Date: 1772-1781
What availed the songs of a "mighty mind, / With inward light irradiate, mirror-like / Receiv'd, and to mankind with ray reflex / The sov'reign Planter's primal work display'd?"
preview | full record— Mason, William (1725-1797)
Date: 1773
"Soaring though air to find the bright abode, / Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God, / We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, / And leave the rolling universe behind; / From star to star the mental optics rove, / Measure the skies, and range the realms above."
preview | full record— Wheatley, Phillis (c.1753–1784)
Date: 1773
"Think'st thou, had Fancy's mirror struck his sight, / And brought thy too degenerate deeds to light; / Had shewn thee curst to such a vicious race, / Whose very breath contaminates the place: / How would his manly heart with grief have died / T'have seen this fatal barrier to his pride?"
preview | full record— Anonymous
Date: 1775
"Before the queen an oval mirror stands, / The curious labor of her active hands; / Ample its size; of wondrous texture wrought; / With pow'r endu'd, surpassing human thought."
preview | full record— Rack, Edmund (1735-1787)
Date: 1775
"On this deceptive mirror FANCY gaz'd; / For in its field she saw whate'er she pleas'd: / Whate'er in thought her fertile brain design'd, / (The varying labours of her changeful mind,) / Whate'er she wills, within its orb she spies, / True to her wish the airy visions rise."
preview | full record— Rack, Edmund (1735-1787)
Date: 1781
Fancy may never "view a shape of lovelier kind / In the bright mirror of her Shakespeare's mind."
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1785
"The shifts and turns, / The expedients and inventions multiform / To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms / Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win,-- / To arrest the fleeting images that fill / The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, / And force them sit, till he has pencil'd off / ...
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1785
The mind may be "enlighten'd from above"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1785
"In thy mild rhetoric dwells a social love / Beyond my wild conceptions, optics false!/ Thro' which I falsely judg'd of polish'd life"
preview | full record— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)
Date: 1786
"Young Fancy, oft in rainbow vest array'd, / Points to new scenes that in succession pass / Across the wond'rous mirror that she bears, / And bids thy unsated soul and wandering eye / A wider range o'er all her prospects take."
preview | full record— Headley, Henry (1765-1788)