Date: 1782
Homer's "Song arose / As the good Parson's quiet Sermon grows; / Who, while his easy thoughts no pressure find / From hosts of images that crowd the mind, / First calmly settles on some moral text, / Then creeps--from one division--to the next"
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1782
"Throughout mankind, the Christian kind at least, / There dwells a consciousness in every breast."
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1782
"Hence all that is in man, pride, passion, art, / Powers of the mind , and feelings of the heart, / Insensible of Truth's almighty charms, / Starts at her first approach, and sounds to arms!"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1782
"Peace of mind" is a delightful guest that may make its "downy nest" in a "sad heart"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1783
"Learn hence, that husbands will be blind / To every beauty but the mind; / Great Venus there should hold her court; / should the Loves and Graces sport / There rapture beam'd in every feature, / Bound by that Cestus, called Good Nature."
preview | full record— Dibdin, Charles (bap. 1745, d. 1814)
Date: 1785
"Unwelcome is the first bright dawn of light / To the dark soul; impatient, she rejects, / And fain would push the heavenly stranger back; / She loathes the cranny which admits the day; / Confused, afraid of the intruding guest; / Disturbed, unwilling to receive the beam, / Which to herself her n...
preview | full record— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)
Date: 1785
"Such rapture filled Lactilla's vacant soul, / When the bright Moralist, in softness dressed, / Opes all the glories of the mental world, / Deigns to direct the infant thought, to prune / The budding sentiment, uprear the stalk / Of feeble fancy, bid idea live, / Woo the abstracted spirit form i...
preview | full record— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)
Date: 1785
A meagre intellect is "unfit / To be tenant of man's noble form"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1785
Knowledge and wisdom dwell in the head: knowledge in "heads replete with thoughts of other men" and wisdom "in minds attentive of their own"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1785
Silence is the "Refuge of tender hearts must fear mixing "With the mad multitude, where passions fell, / And strangers to their bosom, enter wild, / Like Sin and Death in Paradise, to jar / On the soft music of according souls!"
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)