1. The dedicatee is a woman, unnamed here and throughout. She had given Traherne the blank notebook (I.1), and the verse seems to send it back to her to go on filling, which would suit the fifty or so leaves still empty at the end of the manuscript (Bodleian MS Eng. th. e. 50). The traditional candidate is Susanna Hopton (1627-1709) of Kington, Herefordshire, a devotional writer whose niece married Traherne’s brother Philip in 1670; nothing in the manuscript confirms it. The best friend is most naturally Christ.
2. A token or pledge. The manuscript shows that Traherne first wrote “As the true Token” and then revised the line. These four lines alone keep the spelling of the manuscript (“prais therin” for praise therein, and so on), as Dobell printed them; the meditations are in his modernised spelling.
3. A cherub. Cherubin was an old English singular, though it came from the Hebrew plural (Shakespeare’s Prospero calls Miranda one). A Prayer Book reader would hear the Te Deum at Morning Prayer, “To thee Cherubin and Seraphin continually do cry”, so that to write God’s praise is to join the angels who never cease from praising. In the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite (VII) the cherubim are the angels of knowledge, their name read as fullness of knowledge, which suits a book to be filled with truths.