"It is the odd fate of this thought to be the worse for being true," says Johnson about an image of Cowley's, and we can say that it's the chance of Thomas's commutative permutation of even numbers to be the better for being confabulated by time and memory.

Lovely post. First I regretted the truth's breaking in (cf. Frost's "Birches"), but then I loved your last sentence so much that my regret vanished.

Didn't the July weekend when Lewis Carroll and the three little Liddels went gliding in the summer's heat turn out to have been dreary and (as you English say) dull?