Date: March 1843

"My earthly senses are closing over my spirit like the leaves around the heart of a rose at sunset."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1850

"My seventeenth year was come; / And, whether from this habit rooted now / So deeply in my mind, or from excess / In the great social principle of life / Coercing all things into sympathy, / To unorganic natures were transferred / My own enjoyments; or the power of truth / Coming in revelation, d...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Caverns there were within my mind which sun / Could never penetrate, yet did there not / Want store of leafy arbours where the light / Might enter in at will."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"These mighty workmen of our later age, / Who, with a broad highway, have overbridged / The froward chaos of futurity, / Tamed to their bidding; they who have the skill / To manage books, and things, and make them act / On infant minds as surely as the sun / Deals with a flower."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1854

"Let it [caelestïal Sweetness] not stop when entred at the Ear / But sink, and take deep rooting in my heart."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1862

"O may not gold, according to its kind, / Twist round your heart, and grow upon your mind!"

— Wesley, Samuel, the Younger (1691-1739)

Date: 1868

"The fiend out of my soul to chase, / And plant Thy kingdom in its place."

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: April 26 1870

"Like a rose shut in a book / In which pure women may not look, / For its base pages claim control / To crush the flower within the soul."

— Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)

Date: August-November, 1871

"[B]ut the mind of Mr. Rossetti is like a glassy mere, broken only by the dive of some water-bird or the hum of winged insects, and brooded over by an atmosphere of insufferable closeness, with a light blue sky above it, sultry depths mirrored within it, and a surface so thickly sown with water-l...

— Buchanan, Robert (1841–1901)

Date: 1891

"So those high orthodoxies came to be / Quick seeds in me of heterodox opinion, / And, ere I wist, my thoughts were all at sea, / And drifted, holden by no wise dominion."

— Smith, Walter Chalmers (1824-1908)