work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context
3228,"",HDIS,2004-07-28 00:00:00 UTC,"To heav'n's blest regions, where perfection reigns,
And knowledge absolute her throne maintains;
There when the soul, in search of purer day,
Loos'd from mortality's impris'ning clay
Shall swifter than the forked lightning dart,
His vain attainments shall like shades depart,
And vision infinite of truths divine
That far beyond his weak conception shine,
Drown the faint glimmerings of his mental rays
In one all-pow'rful and immortal blaze.
",2010-03-23,8477,•I've included twice in Architecture: Prison and Tent of Clay,"""There [to Heaven's Regions] when the soul, in search of purer day, / Loos'd from mortality's impris'ning clay / Shall swifter than the forked lightning dart.""","",2010-03-24 02:35:00 UTC,""
5302,"",Searching in HDIS (Poetry),2005-07-18 00:00:00 UTC,"If to conceive how any thing can be
From shape extracted and locality
Is hard; what think you of the Deity;
His Being not the least relation bears,
As far as to the human mind appears,
To shape, or size, similitude, or place,
Cloath'd in no form, and bounded by no space.
Such then is God, a spirit pure refin'd
From all material dross, and such the human mind.
For in what part of essence can we see
More certain marks of immortality
Ev'n from this dark confinement with delight
She looks abroad, and prunes herself for flight;
Like an unwilling inmate longs to roam
From this dull earth, and seek her native home.",2013-06-04,14257,•I've included twice: Inmate and Bird,"""Ev'n from this dark confinement with delight / She [the mind] looks abroad, and prunes herself for flight; / Like an unwilling inmate longs to roam / From this dull earth, and seek her native home.""",Animals and Inhabitants and Rooms,2013-06-04 15:47:23 UTC,""
5757,"","Searching in ""thought"" and ""cell"" in HDIS (Poetry); found again ""fancy""",2005-08-28 00:00:00 UTC,Hence rash Belief! may thy wild thoughts again
Ne'er thro the cells of busy fancy rove!
Oblivion snatch their memory from my brain!
Nor leave a trace injurious to my love!,,15354,"","""Hence rash Belief! may thy wild thoughts again / Ne'er thro the cells of busy fancy rove!""",Rooms,2009-09-14 19:43:25 UTC,""
7407,"","Reading; found again in Marjorie Nicholson's Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1946), 149-150.",2013-06-10 19:25:02 UTC,"Let Indians, and the gay, like Indians, fond
Of feather'd fopperies, the sun adore:
Darkness has more divinity for me:
It strikes thought inward; it drives back the soul
To settle on herself, our point supreme!
There lies our theatre; there sits our judge.
Darkness the curtain drops o'er life's dull scene;
'Tis the kind hand of Providence stretch'd out
'Twixt man and vanity; 'tis Reason's reign,
And Virtue's too; these tutelary shades
Are man's asylum from the tainted throng.
Night is the good man's friend, and guardian too;
It no less rescues Virtue than inspires.
(ll. 126-138, p. 120 in CUP edition)",,20476,"","""Darkness has more divinity for me: / It strikes thought inward; it drives back the soul / To settle on herself, our point supreme! / There lies our theatre; there sits our judge.""",Court,2014-07-25 18:51:09 UTC,Night the Fourth
7669,"",LION,2013-09-04 02:16:41 UTC,"TULLIA.
Shame stopt my voice; Honour, and conscious Pride,
That scorn'd to meet on less than equal terms,
And hope of happier days: While Frugi liv'd
Thy sorrows kept possession of my heart,
And Love receded from the stronger guest;
Now his dear image rises to my view
So piteously array'd, with such a train
Of tender thoughts assails this shatter'd frame,
That Reason quits her fort, and flies before,
To the last verge of phrenzy and despair.
(p. 79)",,22688,"","""While Frugi liv'd / Thy sorrows kept possession of my heart, / And Love receded from the stronger guest; / Now his dear image rises to my view / So piteously array'd, with such a train / Of tender thoughts assails this shatter'd frame, / That Reason quits her fort, and flies before, / To the last verge of phrenzy and despair.""",Rooms,2013-09-04 02:16:41 UTC,""
7984,"",Reading,2014-07-25 18:20:09 UTC,"Whoever thinks must see that man was made
To face the storm, not languish in the shade;
Action's his sphere, and,for that sphere design'd,
Eternal pleasures open on his mind.
For this, fair hope leads on the' impassion'd soul
Through life's wild labyrinths to her distant goal;
Paints in each dream, to fan the genial flame,
The pomp of riches, and the pride of fame,
Or fondly gives reflection's cooler eye
A glance, an image, of a future sky.
Yet, though kind Heaven points out the' unerring road
That leads through nature up to bliss and God;
Spite of that God, and all his voice divine
Speaks in the heart, or teaches from the shrine,
Man, feebly vain, and impotently wise,
Disdains the manna sent him from the skies;
Tasteless of all that virtue gives to please,
For thought too active, and too mad for ease,
From wish to wish in life's mad vortex toss'd,
For ever struggling, and for ever lost;
He scorns religion, though her seraphs call,
And lives in rapture, or not lives at all.
