Sketch for Still glides the stream and shall forever glide is a preparatory study for the major oil painting purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1890, the first work by Streeton to enter a public collection. Curiously, however, the Queensland Art Gallery's work is dated five years later. The artist may have brought the sketch up to a more finished quality in an attempt to sell it when he was fundraising for his trip to Europe, which would take place in 1897.

The title of the work refers to some lines from a sonnet by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. For Streeton, the Australian landscape evoked the kinds of emotions he experienced when reading poetry. The scene depicted is the Yarra River as it meanders through flats and pasture land near Heidelberg.