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)

Date: 1810

"Kindness can woo the Lion from his den, / A moral teaching to the sons of men; / His mighty heart in silken bonds can draw, / And bend his nature to sweet Pity's law."

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

Date: 1814

"Give me to send the laughing bowl around, / My soul in Bacchus' pleasing fetters bound."

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1814, 1816, 1896

"To cherish Grace, and twine the golden chain, / Uniting Minds, and making one of twain."

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

Date: 1815

"You bid me write to amuse the tedious hours, / And save from withering my poetic powers; / Hard is the task, my friend, for verse should flow / From the free mind, not fetter'd down by woe."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: November 12, 1816

"But what land, that poet ever sung, or enchanter swayed, can equal that, which, when the slave's foot touches, he becomes free--his prisoned soul starts forth, his swelling nerves burst the chain that enthrall'd him, and, in his own strength he stands, as the rock he treads on, majestic and secu...

— Morton, Thomas (1764-1838)

Date: 1817

"On this scroll thou seest written in characters fair / A sun-beamy tale of a wreath, and a chain; / And, warrior, it nurtures the property rare / Of charming my mind from the trammels of pain."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: February, 1821

"Standard productions of this kind are links in the chain of our conscious being. They bind together the different scattered divisions of our personal identity."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: January 9, 1827

"Lady Stanmore will never know the value of domestic happiness till she has lost it: she will then find that female domination is wretched slavery; and that the silken tie--the silver links that chain the heart of woman to a worthy husband, is her noblest ornament--her crown of triumph."

— Morton, Thomas (1764-1838)