Date: 1785
"[W]hen the mind is absent, and the thoughts are wandering to something else than what is passing in the place in which we are, we are often miserable"
preview | full record— Paley, William (1743-1805)
Date: 1789, 1792
"The tops of these scarce veil'd the roots of those; / A winding court where wandering fancy walk'd / And to herself responsive Echo talk'd."
preview | full record— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)
Date: 1794
"With shadowy trident how Volition guides, / Surge after surge, his intellectual tides; / Or, Queen of Sleep, Imagination roves / With frantic Sorrows, or delirious Loves."
preview | full record— Bilsborrow, Dewhurst (fl. 1794)
Date: February, 1798
"And what (I said) tho' blasphemy's loud scream / With that sweet music of deliv'rance strove; / Tho' all the fierce and drunken passions wove / A dance more wild than ever maniac's dream; / Ye storms, that round the dawning east assembled, / The sun was rising, tho' ye hid his light!"
preview | full record— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
Date: 1800
"The pen is a pacifyer. It checks the mind's career; it circumscribes her wanderings."
preview | full record— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)
Date: 1803
"Ah, how the human mind wearies herself / With her own wanderings, and, involved in gloom / Impenetrable, speculates amiss!"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1814, 1816, 1896
"Solicit Fancy from celestial flights, / To wander o'er the World for frail delights / And crowd Imagination's rooms, immense, / With what relates alone to Time and Sense!"
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)
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...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)