Date: 1651
"'Tis but the Body that blind Fortunes spight / Can chain to Earth; the nobler Soul doth slight / Her servill Bonds, and takes to Heaven her flight."
preview | full record— Sherburne, Sir Edward (bap. 1616, d. 1702)
Date: 1678
"But Fancy, I think, in Poetry, is like Faith in Religion; it makes far discoveries, and soars above reason, but never clashes, or runs against it. Fancy leaps, and frisks, and away she's gone; whilst reason rattles the chains, and follows after."
preview | full record— Rymer, Thomas (1641-1713)
Date: 1691
"Towards the end of which Chapter Evander confesses his Wit has a little run away with him; so ungovernable a thing is towring Fancy, when not hand-cufft by powerful Reason, flying out against Learning, beloved Learning, at so Satyrical a rate as almost makes his heart bleed to read it, when he t...
preview | full record— Dunton, John (1659–1732)
Date: 1713
"An equal Partner in the vanquish'd Earth, / A Brother, not impos'd upon my Birth, / Too weak a Tye unequal Thoughts to bind, / But by the gen'rous Motions of the Mind."
preview | full record— Finch [née], Anne, Countess of Winchilsea (1666-1720)
Date: September 17, 1726
"This Train of Images continually revolv'd in our young Parson's Brain; and to preserve them from being jostled out by any intruding Foreigners, who might dispossess the Original Orthodox Inhabitants, the first Link of the Chain was rivetted by Pride, and the two last closed up by those two insep...
preview | full record— Arbuckle, James (d. 1742)
Date: 1760
"O happy stroke, that bursts the bonds of clay, / Darts through the rending gloom the blaze of day, / And wings the soul with boundless flight to soar, / Where dangers threat, and fears alarm no more."
preview | full record— Beattie, James (1735-1803)
Date: 1762
"Ne’er did thy Voice assume a Master’s Pow’r, / Nor force Assent to what thy Precepts taught; / But bid my independent Spirit soar, / In all the Freedom of unfett’red Thought"
preview | full record— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)
Date: 1767
"One obvious effect of it is, that it confines the attention to artificial rules, and ties the mind down to the observance of them, perhaps at the very time that the imagination is upon the stretch, and grasping at some idea astonishingly great, which however it is obliged, though with the utmost...
preview | full record— Duff, William (1732-1815)