Date: 1766

"Mute is each Syren Passion's faithless song / Check'd and suspended by the solemn scene: / Mute the wild clamours of the giddy throng, / And only heard the "still small voice" within."

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1773

"Smooth like her verse her passions learned to move, / And her whole soul was harmony and love."

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1780

"If my eventful tale / Hath touch'd the chords of pity in your heart, / And swell'd the sympathetic tear--soft tribute! / By gentle minds, to sorrow ever paid, / --Know, 'tis no stranger's woes I have related; / I am the object of my own sad story."

— Cowley [née Parkhouse], Hannah (1743-1809)

Date: 1892

"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all, // And sweetest in the gale is heard."

— Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Date: 2010

"A thought to mind, so to the string / plucked, or touched, or bowed, the music is, / a wrinkling of the air as immaterial / and brief as sunlight glancing on a wave."

— Le Guin, Ursula (b. 1929)