Date: 1788
"Hence at each sound imagination glows; / Hence his warm lay with softest sweetness flows; / Melting it flows, pure, numerous, strong and clear, / And fills the impassioned heart and lulls the harmonious ear."
preview | full record— Collins, William (1721-1759)
Date: 1790
"All the splendour of the highest prosperity can never enlighten the gloom with which so dreadful an idea must necessarily over-shadow the imagination; nor, in a wise and virtuous man, can all the sorrow of the most afflicting adversity ever dry up the joy which necessarily springs from the habit...
preview | full record— Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
Date: 1790
"The airy schemes he once formed of future felicity, resulting from the union of two persons so justly dear to him--with the gay visions of past happiness--floated upon his fancy, and the lustre they reflected, served only to heighten by contrast, the obscurity and gloom of his present views."
preview | full record— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)
Date: 1790
"His disturbed mind resembled a tempestuous flood, whose waves arise dark and turbulent, except where the sun-beam throws a line of trembling radiance across their agitated surface."
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: 1817
"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1820
"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)