Date: 1746

"Now, while I taste the Sweetness of the Shade, / While Nature lies around deep-lull'd in Noon, / Now come, bold Fancy, spread a daring Flight, / And view the Wonders of the torrid Zone."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1746

"He framed a melting lay, to try her heart; / And, if an infant passion struggled there, / To call that passion forth."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1746

"While there with thee the enchanted round I walk, / The regulated wild, gay Fancy then / Will tread in thought the groves of attic land; / Will from thy standard taste refine her own, / Correct her pencil to the purest truth / Of Nature, or, the unimpassion'd shades / Forsaking, raise it to the ...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1746

"Man, in a storm of passions daily whirl'd, / Lives but the jest, and riddle of the world."

— Ruffhead, James

Date: 1746

"As the grave sage, who studies to explore, / Some cause phaenonimous--unknown before, / With patience waits--revolving in his mind / The vast events--attending human kind, / Till some propitious star his soul inspires, / And gives the great solution he requires."

— Ruffhead, James

Date: 1746, 1749

"For Peace and War succeed by Turns in Love, / And while tempestuous these Emotions roll, / And float with blind Disorder in the Soul."

— Francis, Philip (1708-1773)

Date: 1747

"In Vain I strive with Female Art, / To hide the Motions of my Heart; / My Eyes my secret Flame declare, / And Damon reads his Triumph there."

— Lennox, née Ramsay, (Barbara) Charlotte (1730/1?-1804)

Date: 1746; December 17, 1747 [actually January, 1748]

"No more to fabled names confin’d, / To Thee! Supreme, all-perfect mind, / My thoughts direct their flight: / Wisdom’s thy gift, and all her force / From Thee deriv’d, unchanging source / Of intellectual light!"

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1748, 1754

"But when [the mind] soars above mortal Cares and mortal Pursuits, into the Regions of Divinity, and converses with the greatest and best of Beings, it spreads itself into a wider Compass, takes higher Flights in Reason and Goodness, and becomes God-like in its Air and Manners."

— Fordyce, David (bap. 1711, d. 1751)

Date: 1748, 1749

"The human body is a machine that winds up its own springs: it is a living image of the perpetual motion."

— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)