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Records and Other Poems

By the late Robert Leighton

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164

PRESENCES.

To what dark chambers of the heart or brain
Do all our welling thoughts at times retreat?
One presence seals my fountains, and in vain
The rock of thought I beat.
Some other comes, and then, though he be dumb,
My seals are broken and my fountains leap;
And mind, that felt so shallow, has become
A yet unfathom'd deep.
I may not read the old astrologies,
Nor tell how moon-touch'd seas should ebb and flow,
Or mind should be more tidal than the seas,—
But that it is, I know.