Date: 1742
"While o'er my limbs Sleep's soft dominion spread, / What though my soul fantastic measures trod / O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom / Of pathless woods; or, down the craggy steep / Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool; / Or scaled the cliff; or danced on hollow winds, / W...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"The world excluded, every passion hush'd, / And open'd a calm intercourse with Heaven, / Here the soul sits in council; ponders past, / Predestines future action; sees, not feels, / Tumultuous life, and reasons with the storm; / All her lies answers, and thinks down her charms."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"See, from her tomb, as from an humble shrine, / Truth, radiant goddess, sallies on my soul, / And puts Delusion's dusky train to flight; / Dispels the mists our sultry passions raise, / From objects low, terrestrial, and obscene."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1745
"At first his Passions burst / Quick as the Lightning's Flash: but in his Breast / Honour and Justice dwell--Trust me, to Reason / He will return."
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1746, 1753
Love "'Tis like soft air, through which admitted light / Peoples pleas'd fancy, and lends shape to sight: / Yet, like that air, disturb'd, man's quiet breaks, / Tempests his reason, and his triumph shakes."
preview | full record— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)
Date: 1747-8
"Reflect upon this; and then wilt thou be able to account for, if not to excuse, a projected crime, which has habit to plead for it, in a breast as stormy, as uncontroulable!"
preview | full record— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)
Date: 1748, 1749
"And where is the wonder that the body when in health should be subservient, for how can it resist that torrent of blood, and all those spirits which are ready to force obedience, the will having for its ministers an invisible army of fluids, always ready to receive its orders, and as quick as li...
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: 1751, 1791
"The passions are a num'rous crowd, / Imperious, positive, and loud: / Curb these licentious sons of strife; / Hence chiefly rise the storms of life: / If they grow mutinous, and rave, / They are thy masters, thou their slave."
preview | full record— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)
Date: 1752
"Whereas in the Bosom of Mrs. Ellison all was Storm and Tempest; Anger, Revenge, Fear, and Pride, like so many raging Furies, possessed her Mind, and tortured her with Disappointment and Shame."
preview | full record— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)
Date: 1767, 1778
"Here science, like the sun, see radiant rise, / With intellectual beam, through mental skies, / To gild, to gladden all th' improving space, / With taste, with candor, learning, sense, and grace; / To light up all the mind's remotest cells, / Where fancy fledges, and where genius dwells."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)