Date: 1744, 1772, 1795
"Yet not by all / Those lying forms which fancy in the brain / Engenders, are the kindling passions driven, / To guilty deeds; nor reason bound in chains, / That vice alone may lord it: oft adorn'd / With solemn pageants, folly mounts the throne, / And plays her idiot-anticks, like a queen. / A t...
preview | full record— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)
Date: 1745
Chiefly one Charm / He in his graceful Character observes: / That tho' his Passions burn with high Impatience, / And sometimes, from a noble Heat of Nature, / Are ready to fly off, yet the least Check / Of ruling Reason brings them back to Temper, / And gentle Softness."
preview | full record— Thomson, James (1700-1748)
Date: 1747
"Why can I not this fatal Flame remove? / Or why, O why is it a Crime to love? / By Turns my Reason and my Passion sway, / As Honour triumphs, and as Love betray; / My tortur'd Breast conflicting Passions tear, / And Love and Virtue wage unequal War."
preview | full record— Lennox, née Ramsay, (Barbara) Charlotte (1730/1?-1804)
Date: 1752, 1791
"Know too, the joys of sense controul, / And clog the motions of the soul; / Forbid her pinions to aspire, / Damp and impair her native fire: / And sure as Sense (that tyrant!) reigns, / She holds the empress, Soul, in chains."
preview | full record— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)
Date: 1764
Brave rage, a "grand master passion," may flame out for country
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)
Date: 1768
"In saying this, I was making not so much La Fleur's eloge, as my own, having been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another...
preview | full record— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)
Date: 1774
"I expect the incomparable fair one of Hamburg, that prodigy of beauty, and paragon of good sense, who has enslaved your mind, and inflamed your heart."
preview | full record— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)
Date: 1788
"On Eloquence, prevailing art! / Whose force can chain the list'ning heart; / The throb of Sympathy inspire, / And kindle every great desire; / With magic energy controul / And reign the sov'reign of the soul!"
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: 1789
"Does not slavery itself depress the mind, and extinguish all its fire and every noble sentiment?"
preview | full record— Equiano, Olaudah [Gustavus Vasa] (c. 1745-1797)