Date: February, 1821
"I said to myself, 'This is true eloquence: this is a man pouring out his mind on paper.'"
preview | full record— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)
Date: 1822
"Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me / As thus from sleep into the troubled day; / It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea, / Leaving no figure upon memory's glass"
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1824
"'I rose; and, bending at her sweet command, / Touched with faint lips the cup she raised, / And suddenly my brain became as sand / 'Where the first wave had more than half erased / The track of deer on desert Labrador; / Whilst the wolf, from which they fled amazed, / 'Leaves his stamp visibly u...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1824
"The thousand thoughts I now betray to thee, / Wild as thy wave, and headlong as thy speed"
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: 1824
"What do I say--a mirror of my heart? / Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong? / Such as my feelings were and are, thou art; / And such as thou art were my passions long."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)
Date: March, 1826
"And both these effects are of equal use to human life; for the mind of man is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales; and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or affe...
preview | full record— Lamb, Charles (1775-1834)
Date: January, 1833
"[Philosophy] cuts fresh channels for thought, but does not fill up such as it finds ready-made: it traces, on the contrary, more deeply, broadly, and distinctly, those into which the current has spontaneously flowed."
preview | full record— Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873)
Date: 1838
"I to the ocean gave / My mind, and thoughts as restless as the wave"
preview | full record— Crabbe, George (1754-1832)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1841
"What do we know of the unquiet pillow, / By the worn cheek and tearful eyelid prest, / When thoughts chase thoughts, like the tumultuous billow, / Whose very light and foam reveal unrest?"
preview | full record— Landon, Laetitia Elizabeth [L.E.L.] (1802-1838)