Date: 1782

"Say! wilt Thou listen to his weaker strains, / Who pants to range round Fancy's rich domains; / To vindicate her empire, and disown / Proud System, seated on her injur'd throne?"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"Let Critic Reason all her light diffuse / O'er the wide empire of this injur'd [Epic] Muse"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"In life's first season, when the fever's flame / Shrunk to deformity his shrivell'd frame, / And turn'd each fairer image in his brain / To blank confusion and her crazy train."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

A poet may "in robes of beauty to array, / And in bright Order's lucid blaze display, / The forms that Fancy, to thy wishes kind, / Stamps on the tablet of thy clearer mind"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"Can we then deem that in those happier lands, / Where every vital energy expands; / Where Thought, the golden harvest of the mind, / Springs into rich luxuriance, unconfin'd; / That in such soils, with mental weeds o'ergrown, / The seeds of Poesy were thinly sown?"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

The Muse, like Cato, "Well [...] supplies her want of softer art / By all the sterling treasures of the heart."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"Where'er that Parent of engaging thought, / Warm Sensibility, like light, has taught / The bright'ning mirror of the mind to shew / Nature's reflected forms in all their glow."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"How little hints awak'd the large design, / And subtle Fancy spun her variegated line?"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"Yet sober Critics, of no vulgar note, / But such as Learning's sons are proud to quote, / The progress of Homeric verse explain, / As if their souls had lodg'd in Homer's brain."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"Laughs not the spirit of poetic frame, / However slightly warm'd by Fancy's flame, / When grave Bossu by System's studied laws / The Grecian Bard's ideal picture draws"

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)