There speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. Only those who
have been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness of the incessant
not-being which is all we hold of being, know the longing to arrest the
movement even at the price of the perpetuation of their pain. So it was
that the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity of
becoming haunted and held him most.

'Often I had gone this way before,
But now it seemed I never could be
And never had been anywhere else.'

To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive
to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that
was not instantly engulfed--

'In the undefined
Abyss of what can never be again.'

Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have felt
as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with none
of the intoxication of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped
at the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated
every spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old
when the gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'A
New House.'

'All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learned how the wind would sound
After these things should be.'