Date: September 1762; 1774
"And every Moralist will find / A ruling passion in the mind: / Which, tho' pent up and barricado'd / Like winds, where Æolus bravado'd; / Like them, will sally from their den, / And raise a tempest now and then; / Unhinge dame Prudence from her plan, / And ruffle all the world of man."
preview | full record— Lloyd, Robert (bap. 1733, d. 1764)
Date: 1770
A judge may sit serene "Above all mists of passion"
preview | full record— Armstrong, John (1708/9-1779)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason, without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
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: 1787
"Fat is foul weather--dims the fancy's sight"
preview | full record— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)
Date: 1786, 1787, 1788; 1789
"Like a snow-ball, the mind, fraught with peace in its prime, / Moves swiftly adown the steep shelvings of Time; / Accumulates filth from Society's sons, / And strengthens and hardens its coat as it runs; / Till habit on habit is negligent laid, / And the object appears motley, vile, and ill-made...
preview | full record— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)
Date: 1791
"I compared him at this time to a warm West-Indian climate, where you have a bright sun, quick vegetation, luxuriant foliage, luscious fruits; but where the same heat sometimes produces thunder, lightening, and earthquakes in a terrible degree.
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1817
"The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy, / Chacing away all worldliness and folly; / Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, Or the low rumblings earth's regions under; / And sometimes like a gentle whispering / Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing / That breathes about u...
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)
Date: September 10, 1836
"And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason."
preview | full record— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)