Date: 1775

"But, O, my brother! if thou hast a heart / That is not steel'd with stoic apathy / Against the magic of all-conqu'ring love, / Beware of beauty's pow'r; for she has charms / Wou'd melt the frozen breast of hoary age, / Or draw the lonely hermit from his cell / To gaze upon her."

— Francklin, Thomas (1721-1784)

Date: January 23, 1787, 1788

"Whelm'd with such violence of woe, / Would melt a heart of steel, / Which only those who love can know, / Who lose can only feel."

— Arley [Miles Peter Andrews (1742- 814)?]

Date: 1788

"When Passion's tides thro' mans' strong art'ries roar, / His heart resists them like a flinty shore; / But our frail frames, like mould'ring banks, give way."

— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)

Date: 1817, 1818

"With ever-changing notes it floats along, / Till on my passive soul there seemed to creep / A melody, like waves on wrinkled sands that leap"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned / In an ocean of dreams without a sound; / Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress / The light sand which paves it, consciousness"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1824

"'I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, / Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, / And suddenly my brain became as sand / 'Where the first wave had more than half erased / The track of deer on desert Labrador; / Whilst the wolf, from which they fled amazed, / 'Leaves his stamp visibly u...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1992

"Only behind a waterfall of brutal and pleasurable sensations, thought Patrick, accepting the leather-clad menu without bothering to glance up, could he hide from the bloodhounds of his conscience. . There, in the cool recess of the rock, behind that heavy white veil, he would hear them yelping a...

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)

Date: 1992

"Or--he must stop thinking about it--or [his consciousness seemed] like a solution of saturated copper sulphate under the microscope, when it suddenly transforms and crystals break out everywhere on its surface."

— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)