Excerpt from Centuries of Meditations

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 workof 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.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.