Date: 1767, 1778
"Here science, like the sun, see radiant rise, / With intellectual beam, through mental skies, / To gild, to gladden all th' improving space, / With taste, with candor, learning, sense, and grace; / To light up all the mind's remotest cells, / Where fancy fledges, and where genius dwells."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: March, 1778
"An antient philosopher indeed, full of real or pretended honesty, declared it to be his wish that there were a window in his breast that every body might see the integrity and purity of his thoughts. It would be truly be very pretty and amusing if our bodies were transparent, so that we could se...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1778
The heart like a bird to its nestling will fly, / And when by the weight of a parent its bending, / Yet wishes while constant to break and to die. / Like a bird in a snare, of its freedom bereft, / Still hoping and wishing releasement again, / 'Till clos'd in the cage the flutterer is left / To p...
preview | full record— Robertson, James (fl.1768-1788)
Date: 1773, 1778
"The Passions there embody'd throng, / On mental Pinions, swift, and strong, / In Robes array'd of various Fire."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: 1779
"Sorrow may well possess the mind / That feeds where thorns and thistles grow"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1779, 1781
"When Horace says of Pindar, that he pours his violence and rapidity of verse, as a river swoln with rain rushes from the mountain; or of himself, that his genius wanders in quest of poetical decorations, as the bee wanders to collect honey; he, in either case, produces a simile; the mind is impr...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seld...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The good and evil of Eternity are too ponderous for the wings of wit; the mind sinks under them in passive helplessness, content with calm belief and humble adoration."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1780
"Behold the frantick passion how it burns, / Like a wild beast breaks every tie, / Laughs at the Priest; the Legislator spurns, / And gives both heaven and earth the lye!"
preview | full record— Stevenson, John Hall (1717-1785)
Date: 1780
"His face is ever before my eyes, and his voice still sounding in my ear; for, as the comic poet says, he left a sting in the minds of his hearers."
preview | full record— Francklin, Thomas (1721–1784); Lucian (b.c. 125, d. after 180)