Date: 1790

"The idle crowd in fashion's train, / Their trifling comment, pert reply, / Who talk so much, yet talk in vain, / How pleas'd for thee, Oh nymph, I fly! / For thine is all the wealth of mind, / Thine the unborrow'd gems of thought, / The flash of light, by souls refin'd, / From heav'n's empyreal ...

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1790

"If her heart was not quite at peace, its exquisite sensibility was corrected by the influence of reason; as the quivering needle, though subject to some variations, still tends to one fixed point."

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1792

"I must steel my heart, Fairfax, when I go to the encounter; must recapitulate all my wrongs."

— Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809)

Date: 1792

"I know it to be folly, and I will endeavour to steel my heart against this as well as other mistakes."

— Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809)

Date: 1793

"She said she foresaw that, if his heart was not steel and adamant, he would be ruined; that she had read his mind thoroughly, and plainly saw that the only vice he had in the world was want of deceit."

— Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)

Date: 1794, 1797

"If you have reduced me to the necessity of again debating the same painful and gloomy question, if you cannot give that elasticity to my mind which will animate it to despise difficulty and steel it against injustice, however good your intentions may have been, I fear you have but imposed misery...

— Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809)

Date: 1796

"Wouldst thou again with amorous rage
Inflame my bosom? Steeled by age, Vain boy, to pierce my breast thine arrows are too weak."

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)

Date: 1796

"The climate's heat, 'tis well known, operates with no small influence upon the constitutions of the Spanish ladies: but the most abandoned would have thought it an easier task to inspire with passion the marble statue of St. Francis than the cold and rigid heart of the immaculate Ambrosio."

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)

Date: 1797

"Something seemed to lie upon her mind, and she tried almost to the last to tell it; and as she grasped Signora Ellena's hand, she would still look up in her face with such doleful expression as no one who had not a heart of stone could bear."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)