Date: 1730

"Close crowds the shining atmosphere; and binds / Our strengthen'd bodies in its cold embrace, / Constringent; feeds, and animates our blood; / Refines our spirits, through the new-strung nerves, / In swifter sallies darting to the brain; / Where sits the soul, intense, collected, cool, / Bright ...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730, 1744, 1746

"Turn we a moment Fancy's rapid flight / To vigorous soils, and climes of fair extent; / Where, by the potent sun elated high, / The vineyard swells refulgent on the day; / Spreads o'er the vale; or up the mountain climbs, / Profuse; and drinks amid the sunny rocks, / From cliff to cliff increase...

— 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: 1730

"The generous Ashley thine, the friend of man; / Who scan'd his nature with a brother's eye, / His weakness prompt to shade, to raise his aim, / To touch the finer movements of the mind, / And with the moral beauty charm the heart."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1735-6

"His mental eye first launch'd into the deeps of boundless ether; where unnumber'd orbs, / Myriads on myriads, through the pathless sky / Unerring roll, and wind their steady way."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1744, 1746

"That with the vivid energy of sense, / The truth of Nature, which with Attic point / And kind well temper'd satire, smoothly keen, / Steals through the soul, and without pain corrects."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Passion's fierce illapse / Rouzes the mind's whole fabric; with supplies / Of daily impulse keeps the elastic powers / Intensely poiz'd, and polishes anew / By that collision all the fine machine: / Else rust would rise, and foulness, by degrees / Incumbering, choak at last what heaven design'd ...

— 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

"My fluttering Soul was all on Wing to find Thee, / My Love! my Sigismunda!"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1745

"But This, my Friend, these stormy Gusts of Pride / Are foreign to my Love--Till Sigismunda / Be disabus'd, my Breast is Tumult all, / And can obey no settled Course of Reason. / I see Her still, I feel her powerful Image!"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)