Date: 1729

"Now, while my thought round nature's circle runs / (A bolder journey than the furious sun's) / This chief and satiating good to find / The attracting centre of the human mind"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1729

"Then the good easy man, whom reason rules; / Rouz'd by bold insult, and injurious rage, / With sharp, and sudden check, th' astonish'd sons / Of violence confounds; firm as his cause, / His bolder heart; in awful justice clad; / His eyes effulging a peculiar fire: / And, as he charges thro' the ...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1729

"Oh, let not then waste luxury impair / That manly soul of toil which strings your nerves, / And your own proper happiness creates!"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1729

"E'en not all these, in one rich lot combined, / Can make the happy man, without the mind; / Where judgment sits clear-sighted, and surveys / The chain of reason with unerring gaze; / Where fancy lives, and to the brightening eyes, / His fairer scenes, and bolder figures rise; / Where social lov...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730, 1744, 1746

"Ten thousand thousand fleet ideas, such / As never mingled with the vulgar dream, / Crowd fast into the mind's creative eye."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730, 1744, 1746

"The awaken'd throb for virtue, and for fame; / The sympathies of love, and friendship dear; / With all the social offspring of the heart."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730

"Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps, / Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts of home / Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth / In many a vain effort."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730

"Then throng the busy shapes into his mind, / Of cover'd pits, unfathomably deep, / A dire descent! beyond the power of frost, / Of faithless bogs; of precipices huge, / Smooth'd up with snow; and, what is land unknown, / What water, of the still unfrozen eye, / In the loose marsh or solitary lak...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730

"Nor absent are those tuneful shades, I ween, / Taught by the Graces, whose inchanting touch / Shakes every passion from the various string; / Not those, who solemnize the moral scene."

— 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)