Date: 1789
"Far nobler prize my heart constrains, / Yielding to soft controul; / Far other beauty binds in chains / The magnet of my soul."
preview | full record— Colvill, Robert (d. 1788)
Date: 1791
"In progress of time, when my mind was, as it were, strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian aether, I could with much more facility and exactness, carry in my memory and commit to paper the exuberant variety of his wisdom and wit."
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1794
"It [Christianity] has put the whole orbit of reason into shade."
preview | full record— Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)
Date: 1794
"There was a magnetical sympathy between me and my patron"
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1795
"Lady Ruby is the loadstone that draws away every particle of steel that shou'd fortify my heart, and leaves it weaker than a woman's tear."
preview | full record— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)
Date: 1796
"Some hurt themselves by flippant WIT, / As too much GAS, balloons will split;-- / With buoyant splendour, up they rise, / The spirit bursts, the bubble dies."
preview | full record— Courtenay, John Lees (1775?-1794)
Date: 1796
"The effect [of wit on the mind] is strong,--because it's odd, / Like fire electric from a clod; / Or when fix'd air puts out a light, / Tho' vital makes it blaze more bright."
preview | full record— Courtenay, John Lees (1775?-1794)
Date: 1798
"Moral reasoning is nothing but the awakening of certain feelings; and the feeling by which he is actuated, is too strong to leave us much chance of impressing him with other feelings, that should have force enough to counterbalance it."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1799
"His emotion seemed to communicate itself, with an electrical rapidity, to my heart."
preview | full record— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)
Date: 1800
Thoughts may be kept in "perpetual motion"
preview | full record— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)