Take wings of fancy, and ascend, And in a moment set thy face Where all the starry heavens of space Are sharpen'd to a needle's end;
Take wings of foresight; lighten thro' The secular abyss to come, And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb Before the mouldering of a yew;
And if the matin songs, that woke The darkness of our planet, last, Thine own shall wither in the vast, Ere half the lifetime of an oak.
Ere these have clothed their branchy bowers With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain; And what are they when these remain The ruin'd shells of hollow towers?
-Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., Canto LXXVI
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