Date: 1782

Time is a river that fails to enrich the mind and "leaves a dreary waste behind"

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1782

"Happiest soil" may be found "in the serenest minds"

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1782

"Fanatic frenzy" is "the false fire of an o'erheated mind"

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1782

"Man's heart had been impenetrably seal'd / Like theirs that cleave the flood or graze the field, / Had not his Maker's all-bestowing hand / Given him a soul"

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1782

A people may receive the "transcript of the eternal mind"

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1782

"With Asiatic vices stored thy mind, / But left their virtues and thine own behind, / And, having truck'd thy soul, brought home the fee, / To tempt the poor to sell himself to thee?"

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1782

The "anxious mind" may be racked by pangs

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1782

One may have a mind "Not yet so blank, or fashionably blind, / But now and then perhaps a feeble ray /Of distant wisdom shoots across his way."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1782

"Peace be to those (such peace as earth can give,) / Who live in pleasure, dead even while they live; / Born capable indeed of heavenly truth, / But down to latest age from earliest youth, / Their mind a wilderness through want of care, / The plough of wisdom never entering there."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1782

"The pride of letter'd ignorance, that binds / In chains of error our accomplish'd minds, / That decks with all the splendour of the true, / A false religion, is unknown to you."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)