Date: 1746
"No more I search those magic shores, / What regions part the world of soul, / Or whence thy streams, Opinion, roll"
preview | full record— Collins, William (1721-1759)
Date: 1746
Imagination may play "Unbridled in the fields of day, / Thro endless time, and boundless space, / Continue unrestrain'd her race"
preview | full record— Cooke, Thomas (1703-1756)
Date: 1746, 1753
"Fear is elusive sorrow, shunning pain; / Active--yet, stop'd--it dims the doubtful brain; / Spirit snatch'd inward, stagnating, by dread, / Slow, thro' the limbs, crawls cold, the living lead: / Form'd to the look, that moulds th' assumer's face, / His joints catch tremblings--life's moist strin...
preview | full record— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)
Date: Tuesday, March 27, 1750
"The task of an author is, either to teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them; either to let new light in upon the mind, and open new scenes to the prospect, or to vary the dress and situation of common objects, so as to give them fresh grace and more p...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Saturday, September 15, 1750
"The first effect of this meditation is, that it furnishes a new employment for the mind, and engages the passions on remoter objects; as kings have sometimes freed themselves from a subject too haughty to be governed and too powerful to be crushed, by posting him in a distant province, till his ...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, October 2, 1750
"[T]hough I do not pretend to give laws to the legislators of mankind, or to limit the range of those powerful minds that carry light and heat through all the regions of knowledge, yet I have long thought, that the greatest part of those who lose themselves in studies by which I have not found th...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: Tuesday, January 22, 1751
"He often perceives himself transported, he knows not how, to distant tracts of thought, and returns to his first object as from a dream, without knowing when he forsook it, or how long he has been abstracted from it."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: August 27, 1751
"The painted vales of imagination are deserted, and our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy, and toiling with firm and cautious steps up the narrow tracks of demonstration."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1752
"Upon the whole, however, she past a miserable and sleepless Night, her gentle Mind torn and distracted with various and contending Passions, distressed with Doubts, and wandring in a kind of Twilight, which presented her only Objects of different Degrees of Horrour, and where black Despair close...
preview | full record— Fielding, Henry (1707-1754)
Date: 1754
"This is the great intellectual province, wherein our minds range with much freedom, and often with exorbitant licence, in the pursuit of real or imaginary science."
preview | full record— St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)