Date: w. 1789, 1804
"While Vanity unveils her whiffling flags, / Her glittering trinkets, and her tawdry rags-- / Spreads spangled nets, and fills her philter'd bowl, / To fix each Sense, and fascinate the Soul-- / Her birdlime twigs contrived with such sly Art, / That while they tangle thoughts, they trap the heart...
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)
Date: 1790
"The passions join the fierce invading host; / And I and virtue are o'erwhelm'd and lost-- / Passions that in a martingale should move; / Wild horses loosen'd by the hands of Love."
preview | full record— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)
Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827
"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind."
preview | full record— Blake, William (1757-1827)
Date: 1790
'While we converse together, and I feel / 'Secret correction from the bolt of truth / 'Shot home, my better soul in triumph rides, / Borne on the wings of reason to her throne."
preview | full record— Hurdis, James (1763-1801)
Date: 1791
"In his soul was the serpent coil'd round in his heart, hid from the light, as in a cleft rock"
preview | full record— Blake, William (1757-1827)
Date: 1792
"Ah me! the passion that my soul misled / Was check'd, not conquer'd; buried, but not dead: / Now bursting from the grave, in evil hour, / It hastens to its prey with fiercer pow'r, / And, vulture-like, with appetite increas'd / It riots on the undiminish'd feast."
preview | full record— Jerningham, Edward (1727-1812)
Date: 1792
"Nay, from the palaces the Virtues fly, / While boldly entering from their beastly stye, / The vulgar passions rush to pig with kings!
preview | full record— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)
Date: 1793
"The offspring of mind is daily sacrificed by hecatombs to the genius of monarchy."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1793
The author can't understand an afterlife "where the mind, doomed to everlasting inactivity, shall be wholly a prey to the upbraidings of remorse and the sarcasms of devils, is so foreign to the system of things with which I am acquainted"
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1793
"Purify your mind from the gross ideas of sense, and elevate it to the single contemplation of that abstract individual of which particular men are so many detached members, valuable only for the place they fill"
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)