Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/192

172 the Catholic poet's sensuous and coloured strains. Like most mystics, he has but one theme—the history and message of his own enlightenment, and the same is the theme of his prose Centuries of Meditations. That enlightenment had its source in the experience which Vaughan recalls with a sigh in The Retreat, namely, the ecstatic joys of innocent childhood. But Traherne's joys were intenser than Vaughan's, more akin to the mood of Wordsworth when

"The earth and every common sight                   To me did seem                 Apparelled in celestial light,                    The glory and the freshness of a dream."

And from these experiences Traherne drew a bolder and profounder philosophy than either Vaughan or Wordsworth, which recalls rather the mystical audacity of Blake. "My knowledge," he says, "was divine. I knew by intuition those things which, since my apostacy, I collected again by the highest reason." For Vaughan there is no return to life's early ecstasy in this world; Wordsworth can but be thankful that it has been. But Traherne recovered it through the highest reason, and learned that, as in infancy, earth might be already heaven. What the highest reason taught him was, that the intense joy which the beauty of the created world had given him in youth, and which the world's false hierarchy of values for a time obscured, is the very end and purpose for which the world was created. It is only when God beholds the world reflected in the souls of men, evoking their gratitude and love, that His desire in creating is fulfilled—