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| Alfred, Lord Tennyson |
"A kind of waking trance — this for lack of a better word — I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through REPEATING my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, 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.... It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind."