Date: 1821

"Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief / Convulse us and consume us day by day, / And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1824

"'I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, / Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, / And suddenly my brain became as sand / 'Where the first wave had more than half erased / The track of deer on desert Labrador; / Whilst the wolf, from which they fled amazed, / 'Leaves his stamp visibly u...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1825

Domestic love may build her nest in the "feeling breast"

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1838

"Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords / Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole"

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: 1850

The poet's mind is "best pleased / While she as duteous as the mother dove / Sits brooding, lives not always to that end, / But like the innocent bird, hath goadings on/ That drive her as in trouble through the groves."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"[H]ow eagerly / And with what flashes, as it were, the mind / Turned this way--that way! sportive and alert / And watchful, as a kitten when at play."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: April 1861

"My heart is like a singing bird / Whose nest is in a water'd shoot."

— Rossetti, Christina (1830-1894)

Date: 1864

"Look, now, I melt a gourd-fruit into mash, / Add honeycomb and pods, I have perceived, / Which bite like finches when they bill and kiss,-- / Then, when froth rises bladdery, drink up all, / Quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain; / Last, throw me on my back i' the seeded thyme, / A...

— Browning, Robert (1812-1889)

Date: 1868

"The strong man arm'd this moment bind, / The bold usurper of Thy throne, / His armour seize, the carnal mind, / The unbelieving heart of stone, / Out of my flesh the evil tear, / And pluck my soul out of the snare."

— Wesley, John and Charles

Date: 1868

"A sinner's heart by lust possess'd, / Of birds unclean the loathsome nest, / Of fiends the dark abode; / A stinking sepulchre it lies, / While the poor wretch with horror flies / The sight of man and God."

— Wesley, John and Charles