A Day Dream of Tennyson

1901

In the "Life of Tennyson" occurs the following:

"A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not in a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life. This might be the state which St. Paul describes, 'whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body cannot tell.' I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words? But in a moment when I come back to my normal state of 'sanity' I am ready to fight for mein liebes ich and hold that it will last for aeons and aeons."