Date: 1684
"My grateful Thoughts so throng to get abroad, / They over-run each other in the crowd: / To you with hasty flight they take their way, / And hardly for the dress of words will stay."
preview | full record— Oldham, John (1653-1683)
Date: 1691
"Since then Effluviums from all Objects break, / And thrô the Air their unseen Journeys take, / To every Sense in various Measures come; / How is it that the crowding Troops find room? / Numberless Numbers to each Sense repair, / That various Motions, Forms, and Garbs do wear; / Enough to stifle ...
preview | full record— Heyrick, Thomas (bap. 1649. d. 1694)
Date: 1712
"She [the mind] draws ten thousand Landschapes in the Brain, / Dresses of airy Forms an endless Train, / Which all her Intellectual Scenes prepare, / Enter by turns the Stage, and disappear."
preview | full record— Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654-1729)
Date: 1727
"The common Fluency of Speech in many Men, and most Women, is owing to a Scarcity of Matter, and a Scarcity of Words; for whoever is a Master of Language, and hath a Mind full of Ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the Choice of both; whereas common Speakers have only one Set of Ide...
preview | full record— Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"Where virtue, rising from the awful depth / Of truth's mysterious bosom, doth forsake / The unadorn'd condition of her birth; / And dress'd by fancy in ten thousand hues, / Assumes a various feature, to attract, / With charms responsive to each gazer's eye, / The hearts of men."
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"Moreover, from without / When oft the same society of forms / In the same order have approach'd his mind, / He deigns no more their steps with curious heed / To trace; no more their features or their garb / He now examines; but of them and their / Condition, as with some diviner's tongue, / Affi...
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1747-8
"Yet her charming body is not equally organized. The unequal partners pull two ways; and the divinity within her tears her silken frame."
preview | full record— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)
Date: 1777
"I retire to the family of my own thoughts, and find them in weeds of sorrow."
preview | full record— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)
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: 1781
"Mind, like a bride from a nobler family, enriches matter by its union, and brings as a dower, possessions before unknown. Henceforth matter appears cloathed in a gayer and richer garment; and the fruits of this union are a new progeny, to which matter, confining its alliance to its own family, c...
preview | full record— Rotheram, John (1725–1789)