Date: October, 1739

"Bid Fancy quit her fairy cell, / In all her colours drest / While prompt her sallies to control, / Reason, the judge, recalls the soul / To Truth's severest test."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Such then is the abode / Of folly in the mind; and such the shapes / In which she governs her obsequious train."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"For to the brutes / Perception and the transient boons of sense / Hath fate imparted: but to man alone / Of sublunary beings was it given / Each fleeting impulse on the sensual powers / At leisure to review; with equal eye / To scan the passion of the stricken nerve / Or the vague object strikin...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1745

"New to each hour what low delight succeeds, / What precious furniture of hearts and heads!"

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1745

"Off! Traitors! off! or my distracted Soul / Will burst indignant from this Jail of Nature! / To where she beckons yonder."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1775

One may carry with him "all the flimsy furniture of a country Miss's brain"

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1814

"All, in a word, from which all eyes must start, / That opening sepulchre, the naked heart / Bares with its buried woes--till Pride awake, / To snatch the mirror from the soul, and break."

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

Date: 1816

"[H]e can tell / Why Thought seeks refuge in lone caves, yet rife / With airy images, and shapes which dwell / Still unimpaired, though old, in the Soul's haunted cell."

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

Date: 1816

"One breast laid open were a school / Which would unteach Mankind the lust to shine or rule:"

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

Date: 1816

"And there they [i.e., "chiefless castles"] stand, as stands a lofty mind, / Worn, but unstooping to the baser crowd, / All tenantless, save to the crannying Wind, / Or holding dark communion with the Cloud."

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)