Date: 1744
"What slave, unbless'd, who from to-morrow's dawn / Expects an empire? He forgets his chain, / And, throned in thought, his absent sceptre waves."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"Yet not by all / Those lying forms which fancy in the brain / Engenders, are the kindling passions driven, / To guilty deeds; nor reason bound in chains, / That vice alone may lord it: oft adorn'd / With solemn pageants, folly mounts the throne, / And plays her idiot-anticks, like a queen. / A t...
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1745
"'I am too noble, and of too high a birth,' saith that excellent moralist, 'to be a slave to my body; which I look upon only as a chain thrown upon the liberty of my soul.'"
preview | full record— Mason, John (1706-1763)
Date: 1751
"And fettering on her Throne th' immortal Mind, / The Guidance of her Realm to Passions wild resign'd."
preview | full record— West, Gilbert (1703-1756)
Date: 1752, 1791
"Know too, the joys of sense controul, / And clog the motions of the soul; / Forbid her pinions to aspire, / Damp and impair her native fire: / And sure as Sense (that tyrant!) reigns, / She holds the empress, Soul, in chains."
preview | full record— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)
Date: 1753
"He combats Passion, rooted in the Soul, / Whose Powers at once delight ye and controul; / Whose Magic Bondage each lost Slave enjoys, / Nor wishes Freedom, tho' the Spell destroys."
preview | full record— Moore, Edward (1712-1757)
Date: 1762, 1868
"Hasten, Lord, the day of rest / From this indwelling sin, / Vindicate Thy church oppress'd, / And still enslaved within; / Burst our bonds, and let us go / From every thought of evil freed, / Pure in heart, and saints below, / And like our sinless Head."
preview | full record— Wesley, John and Charles
Date: 1763
"Doth Virtue in thy bosom brighter glow, / Or from a Spring more pure doth Action flow? / Is not thy Soul bound with those very chains / Which shackle us, or is that SELF, which reigns / O'er Kings and Beggars, which in all we see / Most strong and sov'reign, only weak in Thee?"
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)
Date: 1766
Love "leaves us not the liberty of choice; it commands in the beginning, as a master, and, reigns, afterwards, as a tyrant, till we are accustomed to its chains, by length of time; or, till they are broken by the efforts of powerful reason, or, the caprice of continued vexation."
preview | full record— Trusler, John (1735-1820)
Date: 1771
"But, Sir, my passions are my masters; they take me where they will; and oftentimes they leave to reason and to virtue nothing but my wishes and my sighs."
preview | full record— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)