Date: 1687
"This Heart of mine, now wreck'd upon despair, / Was once as free and careless as the Air; / In th' early Morning of my tender years, / E're I was sensible of Hopes and Fears, / It floated in a Sea of Mirth and Ease, / And thought the World was only made to please; / No adverse Wind had ever stop...
preview | full record— Cutts, John, Baron Cutts of Gowran (1660/1-1707)
Date: 1734
"Our Depths who fathoms, or our Shallows finds? / Quick Whirls, and shifting Eddies, of our minds?"
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1733-4
"Self-Love but serves the virtuous Mind to wake, / As the small Pebble stirs the peaceful Lake, / The Centre mov'd, a Circle strait succeeds, / Another still, and still another spreads."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1734
"I'm in a raging storm, / Where seas and skies are blended, while my soul / Like some light worthless chip of floating cork / Is tost from wave to wave."
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)
Date: 1735
"God gave us Reason ... A faithful guide to comfort and to save, / Till the mind floats, like Peter on the wave."
preview | full record— Harte, Walter (1708/9-1774)
Date: 1742
"A soul immortal, spending all her fires, / Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness, / Thrown into tumult, raptured, or alarm'd, / At aught this scene can threaten, or indulge, / Resembles ocean into tempest wrought, / To waft a feather, or to drown a fly."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1744
"These Reason, with an energy Divine, / O'erleaps, and claims the Future and Unseen; / The vast Unseen, the Future fathomless! / When the great soul buoys up to this high point, / Leaving gross Nature's sediments below, / Then, and then only, Adam's offspring quits / The sage and hero of the fiel...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1771, 1816
"But now the wavy conflict tends to peace, / And jarring elements their tumults cease, / Placid below, the stream obsequious flows, / And silent wonders how fell Discord grows./ So the calm mind reviews her tortur'd state, / Resuming reason for the cool debate."
preview | full record— Maude, Thomas (1718-1798)
Date: 1784
"Thy piercing thought / Unaided saw each movement of the mind, / As skilful artists view the small machine, / The secret springs and nice dependencies, / And to thy mimic scenes, by fancy wrought / To such a wond'rous shape, th'impassion'd breast / In floods of grief, or peals of laughter bow'd, ...
preview | full record— Jago, Richard (1715-1781)
Date: 1803
"And all the floating thoughts we find / Upon the surface of the mind."
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)