Date: 1724
"When all at once / A thousand anxious Thoughts that slept by Day, / Swarm'd in my Brain, 'till it resembled Hell, / Hot, dark and hot: my sick Imagination, / Assisted by the Shades of Night, would give / A gloomy turn to each Idea there."
preview | full record— Jeffreys, George (1678-1755)
Date: 1725
"Rais'd on the noble prospect of the mind, / From that proud eminence they view mankind"
preview | full record— Pitt, Christopher (1699-1748)
Date: 1726
"I know in descriptions of this nature the scenes are generally supposed to grow out of the author's imagination, and if they are not charming in all their parts, the reader never imputes it to the want of sun or soil, but to the barrenness of invention"
preview | full record— Addison, Joseph (1672-1719)
Date: 1734 [1735?]
"Deaf to Advice, or taking Wrong for Right, / They boldly blunder on in Reason's Spite; / And under clearer Light's obscure Pretence / Live the Antipodes of common Sense."
preview | full record— Paget, Thomas Catesby, Lord Paget (1689-1742)
Date: 1737, 1743
"It is not so much the being exempt from Faults, as the having overcome them, that is an Advantage to us; it being with the Follies of the Mind as with the Weeds of a Field, which, if destroyed and consumed upon the place of their Birth, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung the...
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1741
"Yet all Persons are under some Obligation to improve their own Understanding, otherwise it will be a barren Desart, or a Forest overgrown grown with Weeds and Brambles."
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1741
"Their Understandings are hereby cooped up in narrow Bounds, so that they never look abroad into other Provinces of the intellectual World, which are more beautiful perhaps and more fruitful than their own."
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1742
"While o'er my limbs Sleep's soft dominion spread, / What though my soul fantastic measures trod / O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom / Of pathless woods; or, down the craggy steep / Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool; / Or scaled the cliff; or danced on hollow winds, / W...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"Though silent long, and sleeping ne'er so sound, / Smother'd with errors, and oppress'd with toys, / That heaven-commission'd hour no sooner calls / But from her cavern in the soul's abyss, / Like him they fable under Ætna whelm'd, / The goddess bursts in thunder and in flame, / Loudly convinces...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"I'll range the plenteous intellectual field; / And gather every thought of sovereign power, / To chase the moral maladies of man; / Thoughts which may bear transplanting to the skies, / Though natives of this coarse penurious soil; / Nor wholly wither there, where seraphs sing, / Refined, exalte...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)