Date: 1726

"The Year, yet pleasing, but declining fast, / Soft, o'er the secret Soul, in gentle Gales, / A Philosophic Melancholly breathes, / And bears the swelling Thought aloft to Heaven."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1726

"NOW, giddy Youth, whom headlong Passions fire, / Rouse the wild Game, and stain the guiltless Grove, / With Violence, and Death; yet call it Sport."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1726

"Whitening, the angry Billows rowl immense, / And roar their Terrors, thro' the shuddering Soul / Of feeble Man, amidst their Fury caught, / And, dash'd upon his Fate."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1726

"O! teach me what is Good! teach me thy self! / Save me from Folly, Vanity and Vice, / From every low Pursuit! and feed my Soul, / With Knowledge, conscious Peace, and Vertue pure, / Sacred, substantial, never-fading Bliss!"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1726

"Society divine! Immortal Minds! / Still visit thus my Nights, for you reserv'd, / And mount my soaring Soul to Deeds like yours."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1726

"Now, th'Eternal Scheme, / That Dark Perplexity, that Mystic Maze, / Which Sight cou'd never trace, nor Heart conceive, / To Reason's Eye, refin'd, clears up apace."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1726, 1753

"Heedless of fortune then look down on state, / Balanced within by reason's conscious weight"

— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750); Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1726, 1753

"Divinely proud of independent will, / Prince of your passions, live their sovereign still."

— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750); Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730

"Impatient flouncing through the drifted heaps, / Stung with the thoughts of home; the thoughts of home / Rush on his nerves, and call their vigour forth / In many a vain effort."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730

"Then throng the busy shapes into his mind, / Of cover'd pits, unfathomably deep, / A dire descent! beyond the power of frost, / Of faithless bogs; of precipices huge, / Smooth'd up with snow; and, what is land unknown, / What water, of the still unfrozen eye, / In the loose marsh or solitary lak...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)