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