Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/193

Rh "Our blessedness to see            Is even to the Deity             A Beatific vision!  He attains             His ends while we enjoy.  In us He reigns."

And again

"In them [i.e., human souls] He sees,            And feels, and smells, and lives;             To them He all conveys;             Nay even Himself:  He is the End             To whom in them Himself and all things tend."

The soul whose value is thus final is for Traherne the one great reality; and the mystery of its existence limited to a small body, yet in thought—and what is more real than thought?—embracing the universe, is one on which he dwells in rapt strains. All of Traherne's poetry is the record of these experiences and reasonings. He was an orthodox Anglican, but we hear comparatively little in his poetry of sin and of the death of Christ. Sorrow and the macerating sense of sin are swallowed up in the ecstasy of a soul made one with God by mutual need and love, and tasting already the joys of Paradise.

"Did my Ambition ever dream            Of such a Lord, of such a Love!  Did I                     Expect so sweet a stream             As this at any time?  Could any eye                     Believe it?  Why all Power                               Is used here,              Joys down from Heaven on my head do shower,             And Jove beyond the fiction doth appear             Once more in golden rain to come             To Danaë's pleasing fruitful womb             His Ganymede! His Life! His Joy!              Or He comes down to me, or takes me up                       That I might be his boy,              And fill, and taste, and give and drink the cup;                      But those tho' great are all                     Too short and small,             Too weak and feeble pictures to express             The true mysterious depths of Blessedness.             I am His Image and His friend. His Son, Bride, Glory, Temple, End."