(pp. 154-155)",,24302,"","""For this, fair hope leads on the' impassion'd soul / Through life's wild labyrinths to her distant goal; / Paints in each dream, to fan the genial flame, / The pomp of riches, and the pride of fame, / Or fondly gives reflection's cooler eye / A glance, an image, of a future sky.""","",2014-07-25 18:20:09 UTC,""
5366,"","Reading Sean Silver, The Mind is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2015), 51.",2016-07-12 19:48:43 UTC,"But from what name, what favorable sign,
What heavenly auspice, rather shall i date
My perilous excursion, than from truth,
That nearest inmate of the human soul;
Estrang'd from whom, the countenance divine
Of man disfigur'd and dishonor'd sinks
Among inferior things? For to the brutes
Perception and the transient boons of sense
Hath fate imparted: but to man alone
Of sublunary beings was it given
Each fleeting impulse on the sensual powers
At leisure to review; with equal eye
To scan the passion of the stricken nerve
Or the vague object striking: to conduct
From sense, the portal turbulent and loud,
Into the mind's wide palace one by one
The frequent, pressing, fluctuating forms,
And question and compare them. Thus he learns
Their birth and fortunes; how allied they haunt
The avenues of sense; what laws direct
Their union; and what various discords rise,
Or fix'd or casual: which when his clear thought
Retains and when his faithful words express,
That living image of the external scene,
As in a polish'd mirror held to view,
Is truth: where'er it varies from the shape
And hue of its exemplar, in that part
Dim error lurks. Moreover, from without
When oft the same society of forms
In the same order have approach'd his mind,
He deigns no more their steps with curious heed
To trace; no more their features or their garb
He now examines; but of them and their
Condition, as with some diviner's tongue,
Affirms what heaven in every distant place,
Through every future season, will decree.
This too is truth: where'er his prudent lips
Wait till experience diligent and slow
Has authoriz'd their sentence, this is truth;
A second, higher kind: the parent this
Of science; or the lofty power herself,
Science herself: on whom the wants and cares
Of social life depend; the substitute
Of God's own wisdom in this toilsome world;
The providence of man. Yet oft in vain,
To earn her aid, with fix'd and anxious eye
He looks on nature's and on fortune's course:
Too much in vain. His duller visual ray
The stillness and the persevering acts
Of nature oft elude; and fortune oft
With step fantastic from her wonted walk
Turns into mazes dim. his sight is foil'd;
And the crude sentence of his faltering tongue
Is but opinion's verdict, half believ'd
And prone to change. Here thou, who feel'st thine ear
Congenial to my lyre's profounder tone,
Pause, and be watchful. Hitherto the stores,
Which feed thy mind and exercise her powers,
Partake the relish of their native soil,
Their parent earth. But know, a nobler dower
Her sire at birth decreed her; purer gifts
From his own treasure; forms which never deign'd
In eyes or ears to dwell, within the sense
Of earthly organs; but sublime were plac'd
In his essential reason, leading there
That vast ideal host which all his works
Through endless ages never will reveal.
Thus then indow'd, the feeble creature man,
The slave of hunger and the prey of death,
Even now, even here, in earth's dim prison bound,
The language of intelligence divine
Attains; repeating oft concerning one
And many, pass'd and present, parts and whole,
Those sovran dictates which in farthest heaven,
Where no orb rowls, eternity's fix'd ear
Hears from coeval truth, when chance nor change,
Nature's loud progeny, nor nature's self
Dares intermeddle or approach her throne.
Ere long, o'er this corporeal world he learns
To extend her sway; while calling from the deep,
From earth and air, their multitudes untold
Of figures and of motions round his walk,
For each wide family some single birth
He sets in view, the impartial type of all
Its brethren; suffering it to claim, beyond
Their common heritage, no private gift,
No proper fortune. Then whate'er his eye
In this discerns, his bold unerring tongue
Pronounceth of the kindred, without bound,
Without condition. Such the rise of forms
Sequester'd far from sense and every spot
Peculiar in the realms of space or time:
Such is the throne which man for truth amid
The paths of mutability hath built
Secure, unshaken, still; and whence he views,
In matter's mouldering structures, the pure forms
Of triangle or circle, cube or cone,
Impassive all; whose attributes nor force
Nor fate can alter. There he first conceives
True being, and an intellectual world
The same this hour and ever. Thence he deems
Of his own lot; above the painted shapes
That fleeting move o'er this terrestrial scene
Looks up; beyond the adamantine gates
Of death expatiates; as his birthright claims
Inheritance in all the works of God;
Prepares for endless time his plan of life,
And counts the universe itself his home.
(Book II, ll. 42-149 [1772 text])",,24927,"","""For to the brutes / Perception and the transient boons of sense / Hath fate imparted: but to man alone / Of sublunary beings was it given / Each fleeting impulse on the sensual powers / At leisure to review; with equal eye / To scan the passion of the stricken nerve / Or the vague object striking: to conduct / From sense, the portal turbulent and loud, / Into the mind's wide palace one by one / The frequent, pressing, fluctuating forms, / And question and compare them.""","",2016-07-12 19:49:04 UTC,""
8274,"",Reading at The Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. ,2018-04-19 20:22:22 UTC,"Now commences the reign of judgment or reason; we begin to find little pleasure, but in comparing arguments, stating propositions, disentangling perplexities, clearing ambiguities, and deducing consequences. The painted vales of imagination are deserted, and our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy, and toiling with firm and cautious steps up the narrow tracks of demonstration. Whatever may lull vigilance, or mislead attention, is contemptuously rejected, and every disguise in which error may be concealed, is carefully observed, till by degrees a certain number of incontestable or unsuspected propositions are established, and at last concatenated into arguments, or compacted into systems.",,25184,"","""The painted vales of imagination are deserted, and our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy, and toiling with firm and cautious steps up the narrow tracks of demonstration.""","",2018-04-19 20:22:22 UTC,""