Date: 1741

"I [the mind] did but step out, on some weighty affairs, / To visit last night, my good friends in the stars, / When, before I was got half as high as the moon, / You despatched Pain and Languor to hurry me down; / Vi & Armis they seized me, in midst of my flight, / And shut me in caverns ...

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"By these mysterious ties the busy power / Of memory her ideal train preserves / Intire; or when they would elude her watch, / Reclaims their fleeting footsteps from the waste / Of dark oblivion."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Then the inexpressive strain / Diffuses its inchantment: fancy dreams / Of sacred fountains and Elysian groves, / And vales of bliss: the intellectual power / Bends from his awful throne a wondering ear, / And smiles: the passions, gently sooth'd away, / Sink to divine repose, and love and joy /...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Where virtue, rising from the awful depth / Of truth's mysterious bosom, doth forsake / The unadorn'd condition of her birth; / And dress'd by fancy in ten thousand hues, / Assumes a various feature, to attract, / With charms responsive to each gazer's eye, / The hearts of men."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1746

"The SOUL, inhabiting the Brain, or acting, where it doubtless does, immediately behind the Optic Nerves, stamps, instantaneously upon the Eye, and Eyebrow, a struck Image of conceiv'd Idea: And that in Fact it does This, and that it does it, in the very Instant of Conception, every Man must ever...

— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)

Date: December 17, 1747

"The Passions ceas’d their loud alarms, / And Virtue’s soft persuasive charms / O’er all their senses stole."

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1748

"Chaced from the open country, these robbers [i.e., superstitions] fly into the forest, and lie in wait to break in upon every unguarded avenue of the mind, and overwhelm it with religious fears and prejudices."

— Hume, David (1711-1776)

Date: 1747-8

"Yet her charming body is not equally organized. The unequal partners pull two ways; and the divinity within her tears her silken frame."

— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)

Date: 1751

"This Speech, I own, gave me the first Reflection I ever had in my Life, and lock'd up all my Faculties for a long Time; nor was I able, for the Variety of Ideas that crowded my Brain, to make a Word of Answer, but stood like an Image of Stone"

— Paltock, Robert (1697-1767)

Date: 1753

The heart may a "stranger to those young desires which haunt the fancy and warm breast of youth"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)