Date: 1838

"Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, / And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the un...

— 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: 1841

"As certain liquors, confined in casks too cramped in their dimensions, will ferment, and fret, and chafe in their imprisonment, so the spiritual essence or soul of Mr. Tappertit would sometimes fume within that precious cask, his body, until, with great foam and froth and splutter, it would forc...

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1845

"They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1850

"Those lovely forms / Had also left less space within my mind, / Which, wrought upon instinctively, had found / A freshness in those objects of her love, / A winning power, beyond all other power."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: November 24, 1859

"Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite...

— Darwin, Charles (1809-1882)

Date: 1860

"She kissed him, then seated herself again, and took another table cloth on her lap, unfolding it a little way to look at the pattern, while the children stood by in mute wretchedness - their minds quite filled for the moment with the words 'beggars' and 'workhouse.'"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"She read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas-a-Kempis, and the 'Christian Year' (no longer rejected as a 'hymn-book') that they filled her mind with a continual stream of rhythmic memories; and she was too ardently learning to see all nature and life in the light of h...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)