Date: 1803

Genius may "Add novel tints to fancy's rainbow dress."

— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)

Date: w. c. 1800-1807, 1866

"Joy & Woe are woven fine / A Clothing for the soul divine / Under every grief & pine / Runs a joy with silken twine"

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1810

"If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his righ...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1816

"I stood / Among them, but not of them--in a shroud / Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could, / Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued."

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

Date: 1820

"She stood: he pass'd, shut up in mysteries, / His mind wrapp'd like his mantle."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: 1831

In poetry we are "privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviæ of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave loftiness to his stature, a...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"Familiar as [Shakespeare] was with the evanescent touches of mind en dishabille, and in its innermost feelings, he could not sustain the tone of a character, penetrated with a divine enthusiasm, or fervently devoted to a generous cause, though this is truly within the compass of our nature."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: September 10, 1836

"Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of...

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: 1837

"As these white robes are soil'd and dark, / To yonder shining ground; / As this pale taper's earthly spark, / To yonder argent round; / So shows my soul before the Lamb, / My spirit before Thee; / So in mine earthly house I am, / To that I hope to be."

— Tennyson, Alfred, first Baron Tennyson (1809–1892)

Date: March 1843

"Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)