Date: 1765
"The best Way to prove the Clearness of our Mind is by shewing its Faults; as when a Stream discovers the Dirt at the Bottom, it convinces us of the Transparency and Purity of the Water."
preview | full record— Anonymous
Date: 1769
"The first reverend sage who delivered himself on this mysterious subject, having stroked his grey beard, and hemmed thrice with great solemnity, declared that the soul was an animal; a second pronounced it to be the number three, or proportion; a third contended for the number seven, or harmony;...
preview | full record— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)
Date: 1788
There are those "whom the traffic of their race / Has robb'd of every human grace; / Whose harden'd souls no more retain / Impressions Nature stamp'd in vain; / All that distinguishes their kind, / For ever blotted from their mind; / As streams, that once the landscape gave / Reflected o...
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: 1792
"As when in ocean sinks the orb of day, / Long on the wave reflected lustres play; / Thy tempered gleams of happiness resigned / Glance on the darkened mirror of the mind."
preview | full record— Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855)
Date: 1799
"And, in the waveless mirror of his mind, / Views the fleet years of pleasure left behind, / Since Anna's empire o'er his heart began!"
preview | full record— Campbell, Thomas (1777-1844)
Date: 1815
The wavering motions of the mind are like "quivering light" reflected off a confined "crystal flood" in a brass cistern
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1818
"The lake unruffled [i.e., the mind], will reflect / A picture fair of earth and skies; / But how distorted its effect, / When ripples o'er the surface rise."
preview | full record— Park, Thomas (1759-1834)
Date: 1822
"Thrice has a gloomy vision hunted me / As thus from sleep into the troubled day; / It shakes me as the tempest shakes the sea, / Leaving no figure upon memory's glass"
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1824
"What do I say--a mirror of my heart? / Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong? / Such as my feelings were and are, thou art; / And such as thou art were my passions long."
preview | full record— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)