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Date: 1785

"Yon starry orbs, / Majestic ocean, flowery vales, gay groves, / Eye-wasting lawns, and heaven-attempting hills / Which bound th' horizon, and which curb the view; / All those, with beauteous imagery, awaked / My ravished soul to ecstasy untaught, / To all the transport the rapt sense can bear; /...

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

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Date: 1785

One's "chill'd ideas [may] quit their frozen pole / Of blank Despair"

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

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Date: 1788

"I feel the swelling raptures roll / In surging tides upon my soul"

— Whalley, Thomas Sedgwick (1746-1828)

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Date: 1788

There are those "whom the traffic of their race / Has robb'd of every human grace; / Whose harden'd souls no more retain / Impressions Nature stamp'd in vain; / All that distinguishes their kind, / For ever blotted from their mind; / As streams, that once the landscape gave / Reflected o...

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

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Date: 1789?

The "placid current" of the mind may be bestorm'd so that "th' ideal billows, raging, rise"

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

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Date: 1789

"The third, / More absurd, / Than the iron-fed bird; / And whose brains lacked juice like an over-squeezed curd, / Had nothing of value to give but her--Word."

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

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Date: 1803

"A Whirlpool swallowing up each awful thought / That Heav'n had stamp'd, or education taught."

— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)

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Date: 1807-8

"[T]hrough the cells / And channels of his phrensy-stricken brain / Rage and confusion rush'd; the solemn peal / Broke on his ear like his salvation's knell, / Whilst his vext conscience struggled, but too late, / To rend th' insatiate demon from his heart"

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

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Date: 1807-8

"So minds debas'd can torture gen'rous acts: / And thus, by terrors haunted, hunger-pinch'd, / Hag-ridden by the demon at their hearts, / Suspicious, tost from thought to thought, they watch'd / The lagging hours of night"

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

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Date: 1816

"[T]ort'ring pangs" and inexplicable woe may "like a torrent" overwhelm the soul

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.