Date: 1733, 1748
"Where thou [Memory] art not, the cheerless human mind / Is one vast void, all darksome, sad, and blind; / No trace of anything remains behind."
preview | full record— Pilkington, Laetitia (c. 1709-1750)
Date: 1767
"How transitory have been all my pleasures! the recollection of them dies on my memory, like the departing colours of the rainbow, which fades under the eye of the beholder, and leaves not a trace behind."
preview | full record— Sheridan [née Chamberlaine], Frances (1724-1766)
Date: 1773
"Soaring though air to find the bright abode, / Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God, / We on thy pinions can surpass the wind, / And leave the rolling universe behind; / From star to star the mental optics rove, / Measure the skies, and range the realms above."
preview | full record— Wheatley, Phillis (c.1753–1784)
Date: w. August 30, 1783, printed 1788
"I advised our Miss H--- to the same remedy, but have a notion her mind is haunted by one particular image; if so, nothing will cure her; for if the heart be broken 'tis broken like a looking-glass, and the smallest piece will for ever preserve and reflect the same figure till 'tis again ground d...
preview | full record— Piozzi, [née Salusbury; other married name Thrale] Hester Lynch (1741-1821)
Date: 1788
There are those "whom the traffic of their race / Has robb'd of every human grace; / Whose harden'd souls no more retain / Impressions Nature stamp'd in vain; / All that distinguishes their kind, / For ever blotted from their mind; / As streams, that once the landscape gave / Reflected o...
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: 1791, 1794
"Such were the dreadful images that haunted her distracted mind, and nature was sinking fast under the dreadful malady which medicine had no power to remove."
preview | full record— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)
Date: 1797
"Over the gloom of Schedoni, no scenery had, at any moment, power; the shape and paint of external imagery gave neither impression or colour to his fancy."
preview | full record— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)
Date: 1797
"Her heart was possessed by evil passions, and all her perceptions were distorted and discoloured by them, which, like a dark magician, had power to change the fairest scenes into those of gloom and desolation."
preview | full record— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)
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."
preview | full record— Eliot, George (1819-1880)