h here as anywhere. Those Christians, he
thinks, who put off felicity and defer their enjoyment with long delays
"are to be much suspected."[46] "'Tis not," so he states his law,
"change of place, but glorious principles well practised that establish
Heaven in the life and soul. An angel will be happy anywhere and a
devil miserable, because the principles of the one are always good, of
the other, bad. From the centre to the utmost bounds of the
everlasting hills all is Heaven before God, and full of {335} treasure;
and he that walks like God in the midst of them is blessed."[47] "You
are in Heaven everywhere."[48] The real business of life, as he
elsewhere declares, is to "piece this life with the life of Heaven, to
see it as one with all Eternity, a part of it, a life within it,"[49]
which reminds us of Vaughan's great words:

I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
As calm as it was bright:
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd.[50]

And with much penetration Traherne tells us that Eternity is not an
endless addition of "times "--a weak infinite series of durations, but
rather a Reality in which all true realities abide, and which retains
in a present now all beginnings and all endings.[51] Eternity is just
the real world for which we were made and which we enter through the
door of love.

It is a spiritual world within,
A living world and nearer far of kin
To God than that which first He made.
While that doth fade
This therefore ever shall endure
Within the soul as more divine and pure.[52]

[1] See my _Studies in Mystical Religion_, chap. xix.

[2] Book III. lines 51-55.

[3] Book III. lines 194-197.

[4] Book I. line 18. Since this chapter was written, Alden Sampson's
_Studies in Milton_ (New York, 1913) has been published. His valuable
chapter on "Milton's Confession of Faith" reveals in Milton a very wide
acquaintance with the ideas which I have been tracing, and shows by a
vast number of quotations how frequently the poet used these ideas
sympathetically.

[5] Francis Quarles' "My Beloved is Mine."

[6] George Herbert's poem "Man."

[7] Francis Quarles' "Light."

[8] _Centuries of Meditations_ (London, 1908), iii. 16. For details of
his life and for the story of the discovery of his writings