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)
Date: December 10, 1788; 1789
"Sometimes indeed it happens, that he may be able to mark the time, when from the sight of a picture, a passage in an author, or a hint in conversation, he has received, as it were, some new and guiding light, something like inspiration, by which his mind has been expanded, and is morally sure th...
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: 1789
"In no state of society can a practice, involving in it circumstances of such atrocious and enormous guilt, be considered as defensible by any person whose understanding is not darkened by the turpitude of his heart; in whom not only the feelings of the moral sense are extinguished, but, in this ...
preview | full record— Belsham, William (1752-1827)
Date: 1792
"This has sometimes an astonishing effect on the mind; giving the imagination an opening into all those glowing ideas, which inspired the artist; and which the imagination only can translate."
preview | full record— Gilpin, William (1724-1804)
Date: 1793
In a just society "understanding would convert into a real power, no longer an ignis fatuus, shining and expiring by turns, and leading us into sloughs of sophistry, false science and specious mistake"
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)