Date: 1787
"Fat is foul weather--dims the fancy's sight"
preview | full record— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)
Date: 1788
"Mary observed his character, and wrote down a train of reflections, which these observations led her to make; these reflections received a tinge from her mind; the present state of it, was that kind of painful quietness which arises from reason clouded by disgust; she had not yet learned to be r...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1786, 1787, 1788; 1789
"Like a snow-ball, the mind, fraught with peace in its prime, / Moves swiftly adown the steep shelvings of Time; / Accumulates filth from Society's sons, / And strengthens and hardens its coat as it runs; / Till habit on habit is negligent laid, / And the object appears motley, vile, and ill-made...
preview | full record— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)
Date: 1791
"I compared him at this time to a warm West-Indian climate, where you have a bright sun, quick vegetation, luxuriant foliage, luscious fruits; but where the same heat sometimes produces thunder, lightening, and earthquakes in a terrible degree.
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1792
"For it is the right use of reason alone which makes us independent of everything--excepting the unclouded reason--'Whose service is perfect freedom.'"
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: June, 1793
"FANCY, sportive goddess, hail! / Fleeting as the vernal gale, / Hail! thou dear illusive power / Changing with the swift-wing'd hour; / Now despairing, now reviving, / Now with tenfold vigour thriving, / Now tormenting, now delighting, / Now in midst of battle fighting."
preview | full record— Anonymous
Date: 1796
"Thus he restored his plastic mind to its usual satisfaction, and arose the next morning without a cloud upon his brow."
preview | full record— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)
Date: 1817
"The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy, / Chacing away all worldliness and folly; / Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, Or the low rumblings earth's regions under; / And sometimes like a gentle whispering / Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing / That breathes about u...
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)
Date: September 10, 1836
"And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason."
preview | full record— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)