Date: 1817

Milton in his "latter days" was "poor, sick, blind, slandered, persecuted [...] yet still listening to the music of his thoughts."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: August 1817

"Poetry is the music of language, expressing the music of the mind."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: August 1817

"The musical in sound is the sustained and continuous; the musical in thought and feeling is the sustained and continuous also."

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: 1818

"But poetry makes these odds all even. It is the music of language, answering to the music of the mind, untying as it were 'the secret soul of harmony.'"

— Hazlitt, William (1778-1830)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1900, 1901

"Deep in our souls we should hear the strains of our inner life’s unbroken melody,--a music that is ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintive and always original."

— Bergson, Henri-Louis (1859-1941)