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Date: 1773

"My heart in Delia is so fully blest, / It has no room to lodge another joy."

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

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Date: 1774

"Some have imagined that we are induced to acquiesce with greater patience in our own lot, by beholding pictures of life tinged with deeper horrors, and loaded with more excruciating calamities; as, to a person suddenly emerging out of a dark room, the faintest glimmering of twilight assumes a lu...

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

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Date: 1776

"But the greatest happiness of the greatest number requires, that they should be not only imagined but proved: and this they shall now be, in so far as natural probability, aided by whatever support it may be thought to receive from the character of the narrator, can gain credence, for the indica...

— Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)

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Date: 1783

"He carries windows / In that enlarged breast of his, that all / May see what's done within"

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

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Date: 1786

"'Tis thy pure spirit warms my Anna's mind. / Beams thro' the pensive softness of her form, / And holds its altar--on her spotless heart!"

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

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Date: 1788

"She knew none of the inhabitants of the vast city to which she was going: the mass of buildings appeared to her a huge body without an informing soul."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

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Date: 1788

"I am a wretch! and she heaved a sigh that almost broke her heart, while the big tears rolled down her burning cheeks; but still her exercised mind, accustomed to think, began to observe its operation, though the barrier of reason was almost carried away, and all the faculties not restrained by h...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

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Date: 1789

"While in Fancy's ear / As in the evening wind thy murmurs swell, / The Enthusiast of the Lyre, who wander'd here, / Seems yet to strike his visionary shell, / Of power to call forth Pity's tenderest tear / Or wake wild frenzy--from her hideous cell!"

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

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Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

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Date: 1790, 1794

"How many fine-spun threads of reasoning would my wandering thoughts have broken; and how difficult should I have found it to arrange arguments and inferences in the cells of my brain!"

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.