“You never enjoy the world aright until the sea itself floweth in your veins…” “The corn was orient and immortal wheat…” after pages of ecstatic writing like this, you can get a bit high on reading him. Favourites: “News”; “Shadows in the Water”; “On Leaping over the Moon”; “On Christmas Day”, “Wonder”, "Poverty", "To the Same Purpose" and "Hosanna".
A lost original manuscript of Traherne's was plucked off a bonfire in the nick of time as recently as 1967. Like Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart, Traherne was largely forgotten until the twentieth century, perhaps because their joyful and positive message could not be heard properly till then. We need them to counterbalance the doom and gloom and sheer nastiness that is so often purveyed as "Christianity".
"You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you."
He gets a grand write-up in Phil Rickman's novel “The Wine of Angels”.