Date: 1817

"When some bright thought has darted through my brain: / Through all that day I've felt a greater pleasure / Than if I'd brought to light a hidden treasure."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: 1818

"I knew, I knew / There was a place untenanted in it: / In that same void white Chastity shall sit, / And monitor me nightly to lone slumber"

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: December 27, 1823

"Now in filling my mind with them [ideas and facts], and in warming and animating me, you would, I doubt not, do me great good. And I am one of those substances, like sealing wax and other electric bodies, which require to be warmed in order to possess the faculty of attracting objects, of coveri...

— Wilberforce, William (1759-1833)

Date: 1831

Anaxarchus when "ordered by Nicocreon, tyrant of Salamis, to be pounded in a mortar [...] in contempt of his mortal sufferings, exclaimed, 'Beat on, tyrant! thou dost but strike upon the case of Anaxarchus; thou canst not touch the man himself'"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"The mind is so infinitely superior in character to this case of flesh that incloses it, that he cannot persuade himself that it and the body perish together"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1831

"They skim away from one flower in the parterre of literature to another, like the bee, without, like the bee, gathering sweetness from each, to increase the public stock, and enrich the magazine of thought."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1838

"Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards, / And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader's mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the un...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1841

"As certain liquors, confined in casks too cramped in their dimensions, will ferment, and fret, and chafe in their imprisonment, so the spiritual essence or soul of Mr. Tappertit would sometimes fume within that precious cask, his body, until, with great foam and froth and splutter, it would forc...

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)