If Sleep and Death be truly one, And every spirit's folded bloom Thro' all its intervital gloom In some long trance should slumber on;
Unconscious of the sliding hour, Bare of the body, might it last, And silent traces of the past Be all the colour of the flower:
So then were nothing lost to man; So that still garden of the souls In many a figured leaf enrolls The total world since life began;
And love will last as pure and whole As when he loved me here in Time, And at the spiritual prime Rewaken with the dawning soul.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., Canto XLIII