Centuries: Centuries of Meditations

2019 Reprint of 1960 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. The work for which Traherne is best known today is the Centuries, a collection of short paragraphs in which he reflects on Christian life and ministry, philosophy, happiness, desire and childhood. This was first published in 1908 after having been rediscovered in manuscript ten years earlier.

Traherne’s writings frequently explore the glory of creation and what he perceived as his intimate relationship with God. His writing conveys an ardent, almost childlike love of God, and is compared to similar themes in the works of later poets William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. His love for the natural world is frequently expressed in his works by a treatment of nature that evokes Romanticism–two centuries before the Romantic movement.