Date: 1796

"WIT on all points is out of season, / It's use is to embroider reason."

— Courtenay, John Lees (1775?-1794)

Date: 1796

"Good sense like cloth, the ground-work place, / And then sow on your Wit and lace."

— Courtenay, John Lees (1775?-1794)

Date: 1799

"I reflected with amazement on the slightness of that thread by which human passions are led from their true direction."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"A few incoherent motions and screams, that rent the soul, were followed by a deep swoon."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1805

"Your Worth and Talents will unfold, / Richer than Needlework of Gold; / The native treasures of the soul, / True--as the Needle to the Pole."

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: 1814, 1816, 1896

"Imagination wildly weaves / Her golden labours o'er those glorious leaves, / While Judgment manages the lights and shades / Which Fancy figures, on her bold brocades."

— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)

Date: 1817, 1818

"Yet in my hollow looks and withered mien / The likeness of a shape for which was braided / The brightest woof of genius, still was seen."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1831

"The sublimest poet that ever sung, was peradventure, while a stripling, unconscious of the treasures which formed a part of the fabric of his mind, and unsuspicious of the high destiny that in the sequel awaited him."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1900, 1901

"Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,--thin, almost transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil?"

— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)

Date: 1968

"my mind a shuttle among / set strings of the music / lets a weft of dream grow in the day time, / an increment of associations, / luminous soft threads, / the thrown glamour, crossing and recrossing, / the twisted sinews underlying the work."

— Duncan, Robert (1919-1988)