Date: 1890

"I've known her from an ample nation / Choose one; / Then close the valves of her attention / Like stone."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1891

"Yet in his stern creed lay a tender heart, / The husk o'erlaid a wealth of human kindness / And love, that fain their wisdom would impart / To purge the young soul of its earthly blindness"

— Smith, Walter Chalmers (1824-1908)

Date: 1892

"Least village boasts its blacksmith, / Whose anvil's even din / Stands symbol for the finer forge / That soundless tugs within, // Refining these impatient ores / With hammer and with blaze, / Until the designated light / Repudiate the forge."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 1900

"Had Eve possessed a soul like sand, / Without a taint of aught decayed, / Unfructifiable as land / Whereon no herbs nor forests fade, // Then her Betrayer would have sought / An acquiescent ear in vain."

— Money-Coutts, Francis Burdett Thomas, 5th Lord Latimer (1852-1923)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"It is as if a bar of iron, without touch or sight, with no representative faculty whatever, might nevertheless be strongly endowed with an inner capacity for magnetic feeling; and as if, through the various arousals of its magnetism by magnets coming and going in its neighborhood, it might be co...

— James, William (1842-1910)

Date: 1901-2, 1902

"We must class him, like Bunyan and Tolstoy, amongst those upon whose soul the iron of melancholy left a permanent imprint."

— James, William (1842-1910)