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."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious p...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: December 1843-January 1844

"And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished."

— Marx, Karl (1818-1883)

Date: 1850

"Imagination--here the Power so called / Through sad incompetence of human speech, / That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss / Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, / At once, some lonely traveller"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Finally, whate'er / I saw, or heard, or felt, was but a stream / That flowed into a kindred stream; a gale, / Confederate with the current of the soul, / To speed my voyage."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"For though I was most passionately moved / And yielded to all changes of the scene / With an obsequious promptness, yet the storm / Passed not beyond the suburbs of the mind"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"But these are things / Of which I speak, only as they were storm / Or sunshine to my individual mind, / No further."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven / Was blowing on my body, felt within / A correspondent breeze, that gently moved / With quickening virtue, but is now become / A tempest, a redundant energy, / Vexing its own creation."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1851

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it...

— Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Date: 1854

"Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human happiness."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)