Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1845

"Their minds had been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness."

— Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)

Date: 1847

"His brightening mind brightened his features, and added spirit and nobility to their aspect."

— Brontë, Emily (1818-1848)

Date: 1848

"O that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake, / Would all their colours from the sunset take: / From something of material sublime, / Rather than shadow our own soul's day-time / In the dark void of night."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: 1850

"An auxiliar light / Came from my mind, which on the setting sun / Bestowed new splendour"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1851

"No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards."

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1854

"She turned her head, and the light of her face shone in upon the midnight of his mind."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"Remembrances of how she had journeyed to the little that she knew, by the enchanted roads of what she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how, first coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, she had seen it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as its...

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"I ha' lookn at't an thowt o' thee, Rachael, till the muddle in my mind have cleared awa, above a bit, I hope."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1860

"It is doubtless almost incredible to instructed minds of the present day that a boy of twelve, not belonging strictly to 'the masses' who are now understood to have the monopoly of mental darkness, should have had no distinct idea how there came to be such a thing as Latin on this earth: yet so ...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)