Date: 1850
"Nor, sedulous as I have been to trace / How Nature by extrinsic passion first / Peopled the mind with forms sublime or fair, / And made me love them, may I here omit / How other pleasures have been mine, and joys / Of subtler origin."
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: 1850
"No familiar shapes / Remained, no pleasant images of trees, / Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; / But huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men, moved slowly through the mind / By day, and were a trouble to my dreams."
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: 1854
"When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by and by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within--or sometimes only maim him and distort him!"
preview | full record— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Date: 1854
"t was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom."
preview | full record— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Date: 1854
"Remembrances of how she had journeyed to the little that she knew, by the enchanted roads of what she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how, first coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, she had seen it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as its...
preview | full record— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Date: 1854
"It lay there, warming into life a crowd of gentler thoughts; and she rested"
preview | full record— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Date: 1860
"Here, then, was a secret of life that would enable her to renounce all other secrets - here was a sublime height to be reached without the help of outward things - here was insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within her own soul, where a supreme teacher was waiting t...
preview | full record— Eliot, George (1819-1880)
Date: April, 1871
"Many beliefs, in Coleridge's happy phrase, slumber in the 'dormitory of the soul'; they are present to the consciousness, but they incite to no action."
preview | full record— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)
Date: 1900
"One of these two must ever be, viz., that a man has his fancies in right discipline, turning, leading, and commanding them; or they him. Either they must deal with him, take him up short (as they say), teach him manners, and make him know to whom he belongs; or, this will be his part to teach th...
preview | full record— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)
Date: 1900
"Jealous for thy authority in thy mansion-house and outward family, but not in the least for thy authority within, in thy chiefest mansion, thy principal economy? Are the servants here to talk high and in what tone they please? Must theirs be the last word, their dictates the rules of action? O s...
preview | full record— Cooper, Anthony Ashley, third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)