Date: 1742
"Warnings point out our danger; gnomons, time: / As these are useless when the sun is set; / So those, but when more glorious Reason shines. / Reason should judge in all; in Reason's eye, / That sedentary shadow travels hard."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1742
"Through chinks, styled organs, dim Life peeps at light; / Death bursts the' involving cloud, and all is day; / All eye, all ear, the disembodied power."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"Night is fair Virtue's immemorial friend; / The conscious Moon, through every distant age,/ Has held a lamp to Wisdom, and let fall / On Contemplation's eye her purging ray."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"I'll range the plenteous intellectual field; / And gather every thought of sovereign power, / To chase the moral maladies of man; / Thoughts which may bear transplanting to the skies, / Though natives of this coarse penurious soil; / Nor wholly wither there, where seraphs sing, / Refined, exalte...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"But beyond / This energy of truth, whose dictates bind / Assenting reason, the benignant sire, / To deck the honour'd paths of just and good, / Has added bright imagination's rays."
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1745
"That lies veiled from the eyes of our mind; and the great God hath not thought fit to throw so much light upon it, as to satisfy the anxious and inquisitive desires the soul hath to know it."
preview | full record— Mason, John (1706-1763)
Date: Saturday, April 14, 1750
"[W]e are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude; but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity,...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1758
"Let inward beauty charm the mental sight; / Let godlike Reason, beaming bright, / Chase far away each gloomy shade, / Till VIRTUE's heav'nly form display'd / Alone shall captivate my soul, / And her divinest love possess me whole!"
preview | full record— Mulso [later Chapone], Hester (1727-1801)
Date: w. 1739, 1762
Melancholy's "transient Forms like Shadows pass, / Frail Offspring of the magic Glass, / Before the mental Eye."
preview | full record— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)
Date: 1782
One may have a mind "Not yet so blank, or fashionably blind, / But now and then perhaps a feeble ray /Of distant wisdom shoots across his way"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)