Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious p...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: December 1843-January 1844

"And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished."

— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)

Date: 1850

"Imagination--here the Power so called / Through sad incompetence of human speech, / That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss / Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, / At once, some lonely traveller"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Finally, whate'er / I saw, or heard, or felt, was but a stream / That flowed into a kindred stream; a gale, / Confederate with the current of the soul, / To speed my voyage."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"For though I was most passionately moved / And yielded to all changes of the scene / With an obsequious promptness, yet the storm / Passed not beyond the suburbs of the mind"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"But these are things / Of which I speak, only as they were storm / Or sunshine to my individual mind, / No further."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven / Was blowing on my body, felt within / A correspondent breeze, that gently moved / With quickening virtue, but is now become / A tempest, a redundant energy, / Vexing its own creation."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1851

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it...

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)