Date: 1747-8
"Reflect upon this; and then wilt thou be able to account for, if not to excuse, a projected crime, which has habit to plead for it, in a breast as stormy, as uncontroulable!"
preview | full record— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)
Date: 1748, 1749
"And where is the wonder that the body when in health should be subservient, for how can it resist that torrent of blood, and all those spirits which are ready to force obedience, the will having for its ministers an invisible army of fluids, always ready to receive its orders, and as quick as li...
preview | full record— Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751)
Date: 1751, 1791
"The passions are a num'rous crowd, / Imperious, positive, and loud: / Curb these licentious sons of strife; / Hence chiefly rise the storms of life: / If they grow mutinous, and rave, / They are thy masters, thou their slave."
preview | full record— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)
Date: 1752
"Whereas in the Bosom of Mrs. Ellison all was Storm and Tempest; Anger, Revenge, Fear, and Pride, like so many raging Furies, possessed her Mind, and tortured her with Disappointment and Shame."
preview | full record— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)
Date: 1753
"Though the soul, like a hermit in his cell, sits quiet in the bosom, unruffled by any tempest of its own, it suffers from the rude blasts of others faults"
preview | full record— Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?-1756)
Date: 1758
"Within MYSELF does Virtue dwell? / Is all serene and beauteous there? / What mean these chilling damps of fear? "
preview | full record— Mulso [later Chapone], Hester (1727-1801)
Date: 1767, 1778
"Here science, like the sun, see radiant rise, / With intellectual beam, through mental skies, / To gild, to gladden all th' improving space, / With taste, with candor, learning, sense, and grace; / To light up all the mind's remotest cells, / Where fancy fledges, and where genius dwells."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: 1785
"From shadows thinner than the fleeting night / That floats along the vale, or haply seems / To wrap the mountain in its hazy vest, / (Which the first sun-beam dissipates in air.) / How dost thou conjure monsters which ne'er mov'd / But in the chaos of thy frenzied brain!"
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)