Читать книгу Centuries of Meditations - Thomas Traherne - Страница 9

endeavour, conscious or unconscious, was to reproduce 'the rhythms and cadences of the eternal music.' That he did not entirely succeed in this endeavour, but sometimes stammered or sang only in broken accents, is but to say that in striving to utter

"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,'

he failed where all must fail, until the Super-man is evolved, or the human race invents a new medium of expression.

In a passage no less applicable to Traherne, Thomson describes the Saints :—

"There is the Open Secret Society of the Saints. In how many books, in how many lovely lives, have their mysteries been published! yet how dark and unintelligible is their simplest vernacular to the learned as to the ignorant, to the learned even more than to the ignorant, who are not of the Society ! These are they who know, and live up to the knowledge, that love is the one supreme duty and good, that love is wisdom and purity and valour and peace, and that its infinite sorrow is infinitely better than the world's richest joy."

From Thomson's delineation of the Mystics I quote the following passage, though it is much too short to give an adequate idea of the manner in which the whole description applies to Traherne :—

"Lastly there is the Open Secret Society of the

Mystics. These are the very flower and crown of the four already touched upon, Saints of Saints, Heroes of

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