But it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There he discovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddy in the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious of perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which only the farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam of the waking mind. In a sense he did no more than to state what he found, sometimes in the more familiar language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, and irrecoverable. 'The simple lack Of her is more to me Than other's presence, Whether life splendid be Or utter black. 'I have not seen, I have no news of her; I can tell only She is not here, but there She might have been. 'She is to be kissed Only perhaps by me; She may be seeking Me and no other; she May not exist.' That search lies nearer to the norm of poetry. We might register its wistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on. If that were indeed the culmination of Edward Thomas's poetical quest, he would stand securely enough with others of his time. But he reaches further. In the verses on his 'home,' which we have already quoted, he passes beyond these limits. He has still more to tell of the experience of the soul fronting its own infinity:-- 'So memory made Parting to-day a double pain: First because it was parting; next Because the ill it ended vexed And mocked me from the past again. Not as what had been remedied Had I gone on,--not that, ah no! But as itself no longer woe.' 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.'