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Date: 1765, 1770

"Passions, and snow balls each by motion swell, / And Kitty finds her little heart rebel; / Full of desires she sighs for this, and that, / Her heart for ev'ry man goes pit-a-pat."

— Thompson, Edward (1738-1786)

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Date: 1755, 1771

"Tasteless of all that virtue gives to please, / For thought too active, and too mad for ease, / From wish to wish in life's mad vortex toss'd, / For ever struggling, and for ever lost; / He scorns religion, though her seraphs call, / And lives in rapture, or not lives at all."

— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)

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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: 1777

"But the heart, that natural seat of evil propensities, that little troublesome empire of the passions, is led to what is right by slow motions and imperceptible degrees."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

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Date: 1785

"The shifts and turns, / The expedients and inventions multiform / To which the mind resorts, in chase of terms / Though apt, yet coy, and difficult to win,-- / To arrest the fleeting images that fill / The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast, / And force them sit, till he has pencil'd off / ...

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

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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"

— Paley, William (1743-1805)

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Date: 1786, 1787, 1788; 1789

"Like a snow-ball, the mind, fraught with peace in its prime, / Moves swiftly adown the steep shelvings of Time; / Accumulates filth from Society's sons, / And strengthens and hardens its coat as it runs; / Till habit on habit is negligent laid, / And the object appears motley, vile, and ill-made...

— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)

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Date: 1794

"Retired to her lonely cabin, her melancholy thoughts still hovered round the body of her deceased parent; and, when she sunk into a kind of slumber, the images of her waking mind still haunted her fancy."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

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Date: 1794

"The scenes of the Illiad illapsed in glowing colours to her fancy--scenes, once the haunt of heroes--now lonely, and in ruins; but which still shone, in the poet's strain, in all their youthful splendor."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

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Date: 1795

"Millions of chimeras floated on my imagination all were rejected in speedy succession ere they became old enough to take the colour of reason; yet fancy will be busy till we are no more."

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

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