Date: 1706

"Let us make a Trial, Whether they that have been Scorched and Blacken'd by the Sun of Africa, may not come to have their Minds Healed by the more Benign Beams of the Sun of Righteousness."

— Mather, Cotton (1663-1728)

Date: 1791, 1794

"When fancy paints to me the good old man stooping to raise the weeping penitent, while every tear from her eye is numbered by drops from his bleeding heart, my bosom glows with honest indignation, and I wish for power to extirpate those monsters of seduction from the earth."

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1791, 1794

"Sometimes a gleam of hope would play about her heart when she thought of her parents--'They cannot surely,' she would say, 'refuse to forgive me; or should they deny their pardon to me, they win not hate my innocent infant on account of its mother's errors.'"

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1791, 1794

"Pardon me, ye dear spirits of benevolence, whose benign smiles and chearful-giving hand have strewed sweet flowers on many a thorny path through which my way-ward fate forced me to pass; think not, that, in condemning the unfeeling texture of the human heart, I forget the spring from whence flow...

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1791, 1794

"A gleam of joy breaks in on my benighted soul while I reflect that you cannot, will not refuse your protection to the heart-broken."

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1793

"Nothing is more luxuriant to a thinking mind than self approbation: It is a sun which dispels the clouds of solicitude and anxiety."

— Anonymous [By an American Lady]

Date: August 31, 1837

"But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: August 31, 1837

"The world, — this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: August 31, 1837

"But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, — watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; — must relinquish display and immediate fame."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: August 31, 1837

"For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, — darker than can be enlightened."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)