Date: 1719-1720, 1725

"D'elmont, tho' he was a little startled to find her so much more Mistress of her Temper then he believ'd she could be, yet resolv'd to make all possible use of this Opportunity, which probably might be the last he shou'd ever have, look'd on her as she spoke, with Eyes so piercing, so sparkling ...

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

Date: 1719-1720, 1725

"Books were, as it were, Preparatives to Love, and by their softening Influence, melted the Soul, and made it fit for amorous Impressions."

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

Date: 1735, 1763

"Our lives like his in one smooth current flow, / Nor swell'd with tempest, nor too calmly slow, / Whilst he like some great sage of Rome or Greece, / Shall calm each rising doubt and speak us peace, / Correct each thought, each wayward wish controul, / And stamp with every virtue all the soul."

— Melmoth, William, the younger (bap. 1710, d. 1799)

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...

— 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!"

— 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...

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1754

"Religion stamp'd her sorrow-melting heart"

— 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."

— 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?"

— Merrick, James (1720-1769)

Date: 1788

There are those "whom the traffic of their race / Has robb'd of every human grace; / Whose harden'd souls no more retain / Impressions Nature stamp'd in vain; / All that distinguishes their kind, / For ever blotted from their mind; / As streams, that once the landscape gave / Reflected o...

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)