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Date: 1820

"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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Date: 1822

"Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me / As thus from sleep into the troubled day; / It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea, / Leaving no figure upon memory's glass"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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Date: 1826

A woman's "reason [may be] ship-wrecked upon her passion, and the hulk of her understanding lies thumping against the rock of her fury"

— King, Thomas (1730-1805)

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Date: March, 1826

"And both these effects are of equal use to human life; for the mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or affe...

— Lamb, Charles (1775-1834)

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Date: 1831

"There are conceptions of the mind, that come forth like the coruscations of lightning."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

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Date: 1837

"Make Thou my spirit pure and clear / As are the frosty skies, / Or this first snowdrop of the year / That in my bosom lies."

— Tennyson, Alfred, first Baron Tennyson (1809–1892)

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Date: 1838

"Charm'd by her voice, th' harmonious sounds invade / His clouded mind, and for a time persuade:"

— Crabbe, George (1754-1832)

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Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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Date: w. 1821, 1840

"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious p...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.