Date: 1781
"He [Young] plays, indeed, only on the surface of life; he never penetrates the recesses of the mind, and therefore the whole power of his poetry is exhausted by a single perusal; his conceits please only when they surprise."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1781
"In his 'Night Thoughts' he has exhibited a very wide display of original poetry, variegated with deep reflections and striking allusions, a wilderness of thought, in which the fertility of fancy scatters flowers of every hue and of every odour."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1781
"May God write it upon all your hearts!"
preview | full record— Wesley, John (1703-1791)
Date: 1779, 1781
"Pope foresaw the future efflorescence of imagery then budding in his mind, and resolved to spare no art or industry of cultivation."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: April, 1783
If human souls are of an essence pure, / How fix ideas in them to endure? / And if material, canst not thou, Monro, / The little cells of our ideas show?"
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: April, 1783
"He gives a curious system of the instrument of Memory, which he says is the last or inner ventricle of the brain, whereas the first or outer ventricles are the instruments of perception or thought. He affirms that, according as you hurt one or other of thole instruments, you destroy either of th...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: April, 1783
"When we talk of a storehouse of our ideas, we are only forming an imagination of something similar to an enclosed portion of space in which material objects are reposited. But who ever actually saw this storehouse, or can have any clear perception of it when he endeavours by thinking closely to ...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: April, 1783
"I asked him, if he could give me any notion of the situation of our ideas which we have totally forgotten at the time, yet shall afterwards recollect. He paused, meditated a little, and acknowledged his ignorance in the spirit of a philosophical poet, by repeating as a very happy allusion a pass...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: April, 1783
"As, however, his penetration could not but see that all this is absolutely incompatible with a spiritual substance which mind is, he, immediately without any interruption or preparation whatever, proceeds very quietly, though most effectually, to contradict what he has been assuming, and to anni...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)