I think I have produced evidence enough to convince the reader of the soundness of my contention: if not, I will undertake to produce a good deal more. It is fortunate, indeed, that "A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation" should have stolen into print (for neither at the time of its publication nor subsequently does it appear to have attracted any attention), since without it we should have had no clue to the authorship of these poems. * * * * * Mr. W. T. Brooke has discovered in the British Museum a broadside with the following title, "A Congratulatory Poem on the Right Honourable S^r Orlando Bridgman, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England," which, he suggests, may possibly have been written by the author of the poems here printed. But though it is a poem of considerable merit, it has, in my opinion, no correspondence in style with Traherne's poems. A few lines from it, however, will not be altogether out of place here: Were all your own Rolls searcht scarce should we find That noble seat filled with so fit a mind: So brave a mind as baseness ne'er allays, So great a mind as greatness cannot raise, So just a mind as interest can't seduce, So wise a mind as colours can't abuse, So large a mind as largest Trusts do crave, So calm a mind as Equity should have. High Courtships construed in the present tense, Law's Oracle without perplexed sense, A sober piety in a virtuoso, And an Orlando without Furioso. TRAHERNE'S "SERIOUS AND PATHETICALL CONTEMPLATION OF THE MERCIES OF GOD" This book would hardly be complete without some account of the above work. It is a small 12mo volume of 146 pages, with an engraved frontispiece. It is written--excepting the three pieces of verse which I have already printed--in a kind of unrhymed verse, which is curiously suggestive of the style of Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," particularly in the frequent passages in which the author enumerates or catalogues, as the American poet does, every object he can think of which bears any relation to his theme. There were, of course, more points of unlikeness than of likeness between the two poets, but they at least resembled each other in their invincible optimism, as well as in the points mentioned above. Whitman could not have known of the existence of the "Serious and Patheticall Contemplation"; but had it been accessible to him, it might well have been suspected that he was under some obligations to it.