What words are these have fall'n from me? Can calm despair and wild unrest Be tenants of a single breast, Or sorrow such a changeling be?
Or doth she only seem to take The touch of change in calm or storm; But knows no more of transient form In her deep self, than some dead lake
That holds the shadow of a lark Hung in the shadow of a heaven? Or has the shock, so harshly given, Confused me like the unhappy bark
That strikes by night a craggy shelf, And staggers blindly ere she sink? And stunn'd me from my power to think And all my knowledge of myself;
And made me that delirious man Whose fancy fuses old and new, And flashes into false and true, And mingles all without a plan?
-Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., Canto XVI