Date: 1742
"Is not the mighty mind, that son of heaven, / By tyrant Life dethroned, imprison'd, pain'd? / By Death enlarged, ennobled, deified? / Death but entombs the body; Life, the soul."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1743
"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."
preview | full record— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)
Date: 1746
Imagination may "Bring what ideas she can find / To the great storehouse of the Mind, / Where Judgement ever sits serene, / To rule the vague and sportive queen"
preview | full record— Cooke, Thomas (1703-1756)
Date: Saturday, November 3, 1750
"When we have heated our zeal in a cause, and elated our confidence with success, we are naturally inclined to persue the same train of reasoning, to establish some collateral truth, to remove some adjacent difficulty, and to take in the whole comprehension of our system. As a prince in the ardou...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1754
"O, come; indignant, drive out, far beyond/ The utmost Precincts of the human Breast, / Beyond the Springs of Hope, the Cells of Joy, / And ev'ry Mansion where a Virtue lives; / O drive far off, for ever drive that Bane, / That hideous Pest, engender'd deep in Hell, / Where Stygian Glooms condens...
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: 1759
"He shewed, with great strength of sentiment, and variety of illustration, that human nature is degraded and debased, when the lower faculties predominate over the higher; that when fancy, the parent of passion, usurps the dominion of the mind, nothing ensues but the natural effect of unlawful go...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: January 1, 1760 - January 1, 1762; 1762
A sacred idea may be throned within the heart and "cherished with such fervency of regard, with such reverence of affection, as the devout anchorite more unreasonably pays to those sainted reliques that constitute the object of his adoration"
preview | full record— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)
Date: 1762-3
"Within the brain's most secret cells / A certain Lord Chief Justice dwells, / Of sovereign power, whom, one and all, / With common voice, we Reason call."
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)
Date: 1762-3
"With these grave fops, whose system seems / To give up certainty for dreams / The eye of man is understood / As for no other purpose good / Than as a door, through which, of course, / Their passage crowding objects force; / A downright usher, to admit / New-comers to the court of Wit."
preview | full record— Churchill, Charles (1731-1764)
Date: 1764
"Each nobler aim, repressed by long control, / Now sinks at last or feebly mans the soul; / While low delights, succeeding fast behind, / In happier meanness occupy the mind: / As in those domes, where Caesars once bore sway, / Defaced by time and tottering in decay, / There in the ruin, heedless...
preview | full record— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)