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."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1816
"[Y]ears steal / Fire from the mind as vigour from the limb."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1816
"[T]here is a fire / And motion of the Soul which will not dwell / In its own narrow being, but aspire / Beyond the fitting medium of desire; / And, but once kindled, quenchless evermore."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1817
Thoughts may "nourish up the flame / Within [the] breast"
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)
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, ...
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: 1820
"Thou think'st we will live through thee, one by one, / Like animal life, and though we can obscure not / The soul which burns within, that we will dwell / Beside it, like a vain loud multitude / Vexing the self-content of wisest men."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1823
"'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1837
"As these white robes are soil'd and dark, / To yonder shining ground; / As this pale taper's earthly spark, / To yonder argent round; / So shows my soul before the Lamb, / My spirit before Thee; / So in mine earthly house I am, / To that I hope to be."
preview | full record— Tennyson, Alfred, first Baron Tennyson (1809–1892)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"A single sentence may be considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious p...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)