Date: 1777

"Not like a cloyster'd drone, to read and doze, / In undeserving, undeserv'd repose; / But reason's influence to diffuse; to clear / The enlighten'd world of every gloomy fear; / Dispel the mists of error, and unbind / Those pedant chains that clog the freeborn mind."

— Lyttleton, George, 1st Baron Lyttleton (1709-1773)

Date: 1814

"There is a war, a chaos of the mind, / When all its elements convulsed, combined / Lie dark and jarring with perturbéd force, / And gnashing with impenitent Remorse"

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

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: 1814

"No single passion, and no ruling thought / That leaves the rest, as once, unseen, unsought, / But the wild prospect when the Soul reviews, / All rushing through their thousand avenues"

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

Date: March 30, 1816

"Look on her features! and behold her mind / As in a mirror of itself defined."

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

Date: 1816

"In my youth's summer I did sing of One, / The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind."

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

Date: 1816

"[I]n that Tale I find / The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, / Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind."

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

Date: 1816

"Since my young days of passion--joy, or pain-- / Perchance my heart and harp have lost a string-- / And both may jar."

— 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

"Yet must I think less wildly:--I have thought / Too long and darkly, till my brain became, / In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought, / A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame."

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