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Date: 1724

"When all at once / A thousand anxious Thoughts that slept by Day, / Swarm'd in my Brain, 'till it resembled Hell, / Hot, dark and hot: my sick Imagination, / Assisted by the Shades of Night, would give / A gloomy turn to each Idea there."

— Jeffreys, George (1678-1755)

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Date: 1736

"Dreams were the only Work of a disturb'd Fancy, and were as far from Truth, as the Glow-Worm's dim Shine from Light and Heat; the Creatures of the drowsy Brain."

— Chetwood, William Rufus (d. 1766)

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Date: 1742

"On minds of dove-like innocence possess'd, / On lighten'd minds, that bask in Virtue's beams, / Nothing hangs tedious; nothing old revolves / In that for which they long, for which they live."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1744

"Yet still, through their disgrace [the passions'], no feeble ray / Of greatness shines, and tells us whence they fell: / But these (like that fallen monarch [Adam] when reclaim'd) / When Reason moderates the rein aright, / Shall re-ascend, remount their former sphere, / Where once they soar'd il...

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1759

"His mighty mind travelled round the intellectual world; and, with a more than eagle's eye, saw, and has pointed out blank spaces, or dark spots in it, on which the human mind never shone."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1775

"What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, / Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, / By Reason's light on Resolution's wings, / Spite of her frail / companion, dauntless goes / O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? "

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

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Date: 1820

"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.