Date: 1761, 1765
"Labour and Want (unhospitable twain) / Chill not the current in Life's salient vein; / Nor damp the spirits, else of sprightly cast, / Nor check the nobler passions of the breast; / Nor blunt the fine Sensation's tender edge, / Which man's chief pride philosophers allege. / Thus some fair ...
preview | full record— Stevenson, William (1730-1783)
Date: 1761
"Love has insinuated itself too far into your mind, for you ever to drive it thence. It has eaten its way, has penetrated into its inmoft recesses, like a corrosive menstruum, whose impressions you will never be able to efface, without deftroying at the same time all that virtuous sensibility you...
preview | full record— Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778); Kenrick, William (1729/30-1779)
Date: 1765
"Reason in the bosom pours, / Its growth improves, its fruit matures, / Each counsel of the human brain / Weighs in his scale, and stamps it vain?"
preview | full record— Merrick, James (1720-1769)
Date: 1766
"The blossom opening to the day, / The dews of heaven refin'd, / Could nought of purity display, / To emulate his mind."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1782
"Pleasure, the rambling Bird! the painted Jay! / May snatch the richest seeds of Verse away; / Or Indolence, the worm that winds with art / Thro' the close texture of the cleanest heart, / May, if they haply have begun to shoot, / With partial mischief wound the sick'ning root; / Or Avarice, the ...
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1782
"Vanity is a shoot from self-love--and self-love, Pope declares to be the spring of motion in the human breast."
preview | full record— Sancho, Charles Ignatius (1729-1780)
Date: 1784
"In general the faculties of the mind must be expanded to a certain degree, before religion will take root, or flourish among a people; and a certain proportion of civil liberty is necessary, on which to found that expansion of the mind, which moral or religious liberty requires."
preview | full record— Ramsay, James (1733-1789)