Date: 1786
"Young Fancy, oft in rainbow vest array'd, / Points to new scenes that in succession pass / Across the wond'rous mirror that she bears, / And bids thy unsated soul and wandering eye / A wider range o'er all her prospects take."
preview | full record— Headley, Henry (1765-1788)
Date: 1790
"All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1790
"If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and ...
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: 1781, 1791
"Thou hast no flinty heart which cannot feel, / Thy bosom is not braced with chains of steel."
preview | full record— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)
Date: 1791
"It can be accounted for only in this way; that by reading and meditation, and a very close inspection of life, he had accumulated a great fund of miscellaneous knowledge, which, by a peculiar promptitude of mind, was ever ready at his call, and which he had constantly accustomed himself to cloth...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1796
"You! holding the next place to God in my breast, yet two days, and my heart will be unveiled to you."
preview | full record— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)
Date: 1803
Genius may "Add novel tints to fancy's rainbow dress."
preview | full record— 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"
preview | full record— 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...
preview | full record— 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."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)