. The attraction in this idea lay in its appeal to Drummond’s peculiar imagination, delighting, as it did, in the sight of vastness. The poem is an exhortation to the lover, who is Drummond himself, to cease his mourning for his dead love, and to raise his mind to a love of heaven and of the beauty of God there to be seen. The two ideas which Platonism contributed are the notion of an intelligible world above this world of sense, and of an absolute beauty of which all beauty on earth is but a shadow.
The conception of a world above this world was suggested by Plato in his “Phædo” and explained by Plotinus in his Enneads (VI. vii. 12) as a pure intelligible world. “For since,” says Plotinus, “we say that this All [the universe] is framed after the Yonder, as after a pattern, the All must first exist yonder as a living entity, an animal; and since its idea is complete, everything must exist yonder. Heaven, therefore, must exist there as an animal, not without what here we call its stars, and this is the idea of heaven. Yonder, too, of course, must be the Earth, not bare, but far more richly furnished with life; in it are all creatures that move on dry land and plants rooted in life. Sea, too, is yonder, and all water ebbing and flowing in abiding life; and all creatures that inhabit the water, and all the tribes of the air are part of the all yonder, and all aerial beings, for the same reason as Air itself.” In the “Phædo” (110–111), Plato lends color to his account by calling attention to the fairness of the place and to the pleasantness of life there. Drummond has seized upon this idea of an immaterial world where all is fair and happy, and interprets it as the heaven whither the young woman who has died is urging him to direct his love. Thus in her addresses to Drummond she speaks of the character of the world where she lives.
“Above this vast and admirable frame,
This temple visible, which World we name,
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There is a world, a world of perfect bliss,
Pure, immaterial, bright, ...
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