“Books have their fates,” runs the old Latin tag: habent sua fata libelli. This commonplace has always struck me because of the way it personifies books. Like us, they have individual destinies. Writers used to address their own works as living entities. Ovid, banished by Augustus to the rough shores of the Black Sea, entreated his little book to be his eyes so that he might see his beloved Rome once more. The medieval Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti, writing from exile, asked his poem to speak for him to his beloved. It begins, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s version (the first line of which T.S. Eliot adapted for his own purposes in “Ash Wednesday”):

Because I think not ever to return,
Ballad, to Tuscany-Go therefore thou for me
Straight to my lady’s face
Who, of her noble grace,
Shall show thee courtesy.

Centuries later, Walt Whitman, in his 1881 poem “So Long!” would declare of “Leaves of Grass,” the book that became him as he lived: “Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.” Finally, only a little later, Nietzsche could go so far as to exclaim: aut libri aut liberi (“either children or books”), so overmastering was his sense that his books were not merely the written expression of his thoughts but somehow his very self, robed in buckram and printer’s ink.

We respond to such books not only because they are often good, and sometimes unforgettable, but because we have the vivid sensation of brushing up secretly against “a soul at the white heat,” as Emily Dickinson put it. And when books’ fates have been unusually tortuous or tangled, we experience an unaccustomed complicity in reading them. So it is – for me at least – in reading the diary of Samuel Pepys, the six manuscript volumes of which he composed in an antiquated shorthand, deciphered only in 1825. Reading the diary, I feel as though Pepys is confiding his day to me alone, over a sumptuous roast and a pint of porter. Though he never sought to publish his incomparable record, he nevertheless preserved his diary for the 30 or so years after he stopped writing it; it was the only object he instructed his wife to salvage when the Great Fire of 1666 consumed much of London.

Another such book with a hidden fate, also from the 17th century, lay undiscovered for three centuries. The book was the poet Thomas Traherne’s “Centuries,” a manuscript copy of which, together with his poems “bound in old brown leather,” came to light in a London bookseller’s stall in the winter of 1896, discovered by W.T.Brooke. Like his near contemporaries George Herbert or Henry Vaughan, Traherne was a mystic as well as a poet; yet his name now lives not because of his verse – which is clumsy compared to Herbert’s – but because of his inimitable prose. Traherne wrote an ecstatic but homely, almost gritty, prose unlike anything else in English. Though like Pepys he never sought to publish his work, he must have dreamed of readers: he addresses them, directly and intimately. And he writes in a style of contagious ardor:

Till your Spirit filleth the whole World, and the stars are your Jewels, till you are as familiar with the Ways of God in all Ages as with your Walk and Table: till you are intimately acquainted with that Shady Nothing out of which the World was made: 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.

I’ve modernized the spelling a bit but left the capital letters – so beloved of that age – because they capture the density of Traherne’s nouns and seem almost to halo them, as he intended. Enjoyment of the world is his grand theme; not enjoyment in the epicurean sense but a de light that takes things for themselves while simultaneously viewing them as celestial ciphers. His spirit prefigures William Blake’s. The least clod sings; the dustmote knows hosannas. Hopkins, for all his Jesuit rigor, would have been thrilled by Traherne’s cadences had he heard them:

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: and Perceive yourself to be the Sole Heir of the whole World: and more so then, because Men are in it who are every one Sole Heirs, as well as you. Till you can Sing and Rejoice and Delight in GOD, as Misers do in Gold, and Kings in Scepters, you never Enjoy the World.

It isn’t easy to find a complete Traherne in the magisterial edition of H. M. Margoliouth, which Oxford published in two volumes in 1958 (I was lucky enough to turn one up in a Montreal “bookseller’s stall” myself), but there is a good selection in “Thomas Traherne: Poetry and Prose,” edited by Denise Inge (Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 244 pages, $21.). Traherne was an Anglican clergyman; his convictions and his sentiments are, of course, unabashedly Christian. At the same time there’s nothing narrowly doctrinal about his meditations. “We need to be quickened,” he writes, and his words have that revivifying effect.

Traherne was born sometime around 1636 and died in 1674. During his short life, the Great Plague of 1665 decimated London, to be followed a year later by the Great Fire. The English went to war with the Dutch; across the Channel, the Sun King and the “grand siecle” of Corneille, Racine, Moliere, and La Fontaine was kindling its effulgence. At home his countryman, Pepys, was minutely recording his schemes, casual fornications, and roaring domestic battles with his French-born wife Elizabeth. All the while, in a fervent obscurity Traherne was composing his intricate poems and prose meditations.

In his most celebrated poem, “Shadows in the Water,” he spies another world, transparent yet impassable, contained in a roadside puddle. His vision is as bizarre as the fate of his book; that puddle-world is the reverse of this world of fires and plagues and sea-battles, but both stand in an unbroken continuum, demarcated only by the invisible barrier of the water itself. It is a world, he says, “to which I shall, when that thin Skin / Is broken, be admitted in.” It is in fact this world of ours to which he admits us, through his prose, as though we’d recovered the eyes our childhood once enjoyed.