Date: 1793
Corporal punishment closes all "wholsome avenues of mind ... and on every side we see them guarded with a train of disgraceful passions, hatred, revenge, despotism, cruelty, hypocrisy, conspiracy and cowardice."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1793
"Milton had perhaps wandered in the fields of fancy, and consoled his blindness with listening to the voice of his nation, that was to have resounded with his name."
preview | full record— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)
Date: November 19, 1793
"The mind, freed from her weighty companion, roams at large through the regions of fancy; and at once conceives and invents, beautifies and illustrates, amplifies and adorns."
preview | full record— Boyd, Hugh (1746-1794)
Date: February 2, 1796
"Her head's like the island, folks tell on, / Which nothing but monkies can dwell on"
preview | full record— Hoare, Prince (1755-1834)
Date: 1800
"My path was already chalked out, and my fancy now pursued it with uncommon pleasure."
preview | full record— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)
Date: 1800
"Every sense was an inlet of pleasure, because it was an avenue to knowledge; and my soul brooded over the world of ideas, and glowed with exultation at the grandeur and beauty of its own creations"
preview | full record— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)
Date: November 10, 1813
"I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intellect. This may look like affectation, but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruptions prevents an earthquake."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1814
"No single passion, and no ruling thought / That leaves the rest, as once, unseen, unsought, / But the wild prospect when the Soul reviews, / All rushing through their thousand avenues"
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: w. 1798-1800, 1814
"Not Chaos, not / The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, / Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out / By help of dreams--can breed such fear and awe / As fall upon us often when we look / Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man-- / My haunt, and the main region of my song."
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: 1814, 1816, 1896
One may try "Conjecture's trackless region round, / To judge what phantasms Fancy might have found-- / What Game the glances of her Hawks might trace, / Or Greyhounds view in visionary chace"
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)