page 1 of 4     per page:
sorted by:

Date: 1815

The wavering motions of the mind are like "quivering light" reflected off a confined "crystal flood" in a brass cistern

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

preview | full record

Date: 1816

"[T]ort'ring pangs" and inexplicable woe may "like a torrent" overwhelm the soul

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

preview | full record

Date: 1816

"Yet must I think less wildly:--I have thought / Too long and darkly, till my brain became, / In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought, / A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame."

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

preview | full record

Date: 1816

"Nor is it discontent to keep the mind / Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil / In the hot throng, where we become the spoil / Of our infection"

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

preview | full record

Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

preview | full record

Date: 1817, 1818

There is "One mind, the type of all, the moveless wave / Whose calm reflects all moving things that are"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

preview | full record

Date: 1817, 1818

"With ever-changing notes it floats along, / Till on my passive soul there seemed to creep / A melody, like waves on wrinkled sands that leap"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

preview | full record

Date: August 1817

"Whenever any object takes such a hold on the mind as to make us dwell upon it, and brood over it, melting the heart in love, or kindling it to a sentiment of admiration;--whenever a movement of imagination or passion is impressed on the mind, by which it seeks to prolong and repeat the emotion, ...

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

preview | full record

Date: August 1817

"There is no natural harmony in the ordinary combinations of significant sounds: the language of prose is not the language of music, or of passion: and it is to supply this inherent defect in the mechanism of language--to make the sound an echo to the sense, when the sense becomes a sort of echo ...

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

preview | full record

Date: 1818

"O magic sleep! O comfortable bird, / That broodest o'er the troubled sea of the mind "

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

preview | full record

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.