SOURCE: "Appendix C: Poetry and Mysticism," in On the Mystical Poetry of Henry Vaughan, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962, pp. 123-38.

In the following excerpt, Durr illuminates the nature of the mystic experience and its relationship to reality, and offers high praise of Vaughan as one of the few individuals in human history who have possessed the faculties and genius to formulate the mystical vision of Reality "in words of poetic effect."

When it happens that a man breaks through—is brought through—the narrow confines of his conventional nature, his ego, or "outer man," when perhaps suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, the gates of his perception hitherto set to admit only such data as wear the badge of "a priori" definition open toward their full dimension, "then comes the light!" Then he enters the land of the living, Reality flows in, and he sees that...