Date: 1734

"Or Fancy's beam enlarges, multiplies, / Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1735

"Still can my Soul in Fancy's Mirrour view / Deeds glorious once."

— Somervile, William (1675-1742)

Date: 1737 (also 1738, 1743, reprinted 1754)

"Fain would he see some distant scene / Suggested by his restless spleen, / And fancy's telescope applies / With tinctur'd glass to cheat his eyes."

— Green, Matthew (1696-1737)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Not so the moral species, nor the powers / Of genius and design; the ambitious mind / There sees herself: by these congenial forms / Touch'd and awaken'd, with intenser act / She bends each nerve, and meditates well-pleas'd / Her features in the mirror."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Thus he learns / Their birth and fortunes; how allied they haunt / The avenues of sense; what laws direct / Their union; and what various discords rise, / Or fix'd or casual: which when his clear thought / Retains and when his faithful words express, / That living image of the external scene, / ...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1745

"A race fantastick, in whose page you see / Untutor'd fancy, a meer Jeu d'Esprit: / Wit's shatter'd mirror lies in fragments bright, / Reflects not nature, but confounds the sight."

— Brown, John (1715-1766)

Date: w. 1740, 1748

"Thirsting for Knowledge, but to know the right, / Thro' judgment's optick guide th' illusive sight, / To let in rays on Reason's darkling cell, / And Prejudice's lagging mists dispel."

— Walpole, Horatio [Horace], fourth earl of Orford (1717-1797)

Date: 1750, 1770

"And, Morpheus, thus may thy mild Lethéan powers, / For ever hovering round my midnight hours, / Thro' Fancy's mirror wrap me in idéal joy."

— Hamilton, William Gerard (1729-1796)

Date: 1751, 1791

"The mirrour, faithful to its charge, / Reflects the virgin's soul in large."

— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)

Date: 1746, 1757

"Yet tho' to human Sight invisible, / If She, whom I implore, Urania deign, / With Euphrasy to purge away the Mists / Which, humid, dim the Mirror of the Mind; / (As Venus gave Æneas to behold / The angry Gods with Flame o'erwhelming Troy, / Neptune and Pallas,) not in vain, I'll sing / The mysti...

— Thompson, William (bap. 1712, d.c. 1766)