Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Would thou wert not / Compos'd of grief and tenderness alone, / But had'st a spark of other passions in thee, / Pride, anger, vanity, the strong desire / Of admiration, dear to woman kind;/ These might contend with, and allay thy grief, / As meeting tides and currents smooth our firth."

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: Performed Dec 1756, published 1757

"Sadly he says, that pity is the best, / The noblest passion of the human breast: / For when its sacred streams the heart o'erflow, / In gushes pleasure with the tide of woe; / And when its waves retire, like those of Nile, / They leave behind them such a golden soil, / That there the virtues wit...

— Home, John (1722-1808)

Date: 1775

Love and fear may dry up "soft springs of pity" in the heart and freeze them

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1775

Faded ideas float in the fancy like half-forgotten dreams

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1775

One may be so distressed as to be given "hydrostatics"

— Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816)

Date: 1775

"But, O, my brother! if thou hast a heart / That is not steel'd with stoic apathy / Against the magic of all-conqu'ring love, / Beware of beauty's pow'r; for she has charms / Wou'd melt the frozen breast of hoary age, / Or draw the lonely hermit from his cell / To gaze upon her."

— Francklin, Thomas (1721-1784)

Date: 1787

"Quick, you iron-souled scoundrels! Don't you know he is in distress?"

— Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809); Shakespeare

Date: 1787

Thoughts may run all in one channel

— Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809)

Date: 1800

"The mind that labours for a cure works ill / By feeding its own grief; wasting away / Like boiling waters in an useless struggle"

— Bidlake, John (1755-1814)

Date: 1800

"Know, that the human being's thoughts and deeds / Are not like ocean billows, blindly moved."

— Schiller, Friedrich (1759-1805)