Date: October 13, 1759

"My heart, a victim to thine eyes, / Should I at once deliver, / Say, would the angry fair one prize / The gift, who slights the giver?"

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: May 13, 1761

"In all my Enna's beauties blest, / Amidst profusion still I pine; / For though she gives me up her breast, / Its panting tenant is not mine."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"Reason guides the bands of either host, nor can it subdue one passion but by the assistance of another."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: w. 1764, published 1820

"O Peace of mind, thou lovely guest, / Thou softest soother of the breast, / Dispense thy balmy store."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

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."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"The pupil of impulse, it [his heart] forced him along, / His conduct still right, with his argument wrong; / Still aiming at honour, yet fearing to roam, / The coachman was tipsy, the chariot drove home."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"Reason, therefore, at once gives judgment upon the cause; and the vagrant intruder, imagination, is imprisoned, or banished from the mind."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"Our eyes shew us that the prospect is not present; our hearing, and our touch, depose against its reality; and our taste and smelling are equally vigilant in detecting the impostor."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"But in sleep it is otherwise; having, as much as possible, put our senses from their duty, having closed the eyes from seeing, and the ears, taste, and smelling, from their peculiar functions, and having diminished even the touch itself, by all the arts of softness, the imagination is then left ...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1774

"As in madness, the senses, from struggling with the imagination, are at length forced to submit, so, in sleep, they seem for a while soothed into the like submission: the smallest violence exerted upon any one of them, however, rouzes all the rest in their mutual defence; and the imagination, th...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)