Date: 1802

"With my inward eye 'tis an old man grey, / With my outward a thistle across the way."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1810

"In his mind's eye his house and glebe he sees, / And farms and talks with farmers at his ease;"

— Crabbe, George (1754-1832)

Date: January 8, 1824

"The string you touched in your last truly kind letter has been vibrating ever since, and making music most delightful to a parent's mental ear; an organ not commonly noticed, but which is full as much in daily exercise as the mind's eye of which we speak so familiarly."

— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

Poetry "reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)