Date: 1726

"NOW, giddy Youth, whom headlong Passions fire, / Rouse the wild Game, and stain the guiltless Grove, / With Violence, and Death; yet call it Sport."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1728

Strait the fierce Storm involves his Mind anew, / Flames thro' the Nerves, and boils along the Veins; / While anxious Doubt distracts the tortur'd Heart; / For even the sad Assurance of his Fears / Were Heaven to what he feels."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730

"As thus we talk'd, / Our hearts would burn within us, would inhale / That portion of divinity, that ray / Of purest Heaven, which lights the glorious flame / Of patriots, and of heroes."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730

"But if doom'd, / In powerless humble fortune, to repress / These ardent risings of the kindling soul; / Then, even superior to ambition, we / Would learn the private virtues."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730, 1744, 1746

"O'er all the soul his sacred influence breathes!/ Inflames imagination; through the breast / Infuses every tenderness; and far / Beyond dim earth exalts the swelling thought."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730, 1744, 1746

"With swift wing / O'er land and sea imagination roams; / Or truth, divinely breaking on his mind, / Elates his being, and unfolds his powers; / Or in his breast heroic virtue burns."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1735-6

"He, too, the fire of fancy feeds intense, / With all the train of passions thence derived: / Not kindling quick, a noisy transient blaze, / But gradual, silent, lasting, and profound."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1737

"Whence Talbot's friendship glows to future times, / Intrepid, warm; of kindred tempers born; / Nursed, by experience, into slow esteem, / Calm confidence unbounded, love not blind, / And the sweet light from mingled minds disclosed, / From mingled chymic oils as bursts the fire."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: October, 1739

"Teach me to cool my passion's fires, / Make me the judge of my desires / The master of my heart."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Yet not by all / Those lying forms which fancy in the brain / Engenders, are the kindling passions driven, / To guilty deeds; nor reason bound in chains, / That vice alone may lord it: oft adorn'd / With solemn pageants, folly mounts the throne, / And plays her idiot-anticks, like a queen. / A t...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)