Date: December 1790
"Perhaps the most improving exercise of the mind, confining the argument to the enlargement of the understanding, is the restless enquiries that hover on the boundary, or stretch over the dark abyss of uncertainty."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1791
"Each vice, to minds depraved by bondage known, / With sure contagion fastens on his own."
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: 1791
Corruption may sicken the heart
preview | full record— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)
Date: 1791, 1806
"Oh! horrid Night! / Thou prying Monitor confest! / Whose key unlocks the human breast, / And bares each avenue to mental sight!"
preview | full record— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)
Date: 1791
"Lady Castlenorth was laying up a little magazine of literature, which she intended to open on Willoughby the next day; and her daughter was contemplating in her mind's eye, the handsome person of Willoughby, the figure they should make at Court, and the triumph there would be, when without degra...
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)
Date: 1792
"Yet disappointed as we are, in our researches, the mind gains strength by the exercise, sufficient, perhaps, to comprehend the answers which, in another step of existence, it may receive to the anxious questions it asked, when the understanding with feeble wing was fluttering round the visible e...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1792
"Yet, when I exclaim against novels, I mean when contrasted with those works which exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1793, 1806
The "eye of Reason" may "cloudless shine"
preview | full record— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)
Date: 1794
"But the latter was too deeply wounded, through the medium of her mind, to be quickly revived."
preview | full record— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)
Date: 1794
"In the eye of fancy, she perceived the gleam of arms through the duskiness of night, the glitter of spears and helmets, and the banners floating dimly on the twilight; while now and then the blast of a distant trumpet echoed along the defile, and the signal was answered by a momentary clash of a...
preview | full record— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)