Date: 1745

"My fluttering Soul was all on Wing to find Thee, / My Love! my Sigismunda!"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1746

"Now, while I taste the Sweetness of the Shade, / While Nature lies around deep-lull'd in Noon, / Now come, bold Fancy, spread a daring Flight, / And view the Wonders of the torrid Zone."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1748, 1749

"Like that bird on yonder spray, the imagination seems to be perpetually ready to take wing."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)

Date: 1759

"Fair Pupil, shake off Soul-depressing Vice, / That wing'd with Faith, your Soul may upward rise / Fly from alluring Snares of guileful Joy, / Let Reason's pure Delights your Mind employ."

— Marriott, Thomas (d. 1766)

Date: 1759

"His mighty mind travelled round the intellectual world; and, with a more than eagle's eye, saw, and has pointed out blank spaces, or dark spots in it, on which the human mind never shone."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1760

"O happy stroke, that bursts the bonds of clay, / Darts through the rending gloom the blaze of day, / And wings the soul with boundless flight to soar, / Where dangers threat, and fears alarm no more."

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1760-7

"That had said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man's character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly, as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and look'd in,--view'd the soul stark naked;--observ'd all her motions,--her machinations;--tra...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1761

"Wake my Harp! to melting Measures, / Pour thy softest, sweetest Treasures, / Such as lift the Thoughts on high; / 'Till the rapt Soul, Earth forsaking, / Heaven-ward it's Flight is taking, / On the Wings of Harmony."

— Bickerstaff, Isaac (b. 1733, d. after 1808)

Date: 1761, 1790

"Ev'n from this dark confinement with delight / She [the mind] looks abroad, and prunes herself for flight; / Like an unwilling inmate longs to roam / From this dull earth, and seek her native home."

— Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787); Browne, Isaac Hawkins (1706-1760)

Date: 1761, 1765

"But, after Fancy's eagle-flights were o'er, / And heav'n-illumin'd Genius could no more; / Thus, conscious all his best essays how vain, / Might the rapt bard conclude his humble strain."

— Stevenson, William (1730-1783)