The Silesian Angel, or the Cherubic Wanderer. Under these quaint titles is hidden and forgotten the personal name of one of the most significant, and in manner most original of the seventeenth-century mystics. About the time that a Welsh doctor—the Silurist, Henry Vaughan— published a volume of devotional poetry, of which the thought and feeling are steeped in mysticism, the expression of quaintest beauty, a German doctor newly converted from Lutheranism to the Church, John Scheffler, also published a volume of poetry, more directly mystical in substance and whose style, though of another manner, possesses equal charm and quaintness. In the old-world herb garden of seventeenth-century mystical literature with the rosemary of “Silex Scintillans” we may gather the thyme of the Cherubinischer Wandersman. This latter work consists not of poems but of rhymed couplets, in all 1675, divided into six books. Each couplet (occasionally there are quatrains and two or three longer pieces) sums up with a concision, which rivals the Latin collect, a maxim of mystical theology, of Catholic dogma viewed from the mystical standpoint, or some ascetical rule preparatory to mystical experience. Certainly the doctrine is not original. But we can hardly look for substantial originality in the description of man’s experience of eternal truth. Nor even is the standpoint original. Every utterance can be paralleled from previous mystical writers, either of the German-Flemish or the later Spanish school. Indeed the writer is eager to insist on this in his preface. But the teachings gathered from books explain and confirm the content of a living personal experience. The poet relates what his own eyes have seen of the Word of Life.