Date: 1741

"'I've a friend,' answers Mind, 'who, though slow, is yet sure, / And will rid me at last of your insolent power: / Will knock down your walls, the whole fabric demolish, / And at once your strong holds and my slavery abolish: / And while in your dust your dull ruins decay, / I'll snap off my cha...

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1742

"Thoughts disentangle, passing o'er the lip; / Clean runs the thread; if not, 'tis thrown away / Or kept to tie up nonsense for a song; / Song, fashionably fruitless; such as stains / The fancy, and unhallow'd passion fires; / Chiming her saints to Cytherea's fane."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Passion's fierce illapse / Rouzes the mind's whole fabric; with supplies / Of daily impulse keeps the elastic powers / Intensely poiz'd, and polishes anew / By that collision all the fine machine: / Else rust would rise, and foulness, by degrees / Incumbering, choak at last what heaven design'd ...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"From the wise be far / Such gross unhallow'd pride; nor needs my song / Descend so low; but rather now unfold, / If human thought could reach, or words unfold, / By what mysterious fabric of the mind, / The deep-felt joys and harmony of sound / Result from airy motion; and from shape / The lovel...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1805

"Your Worth and Talents will unfold, / Richer than Needlework of Gold; / The native treasures of the soul, / True--as the Needle to the Pole."

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)

Date: 1968

"my mind a shuttle among / set strings of the music / lets a weft of dream grow in the day time, / an increment of associations, / luminous soft threads, / the thrown glamour, crossing and recrossing, / the twisted sinews underlying the work."

— Duncan, Robert (1919-1988)