Date: 1790, 1794
"Their turn of expression is a dress that hangs so gracefully on gay ideas, that you are apt to suppose that wit, a quality parsimoniously distributed in other countries, is in France as common as the gift of speech."
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: December 1790
"But it was the poor man with only his native dignity who was thus oppressed – and only metaphysical sophists and cold mathematicians can discern this insubstantial form; it is a work of abstraction – and a gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or ...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1792
"Hereditary property sophisticates the mind, and the unfortunate victims to it--if I may so express myself--swathed from their birth, seldom exert that locomotive faculty or body of mind"
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1797
In William Collins's "endeavours to embody the fleeting forms of mind, and clothe them with correspondent imagery, he is not infrequently obscure."
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: 1810
"If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his righ...
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: 1831
In poetry we are "privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviæ of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave loftiness to his stature, a...
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)
Date: 1831
"Familiar as [Shakespeare] was with the evanescent touches of mind en dishabille, and in its innermost feelings, he could not sustain the tone of a character, penetrated with a divine enthusiasm, or fervently devoted to a generous cause, though this is truly within the compass of our nature."
preview | full record— Godwin, William (1756-1836)