Date: 1779

The mind may be veiled in darkness

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1780

"Thy simple diction, free from glaring art, / With sweet allurement steals upon the heart; / Pure as the rill, that Nature's hand refines, / A cloudless mirror of thy soul it shines"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1781

Fancy may never "view a shape of lovelier kind / In the bright mirror of her Shakespeare's mind."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1781

"The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1782

"Where'er that Parent of engaging thought, / Warm Sensibility, like light, has taught / The bright'ning mirror of the mind to shew / Nature's reflected forms in all their glow."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"We now perceive every [idea], as it passes, through a small aperture separately, as in the camera obscura, and this we call time; but at the conclusion of this state we may probably exist in a manner quite different; the window may be thrown open, the whole prospect appear at one view, and all t...

— Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787)

Date: 1782

"Wisdom, blest beam! / The brightness of the everlasting light! / The spotlesss mirror of the pow'r of GOD! / The reflex image of th' all-perfect mind!"

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1785

"The shifts and turns, / The expedients and inventions multiform / To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms / Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win,-- / To arrest the fleeting images that fill / The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, / And force them sit, till he has pencil'd off / ...

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1785

The mind may be "enlighten'd from above"

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1785

"In thy mild rhetoric dwells a social love / Beyond my wild conceptions, optics false!/ Thro' which I falsely judg'd of polish'd life"

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)