Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Traherne's poetry is that it anticipates so much that seems to belong to much later periods of our literary history. Traherne, indeed, is likely to suffer to some extent in his reputation because ideas which with him were certainly original--or at least as much so as any ideas in any poets can be said to be original--have since become commonplaces in our literature. The praise of the beauty and innocence of childhood is familiar enough to us now, and has, perhaps, in some instances been carried to a rather ridiculous extreme. That certainly was not the case in Traherne's time. So far as I know, he was the first who dwelt upon those ideas in any other than an incidental and allusive manner. It is true that we find in Vaughan some passages of a similar tendency, but they are few and slight in comparison with those which we find in Traherne. If there are similar passages in other poets previous to, or contemporary with, the latter, I must confess that I am unacquainted with them. Nor were the poetical possibilities of the theme discovered until more than a century afterwards, when William Blake, who by the light of genius--or shall we say lunacy?--discovered so much else, discovered them. It was fitting, indeed, that Blake, whose youthful experiences seem to have more nearly resembled Traherne's than those of any other poet, should have followed all unknowingly in the elder writer's footsteps. Had he ever sat down to record the events of his infancy and childhood, Blake's narrative, I think, however different in detail, must have been like that of his predecessor in its chief features. I do not believe that there is any point out of all those which I have quoted respecting Traherne's childhood which Blake might not also have recorded of himself. Much as they differed in matters of faith, there was a deep and fundamental agreement in character and temperament between the two poets. To both of them the things seen by their imaginations were more real than the things seen with the eye, and to neither of them was there any dividing line between the natural and the supernatural. Their faiths were founded upon intuition rather than reason, and they were no more troubled by doubt or disbelief than a mountain is. Their capacity for faith was infinite, and stopped short only when their imagination failed them--if it ever did fail them.