[BNP/E3, 49A1 – 13]

C.

Thereby doth flow a black and mystic river

On which a gleam as of a sunset gloats

And in its tide I fashion, moveless ever,

Save by the motion of the stream, two boats.

_______

Over the whole – I know not how – doth hover

A sense of old, poetic, soft and strange,

Whose essence like a fall my soul doth cover

And haunt me with its being and unchanged.

___

Yet is there ought 

Something of death of unbeing

In the still presence of this antique land

{…}

What is this place? No name hereon is written

To take me from the kindly {…} of dream,

But when I look at this land, I am smitten

With a desire to know this town and stream

[13v]

___

We know not the deep

Small things of life where they their hinted meaning keep.

                         Abstract

Bursting the clouds of each {…} creed

Comes like the sun and whispers this; The act

Lives in the doing and not in the deed

Our thoughts are greater than the things we need

Events, † all things that speed

In life are shadows of some real unsensed 

Moveless, unsensed, dead, above, Ideal.

February 1906.