Date: 1800

"My path was already chalked out, and my fancy now pursued it with uncommon pleasure."

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1800

"Every sense was an inlet of pleasure, because it was an avenue to knowledge; and my soul brooded over the world of ideas, and glowed with exultation at the grandeur and beauty of its own creations"

— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)

Date: 1826

"[T]hen sweet Memory / May come, and with her mirror cheer thy mind, / On whose bright surface lovelier scenes shall live / Than any shrined within Italian climes."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: March 1843

"The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one."

— Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

Date: 1854

"What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!"

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1860

"Maggie Tulliver, you perceive was by no means that well-trained, well-informed young person that a small female of eight or nine necessarily is in these days: she had only been to school a year at St Ogg's, and had so few books that she sometimes read the dictionary; so that in travelling over h...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)