Date: w. 1789, 1804
"While Vanity unveils her whiffling flags, / Her glittering trinkets, and her tawdry rags-- / Spreads spangled nets, and fills her philter'd bowl, / To fix each Sense, and fascinate the Soul-- / Her birdlime twigs contrived with such sly Art, / That while they tangle thoughts, they trap the heart...
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)
Date: 1790, 1794
"You, my dear friend, who have felt the tender attachments of love and friendship, and the painful anxieties which absence occasions, even amidst scenes of variety and pleasure; who understand the value at which tidings from those we love is computed in the arithmetic of the heart."
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: December 1790
"From the many just sentiments interspersed through the letter before me, and from the whole tendency of it, I should believe you to be a good, though a vain man, if some circumstances in your conduct did not render the inflexibility of your integrity doubtful; and for this vanity a knowledge of ...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"The passions are necessary auxiliaries of reason: a present impulse pushes us forward, and when we discover that the game did not deserve the chace, we find that we have gone over much ground, and not only gained many new ideas, but a habit of thinking."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"A few fundamental truths meet the first enquiry of reason, and appear as clear to an unwarped mind, as that air and bread are necessary to enable the body to fulfil its vital functions; but the opinions which men discuss with so much heat must be simplified and brought back to first principles; ...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 1790
"Man has been termed, with strict propriety, a microcosm, a little world in himself."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"But it is then, and basking in the sunshine of unmerited fortune, that low, sordid, ungenerous, and reptile souls swell with their hoarded poisons; it is then that they display their odious splendour, and shine out in full lustre of their native villainy and baseness."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: January 19, 1791
"His blood they transfuse into their minds and into their manners."
preview | full record— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)
Date: September 10, 1802
"A Poet's Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature -- & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similies."
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1810
"'All this experience tells the Soul, and yet / 'These moral men their pence and farthings set / 'Against the terrors of the countless Debt"
preview | full record— Crabbe, George (1754-1832)