Date: 1741

"Yet all Persons are under some Obligation to improve their own Understanding, otherwise it will be a barren Desart, or a Forest overgrown grown with Weeds and Brambles."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1741

"I Might give another plain Simile to confirm the Truth of this [mnemonic method]. What Horse or Carriage can take up and bear away all the various, rude and unweildy Loppings of a branchy Tree at once? But if they are divided yet further so as to be laid close, and bound up in a more uniform Man...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1751, 1791

"Now take a Simile at Hand, / Compare the mental Soil to Land."

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

Date: 1773

"Human nature is ever liable to corruption, and has in it the seeds of every vice, as well as of every virtue; and the first will be continually shooting forth and growing up, if not carefully watched and rooted out as fast as they appear."

— Mulso [later Chapone], Hester (1727-1801)

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)