Date: 1838
"Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, / And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul."
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the un...
preview | full record— 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."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1841
"As certain liquors, confined in casks too cramped in their dimensions, will ferment, and fret, and chafe in their imprisonment, so the spiritual essence or soul of Mr. Tappertit would sometimes fume within that precious cask, his body, until, with great foam and froth and splutter, it would forc...
preview | full record— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Date: 1845
"They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish."
preview | full record— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)
Date: 1850
"Those lovely forms / Had also left less space within my mind, / Which, wrought upon instinctively, had found / A freshness in those objects of her love, / A winning power, beyond all other power."
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: November 24, 1859
"Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite...
preview | full record— Darwin, Charles (1809-1882)
Date: October 10, 1869
"Recitations alone readily degenerate into dusty repetitions, and lectures alone are too often a useless expenditure of force. The lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through."
preview | full record— Eliot, Charles William (1834-1926)
Date: 1885
"For example, to express our ideas concerning their physical basis we use different metaphors--stored up ideas, engraved images, well-beaten paths."
preview | full record— Ebbinghaus, Hermann (1850-1909)
Date: 1887
"A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."
preview | full record— Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)