Date: 1785

"Oft as I trod my native wilds alone, / Strong gusts of thought would rise, but rise to die; / The portals of the swelling soul ne'er oped / By liberal converse, rude ideas strove / Awhile for vent, but found it not, and died."

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1785

"Thus rust the Mind's best powers."

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1785

"Yon starry orbs, / Majestic ocean, flowery vales, gay groves, / Eye-wasting lawns, and heaven-attempting hills / Which bound th' horizon, and which curb the view; / All those, with beauteous imagery, awaked / My ravished soul to ecstasy untaught, / To all the transport the rapt sense can bear; /...

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1785

"Such rapture filled Lactilla's vacant soul, / When the bright Moralist, in softness dressed, / Opes all the glories of the mental world, / Deigns to direct the infant thought, to prune / The budding sentiment, uprear the stalk / Of feeble fancy, bid idea live, / Woo the abstracted spirit form i...

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1785

One's "chill'd ideas [may] quit their frozen pole / Of blank Despair"

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1785

An infant soul must be lifted to Jehovah's throne because "[T]he ductile mind, / Pliant as wax, shall wear the mould you give"

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1785

" No glossy diction e'er can aid the thought, / First stamp'd in ignorance, with error fraught."

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1785

"In thy mild rhetoric dwells a social love / Beyond my wild conceptions, optics false!/ Thro' which I falsely judg'd of polish'd life"

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1785

"O, Montagu! forgive me, if I sing / red with the milder ray / Of soft humanity, and kindness bland: / So wide its influence, that the bright beams / Reach the low vale where mists of ignorance lodge, / Strike on the innate spark which lay immersed, / Thick-clogged, and almost quenched in total n...

— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)

Date: 1786

"So o'er my soul short rays of reason fly, / Then fade:--and leave me, to despair and die!"

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)