In one of his verse letters to the Countess of Huntingdon[30] he explains how true love cannot be desire: 

    ’Tis love, but with such fatall weaknesse made,
    That it destroyes it selfe with its owne shade.

He goes still further in the poem entitled Negative Love, where he says that love is such a passion as can only be defined by negatives, for it is above apprehension, and his language here is closely akin to the description of the One or the Good given by Plotinus in the sixth Ennead.

Thomas Traherne is a mystical writer of singular charm and originality.  The manuscripts of his poems and his prose Meditations, a kind of spiritual autobiography and notebook, were only discovered and printed quite recently, and they form a valuable addition to the mystical literature of the seventeenth century.

He has affinities with Vaughan, Herbert, and Sir Thomas Browne, with Blake and with Wordsworth.  He is deeply sensitive to the beauty of the natural world, and he insists on the necessity for rejoicing in this beauty if we are really to live.  By love alone is God to be approached and known, he says, but this love must not be finite.  “He must be loved in all with an unlimited love, even in all His doings, in all His friends, in all His creatures.”  In a prose passage of sustained beauty Traherne thus describes the attitude towards earth which is needful before we can enter heaven.

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars:....  Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.

Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels;.... till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own:  till you delight in God for being good to all:  you never enjoy the world....  The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it.  It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it.  It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it.  It is the Paradise of God....  It is, the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven.[31]

He is for ever reiterating, in company with all the mystics, that

    ’Tis not the object, but the light
    That maketh Heaven:  ’tis a purer sight.

He shares Wordsworth’s rapture in the life of nature, and Browning’s interest in his fellow-men; he has Shelley’s belief in the inner meaning of love, and much of Keats’s worship of beauty, and he expresses this in an original and lyrical prose of quite peculiar and haunting beauty.  He has embodied his main ideas, with a good deal of repetition both in prose and verse, but it is invariably the prose version, probably written first, which is the most arresting and vigorous.

His Meditations well repay careful study; they are full of wisdom and of an imaginative philosophy, expressed in pithy and telling form, which continually reminds the reader of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell.