Date: 1793

"Silent, for ever cold!--Renew, renew / Thy plaint, that well might rend a heart of steel!"

— Kendall, William (1768-1832)

Date: 1793

"She said she foresaw that, if his heart was not steel and adamant, he would be ruined; that she had read his mind thoroughly, and plainly saw that the only vice he had in the world was want of deceit."

— Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)

Date: 1793

"To solace mental fatigue by the amusements of fancy, is no loss of time. Students know how often the eye is busied in wandering over the page, while the mind lies in torpid inactivity; they therefore compute their time, not by the hours consumed in study, but by the real acquisitions they obtain...

— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)

Date: 1794

" The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd / The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1794

"This Magnet, spite of nature's laws, / Still as more distant stronger draws, / And what's more strange, (too well I feel!) / Attracts all hearts but hearts of steel"

— Graham, James (1765-1811)

Date: 1794

"'What numerous ills in life befall! / 'Yet Wisdom learns to scorn them all, / 'And arms the breast with steel"

— Mickle, William Julius [formerly William Meikle] (1734-1788)

Date: 1794, 1800

"Be hot with wrath, great iron-hearted Mack"

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

Date: 1794, 1797

"If you have reduced me to the necessity of again debating the same painful and gloomy question, if you cannot give that elasticity to my mind which will animate it to despise difficulty and steel it against injustice, however good your intentions may have been, I fear you have but imposed misery...

— Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809)

Date: 1795, 1796

The "anvil of gnawing conscience is never cool"

— Timaeus, J. J. (1763-1809); Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

Date: 1795

France "spurning base controul ... pluck'd the iron from her wounded soul [and] O'erthrew her proud Bastile, as with a charm"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)