Date: 1728, 1729, 1736
"She form'd this image of well-bodied air, / With pert flat eyes she window'd well its head, / A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead, / And empty words she gave, and sounding strain, / But senseless, lifeless! idol void and vain!"
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1730
"Whate'er we see, whate'er we feel, / Does all the God reveal, / Confirms the Grand Mistake / Of Those, whose Eagle-Thoughts would make / His Seat so wondrous high, / Beyond the Limits of the Sky, /Out beyond the World's wide Sphear, /And fix his Habitation there."
preview | full record— Woodward, George (b. 1708?)
Date: 1730
"Whether we send our Reason's piercing Rays / Beneath the Great, unbounded Deep, / Where Storms and Tempests sleep, / Whether unrein'd Imagination strays / Thro' the black, Howling Desart's pathless Ways, / The Deep and Howling Wilderness declare / The Omnipresent Godhead there."
preview | full record— Woodward, George (b. 1708?)
Date: 1730, 1744, 1746
"With swift wing / O'er land and sea imagination roams; / Or truth, divinely breaking on his mind, / Elates his being, and unfolds his powers; / Or in his breast heroic virtue burns."
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1731
"Here Arlington, thy mighty Mind disdains / Inferior Earth, and breaks its servile Chains, / Aloft on Contemplations Wings you rise, / Scorn all below and mingle with the Skies."
preview | full record— Boyse, Samuel (1708-1749)
Date: 1732
"How curs'd the Man, who still is musing found? / His Mill-Horse Soul forms one eternal Round?"
preview | full record— Mitchell, Joseph (c. 1684-1738)
Date: 1732
"Malice, and Lust, voracious Birds of Prey, / That out-soar Reason, and our Wishes sway; / Desires' wild Seas, on which the wise are tost, / By Pilot Indolence, are safely crost."
preview | full record— Mitchell, Joseph (c. 1684-1738)
Date: 1733
"I see the Soul in pensive fit, / And mopeing like sick Linnet sit, / With dewy eye and moulting wing, / Unperch'd, averse to fly or sing."
preview | full record— Green, Matthew (1696-1737) [pseud. Peter Drake, a Fisherman of Brentford]
Date: 1733-4
"And hence one Master Passion in the breast, / Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest."
preview | full record— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Date: 1734
"Hail, holy souls, no more confin'd / To limbs and bones that clog the mind; / Ye have escap'd the snares, and left the chains behind."
preview | full record— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)