Date: 1764
Brave rage, a "grand master passion," may flame out for country
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)
Date: 1765
"And my heart, within me burning, / Is become like melting wax."
preview | full record— Smart, Christopher (1722-1771)
Date: 1766
"Considering these words, in a religious sense; that of 'fervency', seems to rise upon 'warmth'; 'warmth' implying, a flame of devotion, in opposition to coolness; 'fervency', great heat of mind, as opposed to coldness."
preview | full record— Trusler, John (1735-1820)
Date: 1768
"In saying this, I was making not so much La Fleur's eloge, as my own, having been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1768
"The fire caught--and the whole city, like the heart of one man, open'd itself to Love."
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1755, 1771
"In every human breast there lives enshrined / Some atom pregnant with the' etherial mind; / Some plastic power, some intellectual ray, / Some genial sunbeam from the source of day; / Something that, warm and restless to aspire, / Works the young heart, and sets the soul on fire, / And bids us al...
preview | full record— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)
Date: 1755, 1771
"Strong and more strong the light celestial shines, / Each thought ennobles, and each sense refines, / Till all the soul, full opening to the flame, / Exalts to virtue what she felt for fame."
preview | full record— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)
Date: 1755, 1771
"The' etherial soul that Heaven itself inspires / With all its virtues, and with all its fires, / Led by these sirens to some wild extreme, / Sets in a vapour when it ought to beam; / Like a Dutch sun that in the' autumnal sky / Looks through a fog, and rises but to die."
preview | full record— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)
Date: 1774
"I expect the incomparable fair one of Hamburg, that prodigy of beauty, and paragon of good sense, who has enslaved your mind, and inflamed your heart."
preview | full record— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Date: 1774
"As you found your brain considerably affected by the cold, you were very prudent not to turn it to poetry in that situation; and not less judicious in declining the borrowed aid of a stove, whose fumigation, instead of inspiration, would at best have produced what Mr. Pope calls a souterkin<...
preview | full record— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)