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A Victorian gentleman at one of London’s bookstalls is turning the pages of an ancient handwritten volume with increasing excitement. What is this? Gemlike sentences, filled with eccentric spelling and ecstatic love for creation, in an elegant seventeenth-century script: “O what a Treasure is evry Sand when truly understood! Who can lov any Thing that God made too much?” There were two manuscripts here, one of poetry and one of prose, bound together; the prose organized in a peculiar manner, as five collections of a hundred short passages each. The gentleman, W. T. Brooke, buys it for a few pence: a treasure, its author a mystery. After Brooke’s death, the manuscript eventually reached antiquarian Bertram Dobell. His detective work revealed the answer: these manuscripts were written by a shoemaker’s son from Hereford, an obscure Anglican cleric called Thomas Traherne. Dobell published the manuscript as Centuries of Meditations in 1908.
