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...

— 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!"

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: 1787

"Fat is foul weather--dims the fancy's sight"

— 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."

— 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...

— 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!"

— 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.'

— 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."

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1788

"His sway the harden'd bosom leads / To Cruelty's remorseless deeds; / Like the blue lightning when it springs / With fury on its livid wings, / Darts to its goal with baleful force, / Nor heeds that ruin marks its course."

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1789?

The placid current of the mind may be bestorm'd so that "th' ideal billows, raging, rise"

— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)