hen my heart shall prize no good above thee;
And then my soul shall know thee; knowing, love thee.[7]

II

Thomas Traherne is one of the best and most adequate representatives,
in this literary group, of this type of religion. He was profoundly
influenced by the revival of Plato and Plotinus, and by the writings of
the religious Humanists and he had absorbed, consciously or
unconsciously, the ideas and ideals which appear and reappear in the
widespread movement which I have been tracing. He was a pure and noble
soul, a man of deep experience and fruitful meditation, the master of a
rare and wonderful style, and we shall find in his writings a glowing
appreciation and a luminous expression of this type of inner, spiritual
religion.

He was born about the year 1636, probably at Hereford, the son of a
poor shoemaker, but of a notable and well-endowed family line. He took
no pains to inform the world of his outward history and we are left
with guesses as to most of the details of his earthly career, but he
has himself supplied us with an unusually full account of his {324}
inward life during the early years of it. "Once I remember," he says,
"I think I was about four years old when I thus reasoned with myself,
sitting in a little obscure room of my father's poor house: If there be
a God certainly He must be infinite in Goodness, and I was prompted to
this by a real whispering instinct of Nature."[8] Whereupon the child
wonders why, if God is so rich, he himself is so poor, possessed of "so
scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts," but he
tells us that as soon as he was old enough to discover the glory of the
world he was in, and old enough for his soul to have "_sudden returns
into itself_," there was no more questioning about poverty and narrow
fortunes. All the wealth of God was his--

I nothing in the world did know
But 'twas divine.[9]

As nobody has better caught the infinite glory of being a child, and as
nobody in literature has more successfully "set the little child in the
midst," than has Traherne, it may be well to let him tell us here in
his splendid enthusiasm what it is to be a child and what the eyes of a
child can see. He shall do it, first in his magnificent prose and then
in his fine and simple verse.

"Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious
apprehensions of the world, than I when I was a child. All appeared
new, and strange at fir