Date: 1789?

"Shorn of her beams and fetter'd by her thought, / The fallen nymph the caves of Sadness sought."

— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)

Date: 1786, 1787, 1788; 1789

"Its anodyne powers [Miss George's singing] the sick'ning make cheery, / And tears off the chain from the mind of the weary."

— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)

Date: 1792

"Now that stern habit throws without controul / Her chain of adamant around thy soul / May not th' unhappy Abelard disclose / (To her who pities most) his train of woes?"

— Jerningham, Edward (1727-1812)

Date: 1793

"For what is sleep, but temporary death; / Sealing up all the windows of the soul, / And binding ev'ry thought in torpid chains?"

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)

Date: 1793

"But, most of all, [the mind is subject] to that lov'd voice, whose thrill, / Rushing impetuous through each throbbing vein, / Dilates the wond'ring mind, and frees its pow'rs / From the cold chains of icy apathy / To all the vast extremes of bliss and pain!"

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)

Date: 1796

"The chains of care fall off my pensive mind, / When through the winds your spirit hails me."

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1801

"My soul her bondage ill endures; / I pant for liberty like yours."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1803

"The polish'd links that form the social chain, / For ages still to ages may remain / Nor snapt by rage, nor undermin'd by art, / If well the rivets join in every part; / But if those links that would the peasant bind, / Gall his chaf'd body, and corrode his mind, / The poor man's iron, and the r...

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: c. 1804-1811, 1818

"Urizen lay in darkness & solitude, in chains of the mind lock'd up."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1807-8

"Much it behoves us to compute the strength / Of him, whose ruin we would work, of him, / Who vaunts himself the legate of Jehovah, / And by that title keeps our souls in thrall / And bondage worse than what our limbs endur'd / Under the yoke of Pharaoh."

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)