Date: December 10, 1774; 1775
"He will pick up from dunghills what by a nice chymistry, passing through his own mind, shall be converted into pure gold; and, under the rudeness of Gothic essays, he will find original, rational, and even sublime inventions."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: December 10, 1776; 1777
"The same disposition, the same desire to find something steady, substantial and durable, on which the mind can lean as it were, and rest with safety. The subject only is changed."
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: 1782
"'Tis granted, and no plainer truth appears, / Our most important are our earliest years. / The mind impressible and soft, with ease / Imbibes and copies what she hears and sees, / And through life's labyrinth holds fast the clue /That education gives her, false or true."
preview | full record— 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"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1783
"Now, when an author has brought us, or is attempting to bring us, into this state; if he multiplies words unnecessarily, if he decks the Sublime object which he presents to us, round and round, with glittering ornaments; nay, if he throws in any one decoration that sinks in the least below the c...
preview | full record— Blair, Hugh (1718-1800)
Date: 1783
"It changes the key in a moment; relaxes and brings down the mind; and shews us a writer perfectly at his ease, while he is personating some other, who is supposed to be under the torment of agitation."
preview | full record— Blair, Hugh (1718-1800)
Date: 1785
"The shifts and turns, / The expedients and inventions multiform / To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms / Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win,-- / To arrest the fleeting images that fill / The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, / And force them sit, till he has pencil'd off / ...
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1785
"He that attends to his interior self, [...] Has business; feels himself engaged to achieve / No unimportant, though a silent task."
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1785
"Thus colour must be in something coloured; figure in something figured; thought can only be in something that thinks; wisdom and virtue cannot exist but in some being that is wise and virtuous."
preview | full record— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)
Date: 1785
"Aristotle taught, that all the objects of our thought enter at first by the senses; and, since the sense cannot receive external material objects themselves, it receives their species; that is, their images or forms, without the matter; as wax receives the form of the seal without any of the mat...
preview | full record— Reid, Thomas (1710-1796)