Date: 1801

"My soul her bondage ill endures; / I pant for liberty like yours."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1803

"The polish'd links that form the social chain, / For ages still to ages may remain / Nor snapt by rage, nor undermin'd by art, / If well the rivets join in every part; / But if those links that would the peasant bind, / Gall his chaf'd body, and corrode his mind, / The poor man's iron, and the r...

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: c. 1804-1811, 1818

"Urizen lay in darkness & solitude, in chains of the mind lock'd up."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1807-8

"Much it behoves us to compute the strength / Of him, whose ruin we would work, of him, / Who vaunts himself the legate of Jehovah, / And by that title keeps our souls in thrall / And bondage worse than what our limbs endur'd / Under the yoke of Pharaoh."

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

Date: 1808

"With active force the comprehensive mind / Breaks custom's chains and prejudice's ties, / And wide in sportive curves unbounded flies."

— Grant [née MacVicar], Anne (1755-1838)

Date: 1808

"Draw close those ties, so fine and yet so strong, / That gently lead the willing soul along, / Nor crush beneath oppression's iron rod / The kindred image of the parent God; / Nor think that rigour's galling chains can bind / The native force of the superior mind."

— Grant [née MacVicar], Anne (1755-1838)

Date: 1810

"Years pass away--let us suppose them past, / Th' accomplish'd nymph for freedom looks at last; / All hardships over, which a school contains, / The spirit's bondage and the body's pains; / Where teachers make the heartless, trembling set / Of pupils suffer for their own regret."

— Crabbe, George (1754-1832)

Date: 1810

"Kindness can woo the Lion from his den, / A moral teaching to the sons of men; / His mighty heart in silken bonds can draw, / And bend his nature to sweet Pity's law."

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: 1816

"Nor wide stretched lands, nor interposing deep, / Can check the progess of th’ unfetter’d soul."

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1817

"On this scroll thou seest written in characters fair / A sun-beamy tale of a wreath, and a chain; / And, warrior, it nurtures the property rare / Of charming my mind from the trammels of pain."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)