Date: 1742
"While o'er my limbs Sleep's soft dominion spread, / What though my soul fantastic measures trod / O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom / Of pathless woods; or, down the craggy steep / Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool; / Or scaled the cliff; or danced on hollow winds, / W...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"The world excluded, every passion hush'd, / And open'd a calm intercourse with Heaven, / Here the soul sits in council; ponders past, / Predestines future action; sees, not feels, / Tumultuous life, and reasons with the storm; / All her lies answers, and thinks down her charms."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"See, from her tomb, as from an humble shrine, / Truth, radiant goddess, sallies on my soul, / And puts Delusion's dusky train to flight; / Dispels the mists our sultry passions raise, / From objects low, terrestrial, and obscene."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1746, 1753
Love "'Tis like soft air, through which admitted light / Peoples pleas'd fancy, and lends shape to sight: / Yet, like that air, disturb'd, man's quiet breaks, / Tempests his reason, and his triumph shakes."
preview | full record— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)
Date: 1747-8
"Reflect upon this; and then wilt thou be able to account for, if not to excuse, a projected crime, which has habit to plead for it, in a breast as stormy, as uncontroulable!"
preview | full record— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)
Date: 1751, 1791
"The passions are a num'rous crowd, / Imperious, positive, and loud: / Curb these licentious sons of strife; / Hence chiefly rise the storms of life: / If they grow mutinous, and rave, / They are thy masters, thou their slave."
preview | full record— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)
Date: 1752
"Whereas in the Bosom of Mrs. Ellison all was Storm and Tempest; Anger, Revenge, Fear, and Pride, like so many raging Furies, possessed her Mind, and tortured her with Disappointment and Shame."
preview | full record— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)
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)