Date: Saturday, April 14, 1750
"This inquiry seems to have been neglected for want of remembering, that all action has its origin in the mind, and that therefore to suffer the thoughts to be vitiated, is to poison the fountains of morality."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, January 22, 1751
"It is, perhaps, not impossible to promote the cure of this mental malady, by close application to some new study, which may pour in fresh ideas, and keep curiosity in perpetual motion."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1752
"So many tender Ideas crowded at once into my Mind, that, if I may use the Expression, they almost dissolved my Heart."
preview | full record— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)
Date: 1765
"Reason in the bosom pours, / Its growth improves, its fruit matures, / Each counsel of the human brain / Weighs in his scale, and stamps it vain?"
preview | full record— Merrick, James (1720-1769)
Date: 1773
"Yet of etherial temper are their souls, / And in their veins the tide of honour rolls; / And valour kindles there the hero's flame, / Contempt of death, and thirst of martial flame. / And pity melts the sympathizing breast, / Ah! fatal virtue!—for the brave distrest."
preview | full record— Day, Thomas (1748-1789)
Date: 1775
"My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; / And in my breast the imperfect joys expire."
preview | full record— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)
Date: 1789
"The third, / More absurd, / Than the iron-fed bird; / And whose brains lacked juice like an over-squeezed curd, / Had nothing of value to give but her--Word."
preview | full record— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)
Date: September 10, 1802
"A Poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature -- & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies."
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1803
"A Whirlpool swallowing up each awful thought / That Heav'n had stamp'd, or education taught."
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)
Date: 1807-8
"So minds debas'd can torture gen'rous acts: / And thus, by terrors haunted, hunger-pinch'd, / Hag-ridden by the demon at their hearts, / Suspicious, tost from thought to thought, they watch'd / The lagging hours of night"
preview | full record— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)