Date: 1793

"For what is sleep, but temporary death; / Sealing up all the windows of the soul, / And binding ev'ry thought in torpid chains?"

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)

Date: w. c. 1793? [in MS]

"Love to faults is always blind / Always is to joy inclind / Lawless wingd & unconfind / And breaks all chains from every mind."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: w. c. 1793? [in MS]

"Deceit to secresy confind / Lawful cautious & refind / To every thing but interest blind / And forges fetters for the mind."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1793

"But, most of all, [the mind is subject] to that lov'd voice, whose thrill, / Rushing impetuous through each throbbing vein, / Dilates the wond'ring mind, and frees its pow'rs / From the cold chains of icy apathy / To all the vast extremes of bliss and pain!"

— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)

Date: 1793

"Exulting Reason from her bondage springs, / Claims Heav'n's wide range, and spreads her eagle wings; / While Superstition, lodg'd with bats and owls, / With Horror, and the hopeless maniac, howls."

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1793

"Of all bondage, mental bondage is surely the most fatal; the absurd despotism which has hitherto, with more than gothic barbarity, enslaved the female mind, the enervating and degrading system of manners by which the understandings of women have been chained down to frivolity and trifles, have i...

— Hays, Mary (1760-1843)

Date: 1794

"In every voice: in every ban, / The mind-forg'd manacles I hear."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1794

"My heart is in your chains, and I must follow."

— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)

Date: 1794

"Forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity! / In chains of the mind locked up, / Like fetters of ice shrinking together."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1794

"And as these irritative ideas make up a part of the chain of our waking thoughts, introducing other ideas that engage our attention, though themselves are unattended to, we find it very difficult to investigate by what steps many of our hourly trains of ideas gain their admittance."

— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)