Date: 1730
"Close crowds the shining atmosphere; and binds / Our strengthen'd bodies in its cold embrace, / Constringent; feeds, and animates our blood; / Refines our spirits, through the new-strung nerves, / In swifter sallies darting to the brain; / Where sits the soul, intense, collected, cool, / Bright ...
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1745
"The Duties of his Day / Were all discharg'd, and gratefully enjoy'd / It's noblest Blessings; calm, as Evening Skies, / Was his pure Mind, and lighted up with Hopes / That open Heaven; when, for his last long Sleep / Timely prepar'd, a Lassitude of Life, / A pleasing Weariness of mortal Joy, / F...
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1751, 1777
"There seems here a necessity for confessing that the happiness and misery of others are not spectacles entirely indifferent to us; but that the view of the former, whether in its causes or effects, like sun-shine or the prospect of well-cultivated plains, (to carry our pretensions no higher), co...
preview | full record— Hume, David (1711-1776)
Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757
"Clouds, all the while have hung upon thy brow, / Nor broke, nor parted by one gleam of joy."
preview | full record— Home, John (1722-1808)
Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757
"Darkly a project peers upon my mind, / Like the red moon when rising in the east, / Cross'd and divided by strange-colour'd clouds."
preview | full record— Home, John (1722-1808)
Date: 1762
"The soul of Nathos was sad, like the sun in the day of mist, when his face is watry and dim."
preview | full record— Ossian; Macpherson, James (1736-1796)
Date: 1765
"Let those, whose arts to fatal paths betray, / The soul with passion's gloom tempestuous blind, / And snatch from Reason's ken th'auspicious ray / Truth darts from Heaven to guide th'exploring mind."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1771, 1776
"'The gusts of appetite, the clouds of care, / 'And storms of disappointment, all o'erpast, / 'Henceforth no earthly hope with heaven shall share / 'This heart, where peace serenely shines at last."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1771, 1776
"The mind untaught / 'Is a dark waste, where fiends and tempests howl; / 'As Phebus to the world, is Science to the soul."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: April, 1783
"Or it may be thus: his ideas hide themselves like birds in gloomy weather; but in warm sunshine they spring forth gay and airy."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)