Date: 1800

"Yet e'en o'er thee, in thy despotic hours, / When thou hast chain'd the mind's excursive powers, / Though to thy gloomy keep by pain betray'd, / That mind can triumph by celestial aid."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1800

"Thy taste ador'd, with Virtue's temperate flame, / Truth, as the fountain both of art and fame; / Yet no ill-founded rule, no servile fear, / Chain'd thy free mind in Fancy's fav'rite sphere."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1801

"My soul her bondage ill endures; / I pant for liberty like yours."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1802

"Paint courts, whose sorceries, too seducing bind, / In chains, in shameful slavish chains, the mind; / Courts, where unblushing Flatt'ry finds the way, / And casts a cloud o'er Truth's eternal ray."

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1803

"The polish'd links that form the social chain, / For ages still to ages may remain / Nor snapt by rage, nor undermin'd by art, / If well the rivets join in every part; / But if those links that would the peasant bind, / Gall his chaf'd body, and corrode his mind, / The poor man's iron, and the r...

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

Date: c. 1804-1811, 1818

"Urizen lay in darkness & solitude, in chains of the mind lock'd up."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1804

"Reason, blest Goddess! who disdains / Religion's Curbs, and mental Chains."

— Collins, John [called Brush Collins] (1742-1808)

Date: w. 1797-1807, published 1893

"Forgetfulness dumbness necessity in chains of the mind lockd up / In fetters of ice shrinking."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1807-8

"Much it behoves us to compute the strength / Of him, whose ruin we would work, of him, / Who vaunts himself the legate of Jehovah, / And by that title keeps our souls in thrall / And bondage worse than what our limbs endur'd / Under the yoke of Pharaoh."

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

Date: 1810

"Years pass away--let us suppose them past, / Th' accomplish'd nymph for freedom looks at last; / All hardships over, which a school contains, / The spirit's bondage and the body's pains; / Where teachers make the heartless, trembling set / Of pupils suffer for their own regret."

— Crabbe, George (1754-1832)