Date: 1785
"Ere Gold appear'd the Passions took their course; / Like whirldwinds swept the flowers of life along, / And crush'd the weak, and undermin'd the strong."
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1785
"Heav'ns! of how cynnical a Nature / The school-taught Race of ALMA MATER! / Who, of cramp'd Mind and clouded Brain / Bind GENIUS in a Gothic Chain."
preview | full record— Polwhele, Richard (1760-1838)
Date: 1785
"O, Montagu! forgive me, if I sing / red with the milder ray / Of soft humanity, and kindness bland: / So wide its influence, that the bright beams / Reach the low vale where mists of ignorance lodge, / Strike on the innate spark which lay immersed, / Thick-clogged, and almost quenched in total n...
preview | full record— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)
Date: 1785
"From shadows thinner than the fleeting night / That floats along the vale, or haply seems / To wrap the mountain in its hazy vest, / (Which the first sun-beam dissipates in air.) / How dost thou conjure monsters which ne'er mov'd / But in the chaos of thy frenzied brain!"
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)
Date: 1787
"Fat is foul weather--dims the fancy's sight"
preview | full record— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)
Date: 1788
"On feeling hearts she [Mercy] sheds celestial dew, / And breathes her spirit o'er th' enlighten'd few; / From soul to soul the spreading influence steals, / Till every breast the soft contagion feels."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
Date: 1788
"Mary observed his character, and wrote down a train of reflections, which these observations led her to make; these reflections received a tinge from her mind; the present state of it, was that kind of painful quietness which arises from reason clouded by disgust; she had not yet learned to be r...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1788
""Ah! will you not there hear me? Will you still inhumanly smile; will you still look so gentle, while your heart is harder than the rocks we shall see--colder than the snow that crowns them!--an heart on which even the pen of fire which Rousseau held would make no impression!"
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)
Date: 1788
"Frequently, your coldness, your unkindness, gives me again to despondence and every lovely prospect I had suffered my imagination to draw is lost in clouds and darkness.'
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)
Date: 1788
"Ah, not alone of power possest / To check each virtue of the breast; / As when the numbing frosts arise / The charm of vegetation dies."
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)