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Date: 1785

"The shifts and turns, / The expedients and inventions multiform / To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms / Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win,-- / To arrest the fleeting images that fill / The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, / And force them sit, till he has pencil'd off / ...

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

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Date: 1785

"[W]hen the mind is absent, and the thoughts are wandering to something else than what is passing in the place in which we are, we are often miserable"

— Paley, William (1743-1805)

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Date: 1785

"BOSWELL. 'But, sir,'tis like walking up and down a hill; one man will naturally do the one better than the other. A hare will run up a hill best, from her fore-legs being short; a dog down.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, sir; that is from mechanical powers. If you make mind mechanical, you may argue in that ma...

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

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Date: 1786, 1787, 1788; 1789

"Like a snow-ball, the mind, fraught with peace in its prime, / Moves swiftly adown the steep shelvings of Time; / Accumulates filth from Society's sons, / And strengthens and hardens its coat as it runs; / Till habit on habit is negligent laid, / And the object appears motley, vile, and ill-made...

— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)

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Date: 1791, 1794

"My daily employment is to think of you and weep, to pray for your happiness and deplore my own folly: my nights are scarce more happy, for if by chance I close my weary eyes, and hope some small forgetfulness of sorrow, some little time to pass in sweet oblivion, fancy, still waking, wafts me ho...

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

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Date: 1791

"I cannot allow any fragment whatever that floats in my memory concerning the great subject of this work to be lost."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

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Date: 1794

"With shadowy trident how Volition guides, / Surge after surge, his intellectual tides; / Or, Queen of Sleep, Imagination roves / With frantic Sorrows, or delirious Loves."

— Bilsborrow, Dewhurst (fl. 1794)

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Date: 1794

"Retired to her lonely cabin, her melancholy thoughts still hovered round the body of her deceased parent; and, when she sunk into a kind of slumber, the images of her waking mind still haunted her fancy."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

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Date: 1794

"The scenes of the Illiad illapsed in glowing colours to her fancy--scenes, once the haunt of heroes--now lonely, and in ruins; but which still shone, in the poet's strain, in all their youthful splendor."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

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Date: 1795

"Millions of chimeras floated on my imagination all were rejected in speedy succession ere they became old enough to take the colour of reason; yet fancy will be busy till we are no more."

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

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