Date: 1802

"He considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1817

"The fashionable journal is expected to be a mirror of public opinion in its own party, a brilliant magnifying mirror, in which the mind of the public may see itself look large and handsome."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1817

"In our perceptions we seem to ourselves merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the landscape, or as a blank canvas on which some unknown hand paints it."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: January, 1833

"Descriptive poetry consists, no doubt, in description, but in description of things as they appear, not as they are; and it paints them, not in their bare and natural lineaments, but seen through the medium and arrayed in the colors of the imagination set in action by the feelings."

— Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The former [i.e., conception] is as a mirror which reflects, the latter [i.e., expression] as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of communication"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

Poetry "reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1854

"Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human happiness."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: August-November, 1871

"[B]ut the mind of Mr. Rossetti is like a glassy mere, broken only by the dive of some water-bird or the hum of winged insects, and brooded over by an atmosphere of insufferable closeness, with a light blue sky above it, sultry depths mirrored within it, and a surface so thickly sown with water-l...

— Buchanan, Robert (1841–1901)