Date: 1770
"Spontaneous joys, where nature has its play, / The soul adopts and owns their firstborn sway; / Lightly they frolic o'er the vacant mind, / Unenvied, unmolested, unconfined."
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)
Date: 1773
"But was it made for nothing else beside / Passions to draw, and Reason to be Guide? / Was so much Art employ'd to drag and drive / Nothing within the Vehicle alive? / No seated Mind that claims the moving Pew, / Master of Passions, and of Reason too?"
preview | full record— Byrom, John (1692-1763)
Date: 1785
"From shadows thinner than the fleeting night / That floats along the vale, or haply seems / To wrap the mountain in its hazy vest, / (Which the first sun-beam dissipates in air.) / How dost thou conjure monsters which ne'er mov'd / But in the chaos of thy frenzied brain!"
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1788
"Our mind's unhelm'd, our attributes decay--"
preview | full record— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)
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."
preview | full record— Bilsborrow, Dewhurst (fl. 1794)
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."
preview | full record— Mason, William (1725-1797)
Date: 1799
In Fancy's "filial train," inspiration rides foremost and "Myriads of spruce ideas crowd the rear."
preview | full record— Grainger, James (1721-1766)
Date: 1804
"Still I perceive thee, in my heart enshrin'd, / Its guardian idol, and its favourite guest."
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1807-8
"So minds debas'd can torture gen'rous acts: / And thus, by terrors haunted, hunger-pinch'd, / Hag-ridden by the demon at their hearts, / Suspicious, tost from thought to thought, they watch'd / The lagging hours of night"
preview | full record— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)
Date: 1814, 1816, 1896
"How then should matron Mind, with filial fear, / Judge all the embryo thoughts engender'd there"
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)