Date: 1785
"The effort rude to quench the cheering flame / Was mine, and e'en on Stella could I gaze / With sullen envy, and admiring pride, / Till, doubly roused by Montagu, the pair / Conspire to clear my dull, imprisoned sense, / And chase the mists which dimmed my visual beam."
preview | full record— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)
Date: 1785
"O, Montagu! forgive me, if I sing / red with the milder ray / Of soft humanity, and kindness bland: / So wide its influence, that the bright beams / Reach the low vale where mists of ignorance lodge, / Strike on the innate spark which lay immersed, / Thick-clogged, and almost quenched in total n...
preview | full record— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)
Date: 1785
"From shadows thinner than the fleeting night / That floats along the vale, or haply seems / To wrap the mountain in its hazy vest, / (Which the first sun-beam dissipates in air.) / How dost thou conjure monsters which ne'er mov'd / But in the chaos of thy frenzied brain!"
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1788
"Frequently, your coldness, your unkindness, gives me again to despondence and every lovely prospect I had suffered my imagination to draw is lost in clouds and darkness.'
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)
Date: October 4, 1802
"Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth / A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud / Enveloping the Earth--"
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1803
Genius may "separate the clouds by error spread, / Till all the gloom is vanquish'd, and the light / Of intellectual day wide-blazing streams"
preview | full record— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)
Date: 1817
"Nor should we pass the secret cell, / Where lonely Science loves to dwell, / Pleas'd, from its lamp, to cast the ray / That lights the mind's beclouded day."
preview | full record— Combe, William (1742 -1823)
Date: 1820
"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)