It must be owned, I think, that while Traherne is usually happy in the selection of his themes, he is sometimes less happy in developing and expressing them. Lines which leave something to be desired in smoothness (though he is not usually chargeable with this fault, his handling of the heroic couplet being particularly good), and now and then lines which to our modern ideas appear to be somewhat prosaic, are certainly to be found in his poems, and do, to a small extent, interfere with the reader's pleasure in them. But for such faults as these we ought surely to make large allowance. The reader should, and doubtless will, remember that he has before him a work for which the author himself has but a limited responsibility. Had he himself published the poems we should have been entitled to think that he deliberately chose to give them to the world with all their faults upon them. As it is, I think we may assume that had he lived to publish them they would have undergone a good deal of revision before they were sent forth to the world. Most of their defects are such as might be easily remedied, and such, indeed, as it was sometimes hard to refrain from remedying. But I have resisted all such temptations, and have confined myself to the task of making the printed text as nearly as possible a reproduction of the original manuscripts. The reader will gather from the facsimile of one of Traherne's poems, which I have given as a frontispiece to this volume, a good general idea as to the character of his handwriting, his spelling, and his punctuation. It would have been an interesting thing could the whole of Traherne's poems have been reproduced in the same style, for, as the reader will see, there is a picturesqueness, a beauty, and a life about the manuscripts which is lost in the cold regularity of type. Some readers may perhaps think that it would have been better to follow the author's original spelling and punctuation; but after giving full consideration to this point, it did not seem advisable to do this. Traherne's spelling is by no means uniform--Deity, for instance, is sometimes "Dietie" and sometimes "Deitie"--and his punctuation, which is, I think, quite peculiar to himself, differs so much from our modern practice, that if it had been reproduced without modification it would often have obscured his meaning and puzzled the reader without any compensating advantage.