Date: 1801
"Some fickle creatures boast a soul / True as the needle to the pole; / Yet shifting, like the weather, / The needle's constancy forego / For any novelty, and show / Its variations rather."
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: October 4, 1802
"Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth / A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud / Enveloping the Earth--"
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1803
Genius may "separate the clouds by error spread, / Till all the gloom is vanquish'd, and the light / Of intellectual day wide-blazing streams"
preview | full record— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)
Date: 1809
"Could my ideas flow as fast as the rain in the store-closet it would be charming."
preview | full record— Austen, Jane (1775-1817)
Date: 1810
"Had Bethlehem's star, of humble swains the guide; / Of souls, unclouded with pedantick pride; / On thee benighted, beamed, with friendly ray, / With all the light of evangelick day; / Ideas, in thy brain, had held no dance / Of anarchy, thou citizen of France!"
preview | full record— Stockdale, Percival (1736-1811)
Date: 1814
"Instruction is the food of the mind; it is like the dew and the rain and the rich soil."
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: 1814, 1816, 1896
Ideas are "like the silent Snows, by Winter spread, / In silvery treasures, o'er the mountain's head; / Whose stores, while undisturb'd, each hour decay, / And hue, form, substance, quickly waste away; / But stirr'd, by winds, like words, with action strong, /Each sphere enlarges as it rolls alon...
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)
Date: 1815?
There are "thoughts that dwell /Deep in the lonely bosom's inmost cell / Unnoticed, and unknown, too painful wake, / And, like a tempest, the dark spirit shake, / When, starting from our slumberous apathy, / We gaze upon the scenes of days gone by."
preview | full record— Bowles, William Lisle (1762-1850)
Date: 1817
Thoughts may come round us, "as of leaves budding--fruit ripening in stillness" etc.
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)
Date: 1817
"Nor should we pass the secret cell, / Where lonely Science loves to dwell, / Pleas'd, from its lamp, to cast the ray / That lights the mind's beclouded day."
preview | full record— Combe, William (1742 -1823)