communings by the way have passed into his verse and made it intimately characteristic of him. Its wistfulness, its prevailing note of sadness are as much himself as are its delight in old English place-names, in natural beauty, in quaint touches of rural character. 'Melancholy' recaptures exactly the curious sense of remoteness from everyday life that is induced by a day's wandering uncompanioned. Now and again the note of melancholy deepens to a dark foreboding that he is nearing the end of his world, as in 'Early One Morning'—
...The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,
The only sweet thing that is not also fleet.
I 'm bound away for ever,
Away somewhere, away for ever—
and in 'Lights Out':
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose...
Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
All pleasure and all trouble,
