For he tells us how he once entered a noble dining-room and was there alone “to see the gold and state and carved imagery,” but wearied of it because it was dead, and had no motion. A little afterwards he saw it “full of lords and ladies and music and dancing,” and now pleasure took the place of tediousness, and he perceived, long after, that “men and women are, when well understood, a principal part of our true felicity.” Once again, “in a lowering and sad evening, being alone in the field, when all things were dead quiet,” he had the same weariness, nay, even horror. “I was a weak and little child, and had forgotten there was a man alive in the earth.” Nevertheless, hope and expectation came to him and comforted him, and taught him “that he was concerned in all the world.” That he was “concerned in all the world” was the great source of comfort and joy which he found in life, and of that joy which his book pours out for us. Not only did he see that he was concerned in all the world, but that river and corn and herb and sand were so concerned. God, he says, “knoweth infinite excellencies” in each of these things; “He seeth how it relateth to angels and men.” In this he anticipated Blake’s _Auguries of Innocence_. He seems to see the patterns which all living things are for ever weaving. He would have men strive after this divine knowledge of things and of their place in the universe. He came to believe that “all other creatures were such that God was Himself in their creation, that is, Almighty Power wholly exerted; and that every creature is indeed as it seemed in my infancy, not as it is commonly apprehended.” Yet he feels the superiority of man’s soul to the things which it apprehends: “One soul in the immensity of its intelligence is greater and more excellent than the whole world.” Even so Richard Jefferies prayed that his soul “might be more than the cosmos of life.” The soul is greater than the whole world because it is capable of apprehending the whole world, because it is spiritual, and the spiritual nature is infinite. Thus Traherne was led to the splendid error of making the sun “a poor little dead thing.” Or perhaps it was a figure of speech used to convince the multitude of his estimation of man’s soul as above all visible things. In the same spirit he speaks of “this little Cottage of Heaven and Earth as too small a gift, though fair,” for beings of whom he says: “Infinity we know and feel by our souls; and feel it so naturally as if it were the very essence and being of the soul”; and again, with childlike simplicity and majesty-- “Man is a creature of such noble principles and severe expectations, that could he perceive the least defect to be in the Deity, it would infinitely displease him.” He could not well have thought of man except loftily, since he was himself one whom imagination never deserted--imagination the greatest power of the mind by which not poets only live and have their being--