Date: 1756, 1766

"This is beyond the reach of our conception. Imagination cannot plumb her line so low."

— Amory, Thomas (1690/1-1788)

Date: 1757

"The tossing of the sea remains after the storm; and when this remain of horror has entirely subsided, all the passion, which the accident raised, subsides along with it; and the mind returns to its usual state of indifference"

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1757

"If we can direct the lights we derive from such exalted speculations, upon the humbler field of the imagination, whilst we investigate the springs and trace the course of our passions, we may not only communicate to the taste a sort of philosophical solidity, but we may reflect back on severer s...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"This fatal day stirs my time-settled sorrow, / Troubles afresh the fountain of my heart."

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Time, that wears out the trace of deepest anguish, / As the sea smooths the prints made in the sand, / Has past o'er thee in vain."

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Would thou wert not / Compos'd of grief and tenderness alone, / But had'st a spark of other passions in thee, / Pride, anger, vanity, the strong desire / Of admiration, dear to woman kind;/ These might contend with, and allay thy grief, / As meeting tides and currents smooth our firth."

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Sadly he says, that pity is the best, / The noblest passion of the human breast: / For when its sacred streams the heart o'erflow, / In gushes pleasure with the tide of woe; / And when its waves retire, like those of Nile, / They leave behind them such a golden soil, / That there the virtues wit...

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: 1757, 1758, 1771, 1777

"Gentler shapes, and softer scenes disclose, / To melt the feeling heart, yet soothe its tenderest woes"

— Dodsley, Robert (1703-1764)

Date: 1757, 1758, 1771, 1777

"Queen of the human heart! at whose command / The swelling tides of mighty Passion rise."

— Dodsley, Robert (1703-1764)

Date: 1759

"Our sense of the horror and dreadful atrocity of such conduct, the delight which we take in hearing that it was properly punished, the indignation which we feel when it escapes this due retaliation, our whole sense and feeling, in short, of its ill desert, of the propriety and fitness of inflict...

— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)