Date: 1788

"And ah! the blessings valued most / By human minds, are blessings lost / Unlike the objects of the eye, / Enlarging, as we bring them nigh, / Our joys, at distance strike the breast, / And seem diminish'd when possest."

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1788

There are those "whom the traffic of their race / Has robb'd of every human grace; / Whose harden'd souls no more retain / Impressions Nature stamp'd in vain; / All that distinguishes their kind, / For ever blotted from their mind; / As streams, that once the landscape gave / Reflected o...

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1789

"Thro' thy [Fancy's] false medium then, no longer view'd, / May fancied pain and fancied pleasure fly, / And I, as from me all thy dreams depart, / Be to my wayward destiny subdu'd."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1790

"And o'er Imagination's gloomy glass, / Despair's mute sons like Banquo's visions pass"

— Merry, Robert (1755-1798)

Date: 1792

"As when in ocean sinks the orb of day, / Long on the wave reflected lustres play; / Thy tempered gleams of happiness resigned / Glance on the darkened mirror of the mind."

— Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855)

Date: 1799

"And, in the waveless mirror of his mind, / Views the fleet years of pleasure left behind, / Since Anna's empire o'er his heart began!"

— Campbell, Thomas (1777-1844)

Date: 1806

"Thy pure flame / Would light the sense opake, and warm the spring / Of boundless ecstacy; while nature's laws / So violated, plead, immortal-tongu'd, / For her dark-fated children; lead them forth / From bondage infamous!"

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)

Date: 1817, 1818

"'twas her lover's face-- / It might resemble her--it once had been / The mirror of her thoughts, and still the grace / Which her mind's shadow cast, left there a lingering trace"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1817, 1818

"Look on your mind--it is the book of fate-- / Ah! it is dark with many a blazoned name / Of misery--all are mirrors of the same"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1820

"He might as wisely and as easily determine that his mind should no longer be the mirror of all that is lovely in the visible universe as exclude from his contemplation the beautiful which exists in the writings of a great contemporary."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)