"I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro kept treading and treading 'till I felt that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service like a drum kept beating, beating until I felt my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creek across my soul with those same boots of lead again and space began to toll, as if the heavens were a bell, and being--an ear and I and silence. Some strange race wrecked solitary here. Just then a plank in reason broke, and I fell down and down and hit a world at every plunge, and finished knowing then."

-- Emily Dickinson