Date: 1762

"To me how tasteless ev’ry Scene of Joy, / The vacant Heart by happy Impulse feels / While mine, which Thoughts of genuine Grief employ, / From chearful Crowds to drear Retirement steals."

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1763, 1767

"The guardian genius of his dawning thought, / Who wide disclos'd to wisdom's sacred ray / The eager inlets of his ample mind, / And pour'd upon each opening mental cell, / The virtue-forming scientific beam / With letter'd and religious radiance fill'd, / The fair expanses of his princely soul, ...

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1771, 1776

"Adieu, ye lays, that fancy's flowers adorn, / The soft amusement of the vacant mind!"

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1773

"My heart in Delia is so fully blest, / It has no room to lodge another joy."

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1773

"Hail to pleasure's frolic train; / Hail to fancy's golden reign; / Festive mirth, and laughter wild, / Free and sportful as the child; / Hope with eager sparkling eyes, / And easy faith, and fond surprise: / Let these, in fairy colours drest, / Forever share my careless breast; / Then, tho' wise...

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1774

"Here lies honest William, whose heart was a mint, / While the owner ne'er knew half the good that was in't."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1782

"With Asiatic vices stored thy mind, / But left their virtues and thine own behind, / And, having truck'd thy soul, brought home the fee, / To tempt the poor to sell himself to thee?"

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1785

"Such rapture filled Lactilla's vacant soul, / When the bright Moralist, in softness dressed, / Opes all the glories of the mental world, / Deigns to direct the infant thought, to prune / The budding sentiment, uprear the stalk / Of feeble fancy, bid idea live, / Woo the abstracted spirit form i...

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1786, 1787, 1788; 1789

"So poignant a mind in a vulgariz'd shell,/ Resembles a bucket of gold in a well; / 'Tis like Ceylon's best spice in a rude-fashion'd jar, / Or Comedy coop'd in a Dutch man of war."

— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)

Date: 1798

"O reader! had you in your mind / Such stores as silent thought can bring."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)