Date: 1684

"My grateful Thoughts so throng to get abroad, / They over-run each other in the crowd: / To you with hasty flight they take their way, / And hardly for the dress of words will stay."

— Oldham, John (1653-1683)

Date: 1693

"When sent from Heav'n a more than common Guest / Takes up his dwelling in a mortal Breast;"

— Hawkshaw, Benjamin (1671/2-1738)

Date: 1718

"Sham Miracles beyond what Poets feign; And legendary Fables crowd her Brain."

— Amhurst, Nicholas (1697-1742)

Date: 1756, 1793

"Domestic troubles long my mind oppress'd, / And made the muse a stranger to my breast"

— Blacklock, Thomas (1721-1791)

Date: 1767

"Man in this world, Sir, may be compared to a hackney-coach upon a stand; continually subject to be drawn by his unruly appetites, on one foolish jaunt or another; but you will say, if his appetites are horses, which as it were drag him along, reason is the coachman to rule those horses--But, Sir...

— Bickerstaff, Isaac (b. 1733, d. after 1808)

Date: 1785

Silence is the "Refuge of tender hearts must fear mixing "With the mad multitude, where passions fell, / And strangers to their bosom, enter wild, / Like Sin and Death in Paradise, to jar / On the soft music of according souls!"

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: 1792

"Two minds in one, and each a truceless guest, / Rending the sphere of our distracted breast!"

— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)

Date: 1805

"Alas! when ev'ry Muse is fled, / How wretched He who writes for bread! / Who, when the joyous years are flown, / And Reason totters on her throne, / And Fancy fails, and Nature tires, / And Fame herself no more inspires, / And ev'n the sweet return of Spring / No more can make the Poet sing, / T...

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: 1807-8

"So minds debas'd can torture gen'rous acts: / And thus, by terrors haunted, hunger-pinch'd, / Hag-ridden by the demon at their hearts, / Suspicious, tost from thought to thought, they watch'd / The lagging hours of night"

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

Date: 1815

"Fancy will sometimes take the lead / And play its part in Reason's stead."

— Combe, William (1742 -1823)