Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"[T]hus pale revenge / Unsheaths her murderous dagger; and the hands / Of lust and rapine, with unholy arts, / Watch to o'erturn the barrier of the laws / That keeps them from their prey: thus all the plagues / The wicked bear, or o'er the trembling scene / The tragic muse discloses, under shapes...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Yet not by all / Those lying forms which fancy in the brain / Engenders, are the kindling passions driven, / To guilty deeds; nor reason bound in chains, / That vice alone may lord it: oft adorn'd / With solemn pageants, folly mounts the throne, / And plays her idiot-anticks, like a queen. / A t...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"What pity then / Should sloth's unkindly fogs depress to earth / Her [the soul's] tender blossom; choak the streams of life, / And blast her spring!"

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"From heaven my strains begin; from heaven descends / The flame of genius to the human breast, / And love and beauty, and poetic joy / And inspiration."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"The hand of nature on peculiar minds / Imprints a different byass, and to each / Decrees its province in the common toil."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"For as old Memnon's image, long renown'd / By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch / Of Titan's ray, with each repulsive string / Consenting, sounded through the warbling air / Unbidden strains; even so did nature's hand / To certain species of external things, / Attune the finer organs of the ...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"So the glad impulse of congenial powers, / Or of sweet sound, or fair proportion'd form, / The grace of motion, or the bloom of light, / Thrills through imagination's tender frame, / From nerve to nerve: all naked and alive / They catch the spreading rays: till now the soul / At length discloses...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Then the inexpressive strain / Diffuses its inchantment: fancy dreams / Of sacred fountains and Elysian groves, / And vales of bliss: the intellectual power / Bends from his awful throne a wondering ear, / And smiles: the passions, gently sooth'd away, / Sink to divine repose, and love and joy /...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

Man was ordained to "To chase each partial purpose from his breast; / And through the mists of passion and of sense, / And through the tossing tide of chance and pain, / To hold his course unfaultering, while the voice / Of truth and virtue, up the steep ascent / Of nature, calls him to his high ...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Else wherefore burns / In mortal bosoms this unquenched hope, / That breathes from day to day sublimer things, / And mocks possession?"

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)