CENTURIES OF MEDITATION
;
THOMAS TRAHERNE
CENTURIES OF
MEDITATIONS
BY
THOMAS TRAHERNE
(1636 -1674)
NOW FIRST PRINTED FROM THE
AUTHOR'S MANUSCRIPT
EDITED BY BERTRAM DOBELL
Nor gold nor jewels for a gift I bring,
But a more precious and a rarer thing
LONDON
PUBLISHED BY THE EDITOR
77 CHARING CROSS ROAD, W.C.
1908
First issued, June 1908
Second issue, December 1908
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
A. T. QUILLER-COUCH
With feelings of much admiration for his talents
as poet, novelist and critic, and of deep
gratitude for his perhaps too favourable
estimate of the literary labours of
THE EDITOR
INTRODUCTION
It is now four years since it fell to my lot to make
known to the world the poems of Thomas Traherne.
For considerably more than two centuries they had
remained in manuscript, unknown and uncared for.
They had fallen into my hands by what I must needs
think was a very remarkable series of accidents ; and
I account it as one of the most fortunate incidents of
my life that I immediately discerned their value and
importance. When I published them I did not fear to
express my belief that they were the work of one of
the finest and noblest spirits that ever existed, and it
was a great gratification to me that my own estimate of Traherne was accepted as a true one by all competent judges. I do not think that any one whose opinions are worth consideration would now deny that this successor of George Herbert, and contemporary of Milton, Crashaw and Vaughan, is worthy to be men- tioned in the same breath with them. Or, if indeed any one should think that Traherne's poems, fine as
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they are in substance, are yet, owing to their occasional defects of expression, inferior to those of the poets I have named, I cannot doubt that with the publication of the present volume all question as to his claim to rank with them in force of intellect and power of expression must be finally set at rest.
When I published the poems I prefixed to them an introduction in which I gave all the facts about the author's life and works which I had then been able to discover. I need not travel again over this ground, since most of my present readers will have seen the previous volume. What I said in that preface I do not now see any reason to modify or withdraw.
About the present work there is much to be said: and I at first intended to attempt to say all that needed saying. But after some endeavour to do this, I came to see that with all my admiration for Traherne as a literary artist, I was so far out of sympathy with many of his ideas that I could not deal with them from the proper standpoint without exposing myself to some risk of misapprehension. Though it is certainly not necessary that any one who writes about Traherne should believe all that he did, it is yet desirable that he should be generally in sympathy with the faith of which our author was so earnest a professor. For myself then all I now propose to do is, firstly, to make some remarks on the characteristics of Traherne as a man and an author and secondly, to endeavour to bring out, by comparison with the most famous work
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of the same kind, the peculiar merits of his " Centuries of Meditations."
In the character of Traherne the qualities of the poet, the mystic, and the saint are all to be found in a very high degree, if not indeed in their highest manifestations. And these qualities were all so happily combined in him that they make up together a perfect unity. He was not more a poet than a mystic, nor more a mystic than a saint; but each at all times, and never one rather than the other. To set out to prove this is not perhaps very necessary, since few or none who study attentively this and the former volume will be likely to question it; but I cannot resist the temptation of making some relative quotations from an author who, though utterly different as it may seem at first, from Traherne, had yet not a few qualities in common with him. The writer of " The City of Dreadful Night," though he did not and could not know anything of Traherne, has yet, in his essay called " Open Secret Societies," in describing the typical characteristics of the Poet, the Mystic, and the Saint, produced a living picture of our " splendid alien," as he has been called.
Let me quote first Thomson's description of the Poet :—
"There is the Open Secret Society of -the Poets.
These are they who feel that the universe is one mighty
harmony of beauty and joy ; and who are continually
listening to the rhythms and cadences of the eternal
music whose orchestra comprises all things from the
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shells to the stars, all beings from the worm to man, all sounds from the voice of the little bird to the voice of the great ocean ; and who are able partially to reproduce these rhythms and cadences in the language of men. In all these imitative songs of theirs is a latent undertone, in which the whole infinite harmony of the whole lies furled; and the fine ears catch this undertone, and convey it to the soul, wherein the furled music unfurls to its primordial infinity, expanding with rapturous pulses and agitating with awful thunders this soul which has been skull-bound, so that it is dissolved and borne away beyond consciousness, and becomes as a, living wave in a shoreless ocean. If, however these their poems be read silently in books, instead of being heard chanted by the human voice, then for the eye which has vision an underlight stirs and quickens among the letters which grow translucent and throb with light ; and this mysterious splendour entering by the eyes into the soul fills it with spheric illumination, and like the mysterious music swells to infinity, consuming with quick fire all the bonds and dungeon-walls of the soul, dazing it out of consciousness and dissolving it in a shoreless ocean of light."
That this passage might very well stand for a particular description of Traherne's character as a poet can, I think, hardly be disputed. If ever man felt that the ‘universe is one mighty harmony of beauty and joy,' that man was most certainly Traherne. In all his writings (save his " Roman Forgeries ") his continual
x
endeavour, conscious or unconscious, was to reproduce 'the rhythms and cadences of the eternal music.' That he did not entirely succeed in this endeavour, but sometimes stammered or sang only in broken accents, is but to say that in striving to utter
"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,'
he failed where all must fail, until the Super-man is evolved, or the human race invents a new medium of expression.
In a passage no less applicable to Traherne, Thomson describes the Saints :—
"There is the Open Secret Society of the Saints. In how many books, in how many lovely lives, have their mysteries been published! yet how dark and unintelligible is their simplest vernacular to the learned as to the ignorant, to the learned even more than to the ignorant, who are not of the Society ! These are they who know, and live