Chapter IX

It was a difficult matter to persuade me that the tinseled ware upon
a hobby horse was a fine thing. They did impose upon me and obtrude
their gifts that made me believe a ribbon or a feather curious. I
could not see where was the curiousness or fineness. And to teach me
that a purse of gold was at any value seemed impossible, the art by
which it becomes so, and the reasons for which it is accounted so
were so deep and hidden to my inexperience. So that nature is still
nearest to natural things, and farthest off from preternatural; and
to esteem that the reproach of nature is an excuse in them only who
are unacquainted with it. Natural things are glorious, and to know
them glorious; but to call things preternatural natural monstrous.
Yet all they do it who esteem gold, silver, houses, land, clothes,
&c., the riches of nature, which are indeed the riches of invention.
Nature knows no such riches, but art and error makes them. Not the
God of Nature, but sin only was the parent of them. The riches of
Nature are our souls and bodies, with all their faculties, senses,
and endowments. And it had been the easiest thing in the whole world
[to teach me] that all felicity consisted in the enjoyment of all
the world, that it was prepared for me before I was born, and that
nothing was more divine and beautiful.

Surely Traherne was here anticipating much which seems to belong to a far later date! The doctrine here urged is in essentials the same as that which was insisted upon by Rousseau and other philosophers of the eighteenth century. Shelley himself hardly enforced the idea of the return to nature more strenuously than Traherne does in this passage. "Natural things are glorious and to know them glorious"--is not this the whole burden of Walt Whitman's poetry? Nay, is it not the whole burden of all poetry worthy of the name?