Date: September 10, 1836

"What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest, — and all to form the Hand of the mind;...

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: September 10, 1836

"When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: 1838 (published posthumously)

"I say, therefore that to the [GREEK] hegemonicon in every man, and indeed that which is properly we ourselves, (we rather having those other things of necessary nature than being them), is the soul as comprehending itself, all its concerns and interests, its abilities and capacities, and holding...

— Cudworth, Ralph (1617-1688)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

Poetry "reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: December 1840

"Perhaps a friendly Morgan le Fay will make Siegfried's castle rise again for me or show my mind's eye what heroic deeds are reserved for his sons of the nineteenth century."

— Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895)

Date: 1842

A "thought of shame" may "Bedim the mental eye with film impure"

— De Vere, Sir Aubrey (1788-1846)