Canto XLVIII

If these brief lays, of Sorrow born,   Were taken to be such as closed    Grave doubts and answers here proposed, Then these were such as men might scorn:

Her care is not to part and prove;    She takes, when harsher moods remit,    What slender shade of doubt may flit, And makes it vassal unto love:

And hence, indeed, she sports with words,    But better serves a wholesome law,    And holds it sin and shame to draw The deepest measure from the chords:

Nor dare she trust a larger lay,    But rather loosens from the lip    Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away.

-Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., Canto XLVIII