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)
Date: 1785
"From shadows thinner than the fleeting night / That floats along the vale, or haply seems / To wrap the mountain in its hazy vest, / (Which the first sun-beam dissipates in air.) / How dost thou conjure monsters which ne'er mov'd / But in the chaos of thy frenzied brain!"
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1788
"Hence at each sound imagination glows; / Hence his warm lay with softest sweetness flows; / Melting it flows, pure, numerous, strong and clear, / And fills the impassioned heart and lulls the harmonious ear."
preview | full record— Collins, William (1721-1759)
Date: 1788-89
"At first, indeed, before she is excited by science, she is oppressed with lethargy, and clouded with oblivion; but in proportion as learning and enquiry stimulate her dormant powers, she wakens from the dreams of ignorance, and opens her eye to the irradiations of wisdom"
preview | full record— Taylor, Thomas (1758-1835)
Date: 1788-89
"The former [Platonic philosophy] fills the soul with intelligible light, breaks her lethargic fetters, and elevates her to the principle of things; the latter [Lockean philosophy] clouds the intellectual eye of the soul, by increasing her oblivion, strengthens her corporeal bands, and hurries he...
preview | full record— Taylor, Thomas (1758-1835)