"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 along….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 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….
I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words? …
There is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind."
Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson of England
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son