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: 1786
"Young Fancy, oft in rainbow vest array'd, / Points to new scenes that in succession pass / Across the wond'rous mirror that she bears, / And bids thy unsated soul and wandering eye / A wider range o'er all her prospects take."
preview | full record— Headley, Henry (1765-1788)
Date: 1788
"When sovereign Reason from her throne is hurl'd, / And with her all the subject senses whirl'd, / From sweet HUMANITY, the nurse of grief, / Even thy deep woes, O Phrenzy! find relief."
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1789?
"Pale Fear, and all her haggard train, / That generate and nurture pain, / And each unwelcome mental guest, / Lay dormant in the human breast."
preview | full record— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)
Date: 1804
"Still I perceive thee, in my heart enshrin'd, / Its guardian idol, and its favourite guest."
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1805
"Alas! when ev'ry Muse is fled, / How wretched He who writes for bread! / Who, when the joyous years are flown, / And Reason totters on her throne, / And Fancy fails, and Nature tires, / And Fame herself no more inspires, / And ev'n the sweet return of Spring / No more can make the Poet sing, / T...
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1807-8
"So minds debas'd can torture gen'rous acts: / And thus, by terrors haunted, hunger-pinch'd, / Hag-ridden by the demon at their hearts, / Suspicious, tost from thought to thought, they watch'd / The lagging hours of night"
preview | full record— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)