Date: 1755, 1771
"The' etherial soul that Heaven itself inspires / With all its virtues, and with all its fires, / Led by these sirens to some wild extreme, / Sets in a vapour when it ought to beam; / Like a Dutch sun that in the' autumnal sky / Looks through a fog, and rises but to die."
preview | full record— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)
Date: 1755, 1771
"But he whose active, unencumber'd mind / Leaves this low earth and all its mists behind, / Fond in a pure unclouded sky to glow, / Like the bright orb that rises on the Po, / O'er half the globe with steady splendour shines, / And ripens virtues as it ripens mines."
preview | full record— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)
Date: 1772, 1810
"He spoke: a sudden cloud his senses stole, / And thickening darkness swam o'er all his soul"
preview | full record— Jones, Sir William (1746-1794)
Date: 1767, 1778
"Here science, like the sun, see radiant rise, / With intellectual beam, through mental skies, / To gild, to gladden all th' improving space, / With taste, with candor, learning, sense, and grace; / To light up all the mind's remotest cells, / Where fancy fledges, and where genius dwells."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason, without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: April, 1783
"Or it may be thus: his ideas hide themselves like birds in gloomy weather; but in warm sunshine they spring forth gay and airy."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1785
"I was delighted with this flash bursting from the cloud which hung upon his mind, closed my letter directly, and joined the company."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1785
"From shadows thinner than the fleeting night / That floats along the vale, or haply seems / To wrap the mountain in its hazy vest, / (Which the first sun-beam dissipates in air.) / How dost thou conjure monsters which ne'er mov'd / But in the chaos of thy frenzied brain!"
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1787
"It is enough--my scruples are at an end--my prejudices, like clouds before the rising sun, vanish before the lights of your superior reason."
preview | full record— Bickerstaff, Isaac (b. 1733, d. after 1808)
Date: 1791
"I have a wonderful superstitious love of mystery; when, perhaps, the truth is, that it is owing to the cloudy darkness of my own mind."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)