Date: 1787

"What force can free the mind that Vice has chain'd, / Or clear the current if the fountain's stain'd?"

— Pye, Henry James (1745-1813)

Date: 1787

"Her's [Gaul's] was the earliest boast with lenient care / To form soft Courtesy's attractive air; / Throw o'er the willing mind Politeness' chains, / And raise that empire which she yet maintains."

— Pye, Henry James (1745-1813)

Date: 1787

"The increasing powers of ripening sense pervade / The gloomy stillness of the cloister's shade, / Destroy the bonds that Reason's force confin'd, / And burst the fetters that enchain'd the mind."

— Pye, Henry James (1745-1813)

Date: 1788-89

"The former [Platonic philosophy] fills the soul with intelligible light, breaks her lethargic fetters, and elevates her to the principle of things; the latter [Lockean philosophy] clouds the intellectual eye of the soul, by increasing her oblivion, strengthens her corporeal bands, and hurries he...

— Taylor, Thomas (1758-1835)

Date: 1788

"But still the vigour of my soul I keep, / And its keen anger burst the bonds of sleep."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1788

"See the fond links of feeling nature broke! / The fibres twisting round a parent's heart, / Torn from their grasp, and bleeding as they part."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1788

"When the sharp iron wounds his inmost soul, / And his strain'd eyes in burning anguish roll; / Will the parch'd negro find, ere he expire, / No pain in hunger, and no heat in fire?"

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1788

"Their minds were shackled with a set of notions concerning propriety, the fitness of things for the world's eye, trammels which always hamper weak people."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1788

"He had been the slave of beauty, the captive of sense; love he ne'er had felt; the mind never rivetted the chain, nor had the purity of it made the body appear lovely in his eyes."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: February 3, 1788

"The spirit of the Gospel 'proclaims liberty to the captive, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound:' but these men rivet the chains of slavery; 'the iron enters into the Negro's soul,' while while his mind is left in all the darkness of ignorance, without one ray of those comforts ...

— Agutter, William (1758-835)