Date: 1838

The soul "may be a lawn besprinkled o'er with flowers, and stirring shades, and baffled beams"

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

" For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious p...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1850

"My seventeenth year was come; / And, whether from this habit rooted now / So deeply in my mind, or from excess / In the great social principle of life / Coercing all things into sympathy, / To unorganic natures were transferred / My own enjoyments; or the power of truth / Coming in revelation, d...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Caverns there were within my mind which sun / Could never penetrate, yet did there not / Want store of leafy arbours where the light / Might enter in at will."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"These mighty workmen of our later age, / Who, with a broad highway, have overbridged / The froward chaos of futurity, / Tamed to their bidding; they who have the skill / To manage books, and things, and make them act / On infant minds as surely as the sun / Deals with a flower."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1854

"Let it [caelestïal Sweetness] not stop when entred at the Ear / But sink, and take deep rooting in my heart."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1860

"Whence Mr Stelling concluded that Tom's brain being peculiarly impervious to etymology and demonstrations, was peculiarly in need of being ploughed and harrowed by these patent implements: it was his favourite metaphor, that the classics and geometry constituted that culture of the mind which pr...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"A girl of no startling appearance, and who will never be a Sappho or a Madame Roland or anything else that the world takes wide note of, may still hold forces within her as the living plant-seed does, which will make a way for themselves, often in a shattering, violent manner."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus for themselves under unfavourable circumstances have been supplied by nature with an apparatus of hooks, so that they will get a hold on very unreceptive surfaces. The spiritual seed which had been scattered over Mr Tulliver had apparently been de...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)