Date: 1794

"When we are suddenly awaked by any violent stimulus, the surprise totally disunites the trains of our sleeping ideas from these of our waking ones; but if we gradually awake, this does not happen; and we readily unravel the preceding trains of imagination."

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)

Date: 1794

"How thoughts to thoughts are link'd with viewless chains, / Tribes leading tribes, and trains pursuing trains."

— Bilsborrow, Dewhurst (fl. 1794)

Date: 1794

"With shadowy trident how Volition guides, / Surge after surge, his intellectual tides; / Or, Queen of Sleep, Imagination roves / With frantic Sorrows, or delirious Loves."

— Bilsborrow, Dewhurst (fl. 1794)

Date: 1794

"True Madam! But how hard to feign a merriment to which the heart's a stranger!"

— Dudley, Sir Henry Bate (1745-1824)

Date: 1795, 1796

"But, hear, Louisa--a thought, just now, vast and immense as my own boundless passion, crowds on my troubled mind."

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

Date: 1796

"Still, still my soul in memory's inmost cell, / Where images most dear, most sacred dwell, / With willing gratitude retains, reveres, / Thy faithful service to my weakest years!"

— Bishop, Samuel (1731-1795)

Date: w. 1788-93, 1796 (rev. 1815, 1827, 1837, 1897)

"The dissipation of Blandford, and the disputes of Portsmouth, consumed the hours which were not employed in the field; and amid the perpetual hurry of an inn, a barrack, or a guard-room, all literary ideas were banished from my mind."

— Gibbon, Edward (1737-1794)

Date: 1796

"He felt not the provocation of lust; no voluptuous desires rioted in his bosom; nor did a burning imagination picture to him the charms which modesty had veiled from his eyes."

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)

Date: 1796

"The image of that lovely and unfortunate girl still lived in his heart, and baffled all Virginia's efforts to displace it."

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)

Date: w. 1794, 1797

"'Tis only those of purer clay / 'From sensual dross refined, / 'In whom the passions pleas'd obey / 'The God within the mind, / 'Who share my delegated aid, / 'Through Wisdom's golden mean convey'd / 'From the first source of sov'reign good."

— Mason, William (1725-1797)