Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"What pity then / Should sloth's unkindly fogs depress to earth / Her [the soul's] tender blossom; choak the streams of life, / And blast her spring!"
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"From heaven my strains begin; from heaven descends / The flame of genius to the human breast, / And love and beauty, and poetic joy / And inspiration."
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"The hand of nature on peculiar minds / Imprints a different byass, and to each / Decrees its province in the common toil."
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"For as old Memnon's image, long renown'd / By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch / Of Titan's ray, with each repulsive string / Consenting, sounded through the warbling air / Unbidden strains; even so did nature's hand / To certain species of external things, / Attune the finer organs of the ...
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"So the glad impulse of congenial powers, / Or of sweet sound, or fair proportion'd form, / The grace of motion, or the bloom of light, / Thrills through imagination's tender frame, / From nerve to nerve: all naked and alive / They catch the spreading rays: till now the soul / At length discloses...
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"Then the inexpressive strain / Diffuses its inchantment: fancy dreams / Of sacred fountains and Elysian groves, / And vales of bliss: the intellectual power / Bends from his awful throne a wondering ear, / And smiles: the passions, gently sooth'd away, / Sink to divine repose, and love and joy /...
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
Man was ordained to "To chase each partial purpose from his breast; / And through the mists of passion and of sense, / And through the tossing tide of chance and pain, / To hold his course unfaultering, while the voice / Of truth and virtue, up the steep ascent / Of nature, calls him to his high ...
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"Else wherefore burns / In mortal bosoms this unquenched hope, / That breathes from day to day sublimer things, / And mocks possession?"
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"The high-born soul / Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing / Beneath its native quarry."
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"For such the bounteous providence of heaven, / In every breast implanting this desire / Of objects new and strange, to urge us on / With unremitted labour to pursue / Those sacred stores that wait the ripening soul, / In Truth's exhaustless bosom."
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)