Date: 1787

"For scenes that frequent shapes of Death impart / Arm the firm breast, and steel the manly heart"

— Pye, Henry James (1745-1813)

Date: 1787

"To curse the hearts that selfish maxims steel, / And execrate the effects of patriot zeal.--"

— Pye, Henry James (1745-1813)

Date: 1787

"But when by various wrongs your bosom's steel'd, / Your groaning country calling to the field, / And 'twixt the foe and you the uncertain scale / Of fight must shew whose fortune shall prevail"

— Pye, Henry James (1745-1813)

Date: 1788

"Strong Genius, from whose forge of thought / Forms rise, to quick perfection wrought"

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1780, 1788

"Authority! unfeeling power, / Whose iron heart can coldly doom / The Debtor, dragg'd from Pleasure's bower, / To sicken in the dungeon's gloom."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1788

"So have I heard / The captive finch, in narrow cage confin'd, / Charm all his woe away with cheerful song, / Which might have melted e'en a heart of steel / To give him liberty"

— Hurdis, James (1763-1801)

Date: 1788

"With horns, and tail, and hoofs that make folks start; / And in my breast a millstone for a heart!"

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1788

"But in general, I know of no method of getting money, not even that of robbing for it upon the highway, which has so direct a tendency to efface the moral sense, to rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition, and to harden it, like steel, against all impressions of sensibility."

— Newton, John (1725-1807)

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 ...

— Agutter, William (1758-835)

Date: 1788

"Ah! think not, WHITE, the Muse from fancy brings / Those woes, for Hist'ry sanctions what she sings, / Her bloody Annals still does Truth unfold, / Stain'd with the victims of soul-spotting gold."

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)