Date: October, 1739

"Bid Fancy quit her fairy cell, / In all her colours drest / While prompt her sallies to control, / Reason, the judge, recalls the soul / To Truth's severest test."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1741

"'I've a friend,' answers Mind, 'who, though slow, is yet sure, / And will rid me at last of your insolent power: / Will knock down your walls, the whole fabric demolish, / And at once your strong holds and my slavery abolish: / And while in your dust your dull ruins decay, / I'll snap off my cha...

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1742

"Is not the mighty mind, that son of heaven, / By tyrant Life dethroned, imprison'd, pain'd? / By Death enlarged, ennobled, deified? / Death but entombs the body; Life, the soul."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1743

"Darkness has more divinity for me: / It strikes thought inward; it drives back the soul / To settle on herself, our point supreme! / There lies our theatre; there sits our judge."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1746

Imagination may "Bring what ideas she can find / To the great storehouse of the Mind, / Where Judgement ever sits serene, / To rule the vague and sportive queen"

— Cooke, Thomas (1703-1756)

Date: 1754

"O, come; indignant, drive out, far beyond/ The utmost Precincts of the human Breast, / Beyond the Springs of Hope, the Cells of Joy, / And ev'ry Mansion where a Virtue lives; / O drive far off, for ever drive that Bane, / That hideous Pest, engender'd deep in Hell, / Where Stygian Glooms condens...

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1762-3

"Within the brain's most secret cells / A certain Lord Chief Justice dwells, / Of sovereign power, whom, one and all, / With common voice, we Reason call."

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1762-3

"With these grave fops, whose system seems / To give up certainty for dreams / The eye of man is understood / As for no other purpose good / Than as a door, through which, of course, / Their passage crowding objects force; / A downright usher, to admit / New-comers to the court of Wit."

— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)

Date: 1764

"Each nobler aim, repressed by long control, / Now sinks at last or feebly mans the soul; / While low delights, succeeding fast behind, / In happier meanness occupy the mind: / As in those domes, where Caesars once bore sway, / Defaced by time and tottering in decay, / There in the ruin, heedless...

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1766

"Wisdom, which men with so much pain, / With so much weariness attain, / May in a little moment quit, / And abdicate the throne of Wit, / And leave, a vacant seat, the brain, / For Folly to usurp and reign."

— Lloyd, Evan (1734-1776)