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)
Date: February 3, 1788
"The spirit of the Gospel 'proclaims liberty to the captive, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound:' but these men rivet the chains of slavery; 'the iron enters into the Negro's soul,' while while his mind is left in all the darkness of ignorance, without one ray of those comforts ...
preview | full record— Agutter, William (1758-835)
Date: 1788
"Thou Christian emperor in whose generous breast / The light of pure devotion shone impress'd, / That sacred light descending from above, / An emanation of coelestial love; / With speed of light'ning spread the lambent ray, / Till realms of darkness kindled into day; / From God himself the spark ...
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)