Date: 1741
"So for Instance, in Children; they perceive and forget a hundred Things in an Hour; the Brain is so soft that it receives immediately all Impressions like Water or liquid Mud, and retains scarce any of them: All the Traces, Forms or Images which are drawn there, are immediately effaced or closed...
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: w. 1740, 1748
"But when your early Care shall have design'd / To plan the Soul and mould the waxen Mind; / When you shall pour upon his tender Breast / Ideas that must stand an Age's Test, / Oh! there imprint with strongest deepest dye / The lovely form of Goddess LIBERTY!"
preview | full record— Walpole, Horatio [Horace], fourth earl of Orford (1717-1797)
Date: 1748, 1749
"Hurried with incessant rapidity by the vortex of blood and animal spirits, one undulation makes an impression, which is immediately effaced by another; the soul pursues it, but often in vain: she must wait to bewail the loss of what she did not quickly lay hold of; and thus it is that the imagin...
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: 1754
"Religion stamp'd her sorrow-melting heart"
preview | full record— Jeffreys, George (1678-1755)
Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757
"Time, that wears out the trace of deepest anguish, / As the sea smooths the prints made in the sand, / Has past o'er thee in vain."
preview | full record— Home, John (1722-1808)
Date: 1765
"Reason in the bosom pours, / Its growth improves, its fruit matures, / Each counsel of the human brain / Weighs in his scale, and stamps it vain?"
preview | full record— Merrick, James (1720-1769)