Date: 1774
"A learned parson, rusting in his cell, at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well upon the nature of man; will profoundly analyze the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the senses, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, h...
preview | full record— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Date: 1775
"What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, / Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, / By Reason's light on Resolution's wings, / Spite of her frail / companion, dauntless goes / O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? "
preview | full record— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason, without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1781
"Her teeming Thoughts with bright Conceptions glow, / Ideas crowd, and Lines spontaneous flow."
preview | full record— Keate, George (1729-1797)
Date: 1781
"He proceeded throughout his life to tread the same steps on the same circle; always applauding his past conduct, or at least forgetting it, to amuse himself with phantoms of happiness which were dancing before him, and willingly turned his eyes from the light of reason, when it would have discov...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1782
"Let Critic Reason all her light diffuse / O'er the wide empire of this injur'd [Epic] Muse"
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1782
"Where'er that Parent of engaging thought, / Warm Sensibility, like light, has taught / The bright'ning mirror of the mind to shew / Nature's reflected forms in all their glow."
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1782
One may have a mind "Not yet so blank, or fashionably blind, / But now and then perhaps a feeble ray /Of distant wisdom shoots across his way"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1783
" And when thou yields to night thy wide domain, / Let rays of truth enlight his sleeping brain."
preview | full record— Blake, William (1757-1827)
Date: 1783
"When first the orient rays of beauty move / The conscious soul, they light the lamp of love"
preview | full record— Mason, William (1725-1797)