Date: c. 370-365 B.C.

"And when this feeling continues and he is nearer to him and embraces him, in gymnastic exercises and at other times of meeting, then the fountain of that stream, which Zeus when he was in love with Ganymede named Desire, overflows upon the lover, and some enters into his soul, and some when he i...

— Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

Date: 1693

"Condemn'd in this dark Prison must I here, / Watch till the Trumpet strike mine Ear? / Must I ne'er know thy Goodness and thy Love, / Because I did transgress thy Will above? / Must Clouds and Vapours still obscure my Mind?"

— Hawkshaw, Benjamin (1671/2-1738)

Date: 1700

"To think of a Whirlwind, tho' 'twere in a Whirlwind, were a Case of more steady Contemplation; a very tranquility of Mind and Mansion."

— Congreve, William (1670-1729)

Date: w. 1740, 1748

"Thirsting for Knowledge, but to know the right, / Thro' judgment's optick guide th' illusive sight, / To let in rays on Reason's darkling cell, / And Prejudice's lagging mists dispel."

— Walpole, Horatio [Horace], fourth earl of Orford (1717-1797)

Date: 1753

"Though the soul, like a hermit in his cell, sits quiet in the bosom, unruffled by any tempest of its own, it suffers from the rude blasts of others faults"

— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)

Date: 1767, 1778

"Here science, like the sun, see radiant rise, / With intellectual beam, through mental skies, / To gild, to gladden all th' improving space, / With taste, with candor, learning, sense, and grace; / To light up all the mind's remotest cells, / Where fancy fledges, and where genius dwells."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1785

"The effort rude to quench the cheering flame / Was mine, and e'en on Stella could I gaze / With sullen envy, and admiring pride, / Till, doubly roused by Montagu, the pair / Conspire to clear my dull, imprisoned sense, / And chase the mists which dimmed my visual beam."

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1785

"Oft as I trod my native wilds alone, / Strong gusts of thought would rise, but rise to die; / The portals of the swelling soul ne'er oped / By liberal converse, rude ideas strove / Awhile for vent, but found it not, and died."

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1815?

There are "thoughts that dwell /Deep in the lonely bosom's inmost cell / Unnoticed, and unknown, too painful wake, / And, like a tempest, the dark spirit shake, / When, starting from our slumberous apathy, / We gaze upon the scenes of days gone by."

— Bowles, William Lisle (1762-1850)

Date: 1817

"Nor should we pass the secret cell, / Where lonely Science loves to dwell, / Pleas'd, from its lamp, to cast the ray / That lights the mind's beclouded day."

— Combe, William (1742 -1823)