Date: 1850

"Who that shall point as with a wand and say / 'This portion of the river of my mind / Came from yon fountain?'"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"I could behold / The antechapel where the statue stood / Of Newton with his prism and silent face, / The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Finally, whate'er / I saw, or heard, or felt, was but a stream / That flowed into a kindred stream; a gale, / Confederate with the current of the soul, / To speed my voyage."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round / As with the might of waters."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Behold an emblem of our human mind / Crowded with thoughts that need a settled home, / Yet, like to eddying balls of foam / Within this whirlpool, they each other chase / Round and round, and neither find / An outlet nor a resting-place!"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1851

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it...

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: Date Unknown

It is difficult for a "powerful mind" to be its own master: "a lake wants mountains to compass and hold it in."

— Addison, Joseph (1672-1719)

Date: 1854

"It was not the touch he needed most at such a moment--the touch that could calm the wild waters of his soul, as the uplifted hand of the sublimest love and patience could abate the raging of the sea--yet it was a woman's hand too."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"Her remembrances of home and childhood, were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact, that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many tho...

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)