ess was gone
From me! For this
I thirsted absent bliss,
And thought that sure beyond the seas,
Or else in something near at hand
I knew not yet (since nought did please
I knew), my bliss did stand,

IV.

But little did the infant dream
That all the treasures of the world were by:
And that himself was so the cream
And crown of all which round about did lie.
Yet thus it was: The Gem,
The Diadem,
The Ring enclosing all
That stood upon this earthly ball;
The Heavenly Eye,
Much wider than the sky,
Wherein they all included were,
The glorious Soul that was the King
Made to possess them, did appear
A small and little thing.

I must quote from another poem, if only for the pleasure of writing down
the lines:--

THE SALUTATION.

These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins--
Where have ye been? Behind
What curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?
When silent I
So many thousand, thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie,
How could I smiles or tears
Or lips or hands or eyes or ears perceive?
Welcome ye treasures which I now receive!

These poems waited for two hundred and thirty years to be discovered on a
street bookstall! There are lines in them and whole passages in the
unpublished _Centuries of Meditations_ which almost set one wondering with
Sir Thomas Browne "whether the best of men be known, or whether there be
not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the
known account of Time?"

I am tempted, but will not be drawn to discuss how Traherne stands related
to Vaughan on the one hand and Cowley on the other. I note the discovery
here, and content myself with wondering if the reader share any of my
pleasure in it and enjoyment of the process which brought it to pass.
For me, I was born and bred a bookman. In my father's house the talk
might run on divinity, politics, the theatre; but literature was the great
thing. Other callings might do well enough, but writers were a class
apart, and to be a great writer was the choicest of ambitions. I grew up
i