Date: 1662
"Flowers, rivers, woods, the pleasant air and wind, / With Sacred thoughts, do feed my serious mind."
preview | full record— Watkyns, Rowland (c. 1614-1664)
Date: 1667
"Good Conscience on God it self can roul; / 'Tis Aquavitæ to the swouning soul."
preview | full record— Billingsley, Nicholas (bap. 1633, d. 1709)
Date: 1667; 2nd ed. in 1674
"But knowledge is as food, and needs no less / Her temperance over appetite, to know / In measure what the mind may well contain; / Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns / Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind."
preview | full record— Milton, John (1608-1674)
Date: 1705, 1712
"[W]ise Men on sound Reason ground Belief: / How that they find what for the Soul is good, / As by their Smell and Taste they judge their Food; / For who but each Man's Reason ought to try / 'Tis Faith, who must be sav'd or damn'd thereby."
preview | full record— Ward, Edward (1667-1731)
Date: 1709
"They fed the Body, but did feast the Mind."
preview | full record— Gould, Robert (b. 1660?, d. in or before 1709)
Date: 1725-6
"[T]his last astonishes the Reader, and he is so intent upon it, that he has not attention to consider the absurdity in the manner of Ulysses's landing: In this moment when [Homer] perceives the mind of the Reader as it were intoxicated with these beauties, he steals Ulysses on shore, and dismiss...
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), Broome, W. and Fenton, E.
Date: March 13, 1727
"And is not virtue in mankind / The nutriment that feeds the mind; / Upheld by each good action past, / And still continued by the last?"
preview | full record— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)
Date: 1735-6
"See! the full board / That steams disgust, and bowls that give no joy; / No truth invited there, to feed the mind; / Nor wit, the wine-rejoicing reason quaffs."
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1759
"Some Readers read too much, as Gluttons eat, / These Flatulence produce, and those Conceit; / If you, by reading much, would Knowledge gain, / Think, while you read, or you will read in vain."
preview | full record— Marriott, Thomas (d. 1766)