At a Glance

A country parson of the 1670s was given a notebook of blank pages by a friend, and he filled it with numbered meditations on happiness, on the infinite, and on the world as a gift made to every soul. Unknown for two centuries and nearly printed under another poet’s name, it is one of the great books of English prose.

Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations, written c. 1670-74, first published 1908; five Centuries, 410 meditations, about 80,000 words.

The book. The Centuries are short prose meditations, numbered in sets of a hundred, which the period called centuries, and there are four full Centuries and a fifth that stops at ten. They mix argument, prayer, memory, poems and comment on Scripture, and their subject is felicity, the soul’s highest happiness, and how it is to be found in a world that is already God’s gift to each person. The book sets itself going in a few lines. A friend had given the author a blank notebook, and on its first page he tells her, “I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders” (I.1). The first wonder, which he names two meditations later, is that she shall be heir of the whole world.

The author. Thomas Traherne (c. 1637-1674) was a shoemaker’s son from Hereford who studied at Oxford, served as rector of the country parish of Credenhill in Herefordshire, and ended his life as chaplain in the household of a former Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He published one book in his lifetime, and most of what he wrote, this book among it, lay unknown in manuscript until long after his death.

The reader. The book suits anyone drawn to Christian Platonism, to devotional and mystical writing, or to the sense that the common world is more than it seems, and it rewards a reader with an ear for rhythm. Its sentences are plain. Its difficulty lies in its ideas, in its deliberate repetitions and in a handful of words whose older senses have faded, and a few meditations at a sitting, read slowly and if possible aloud, suit it best. The Key Words and the notes help with the rest.

The edition. The text follows the first edition, published in 1908 by the London bookseller Bertram Dobell and the only complete printing in the public domain. It has been corrected in about 275 places against Traherne’s own manuscript, and the words he crossed out but Dobell printed are shown struck through, as the Note on the Text explains. The notes identify Scripture and sources, explain names and the older senses of words, and point to the Key Words when a word needs more than a gloss. They never look ahead. Everything after the text, from the Afterword on, gives the argument away and is best kept until the book is finished.