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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)

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Date: 1820

"A moment's thought is passion's passing bell"

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

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Date: 1820

"Only a sense / Remains of them, like the omnipotence / Of music, when the inspired voice and lute / Languish, ere yet the responses are mute, / Which through the deep and labyrinthine soul, / Like echoes through long caverns, wind and roll."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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Date: 1821

"The peaceful conscience is the boon / That keeps the jarring mind in tune"

— Combe, William (1742 -1823)

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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)

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Date: 1848

"Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody! / Attuning still the soul to tenderness"

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

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Date: 1860

"If she had felt that she was entirely wrong and that Tom had been entirely right, she could sooner have recovered more inward harmony, but now her penitence and submission were constantly obstructed by resentment that would present itself to her no otherwise than as just.'"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

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Date: 1860

"But Maggie who had little more power of concealing the impressions made upon her than if she had been constructed of musical strings, felt her eyes getting larger with tears as they took each other's hands in silence."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

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Date: 1865

"Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul, / With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird, / There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim."

— Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)

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Date: 1892

"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all, // And sweetest in the gale is heard."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.