Date: 1850
"No familiar shapes / Remained, no pleasant images of trees, / Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; / But huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men, moved slowly through the mind / By day, and were a trouble to my dreams."
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: 1854
"The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous activity; the voltaic-pile is not strong enough to produce crystallizations; phantasms of great ideas float through her mind, but she has not ...
preview | full record— Eliot, George (1819-1880)
Date: 1871-2, 1874
"My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes."
preview | full record— Eliot, George (1819-1880)
Date: April, 1871
"Constantly impressed ideas are brought back by the world around us, and if they are so often, get so tied to our other ideas that we can hardly wrench them away."
preview | full record— Bagehot, William (1826-1877)