To have no principles or to live beside them, is equally miserable. 
    Philosophers are not those that speak but do great things. 
    All men see the same objects, but do not equally understand them. 
    Souls to souls are like apples, one being rotten rots another.

This kind of saying abounds on every page.  Some of his more sustained philosophic passages are also noteworthy; such, for instance, is his comparison of the powers of the soul to the rays of the sun, which carry light in them unexpressed until they meet an object (Meditations, second century, No. 78).  But Traherne’s most interesting contribution to the psychology of mysticism is his account of his childhood and the “vision splendid” that he brought with him.  Even more to him than to Vaughan or Wordsworth,

    The earth, and every common sight
      ... did seem
    Apparelled in celestial light,

and his description of his feelings and spiritual insight are both astonishing and convincing.  A number of his poems are devoted to this topic (The Salutation, Wonder, Eden, Innocence, The Rapture, The Approach, and others), but it is the prose account which must be given.

All appeared now, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful.  I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys....  The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown.  I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.  The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold:  the gates were at first the end of the world.  The green trees when I saw them first ... transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.  The Men!  O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem!  Immortal Cherubims!  And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty!  Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels.  I knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places....  The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven.[32]

It is necessary to quote at some length, because it is the way in which Traherne expresses his experiences or reflections which is the moving and original thing about him.  This last passage seems to anticipate something of the magic of Keats in the Ode to a Nightingale or the Grecian Urn, the sense of continuity, and of eternity expressed in time.  Traherne’s account of the gradual dimming of this early radiance, and his enforced change of values is equally unusual.  Only with great difficulty did his elders persuade him “that the tinselled ware upon a hobby-horse was a fine thing” and that a purse of gold was of any value, but by degrees when he found that all men prized things he did not dream of, and never mentioned those he cared for, then his “thoughts were blotted out; and at last all the celestial great and stable treasures, to which I was born, as wholly forgotten, if as they had never been.”