Date: 1781

Fancy may never "view a shape of lovelier kind / In the bright mirror of her Shakespeare's mind."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1781

"Thus our young lord, with fashion's phrase refin'd, / Fineer'd the mean interior of his mind"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1781

"Well may'st thou bend o'er this congenial sphere; / For Sensibility is sovereign here."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1781

"Fashion's pert tricks the crowded brain oppress / With all the poor parade of tawdry dress:"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"Say! wilt Thou listen to his weaker strains, / Who pants to range round Fancy's rich domains; / To vindicate her empire, and disown / Proud System, seated on her injur'd throne?"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"Let Critic Reason all her light diffuse / O'er the wide empire of this injur'd [Epic] Muse"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"In life's first season, when the fever's flame / Shrunk to deformity his shrivell'd frame, / And turn'd each fairer image in his brain / To blank confusion and her crazy train."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

A poet may "in robes of beauty to array, / And in bright Order's lucid blaze display, / The forms that Fancy, to thy wishes kind, / Stamps on the tablet of thy clearer mind"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"Can we then deem that in those happier lands, / Where every vital energy expands; / Where Thought, the golden harvest of the mind, / Springs into rich luxuriance, unconfin'd; / That in such soils, with mental weeds o'ergrown, / The seeds of Poesy were thinly sown?"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

The Muse, like Cato, "Well [...] supplies her want of softer art / By all the sterling treasures of the heart."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)