Date: 1703
"I found the Fond, Believing, Love-sick Maid, / Loose, unattir'd, warm, tender, full of Wishes; / Fierceness and Pride, the Guardians of her Honour, / Were charm'd to Rest, and Love alone was waking. / Within her rising Bosom all was calm, / As peaceful Seas that know no Storms, and only / Are ge...
preview | full record— Rowe, Nicholas (1674-1718)
Date: 1722
"[O]r that hence, as swiftly those imperceptible Messengers called animal Spirits, should, at the Nutus Animae, rush through their Meandrous Paths like Lightning, and having dispatched the Mandates of the Will, as speedily bring back their Errand to the common Sensory."
preview | full record— Turner, Daniel (1667-1741)
Date: 1742
"While o'er my limbs Sleep's soft dominion spread, / What though my soul fantastic measures trod / O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom / Of pathless woods; or, down the craggy steep / Hurl'd headlong, swam with pain the mantled pool; / Or scaled the cliff; or danced on hollow winds, / W...
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"The world excluded, every passion hush'd, / And open'd a calm intercourse with Heaven, / Here the soul sits in council; ponders past, / Predestines future action; sees, not feels, / Tumultuous life, and reasons with the storm; / All her lies answers, and thinks down her charms."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"See, from her tomb, as from an humble shrine, / Truth, radiant goddess, sallies on my soul, / And puts Delusion's dusky train to flight; / Dispels the mists our sultry passions raise, / From objects low, terrestrial, and obscene."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1746, 1753
Love "'Tis like soft air, through which admitted light / Peoples pleas'd fancy, and lends shape to sight: / Yet, like that air, disturb'd, man's quiet breaks, / Tempests his reason, and his triumph shakes."
preview | full record— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)
Date: 1747-8
"Reflect upon this; and then wilt thou be able to account for, if not to excuse, a projected crime, which has habit to plead for it, in a breast as stormy, as uncontroulable!"
preview | full record— Richardson, Samuel (bap. 1689, d. 1761)
Date: 1751, 1791
"The passions are a num'rous crowd, / Imperious, positive, and loud: / Curb these licentious sons of strife; / Hence chiefly rise the storms of life: / If they grow mutinous, and rave, / They are thy masters, thou their slave."
preview | full record— Cotton, Nathaniel, the elder (1705-1788)
Date: 1752
"Whereas in the Bosom of Mrs. Ellison all was Storm and Tempest; Anger, Revenge, Fear, and Pride, like so many raging Furies, possessed her Mind, and tortured her with Disappointment and Shame."
preview | full record— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)
Date: 1785
"From shadows thinner than the fleeting night / That floats along the vale, or haply seems / To wrap the mountain in its hazy vest, / (Which the first sun-beam dissipates in air.) / How dost thou conjure monsters which ne'er mov'd / But in the chaos of thy frenzied brain!"
preview | full record— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)