Date: 1772-1781

What availed the songs of a "mighty mind, / With inward light irradiate, mirror-like / Receiv'd, and to mankind with ray reflex / The sov'reign Planter's primal work display'd?"

— Mason, William (1725-1797)

Date: 1772, 1810

"He spoke: a sudden cloud his senses stole, / And thickening darkness swam o'er all his soul"

— Jones, Sir William (1746-1794)

Date: 1773

"What tho' no Objects strike upon the Sight,-- / Thy Sacred Presence is an inward Light."

— Byrom, John (1692-1763)

Date: 1773, 1806

"Truth's unclouded ray" may strike the soul and melt Suspicion away

— Jerningham, Edward (1727-1812)

Date: 1773, 1894-1895

"The human Spirit, when it burns and shines, / 'Lamp of Jehovah" Solomon defines. / Now, as a Vessel, to contain the Whole, / This 'Lamp' denotes the Body, Oil the Soul"

— Byrom, John (1692-1763)

Date: 1773

One's judgment may appear to be "sometimes almost eclipsed by the brilliancy of her imagination"

— Graves, Richard (1715-1804)

Date: 1774

"A learned parson, rusting in his cell, at Oxford or Cambridge, will reason admirably well upon the nature of man; will profoundly analyze the head, the heart, the reason, the will, the passions, the senses, the sentiments, and all those subdivisions of we know not what; and yet, unfortunately, h...

— Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773)

Date: 1775

"What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, / Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, / By Reason's light on Resolution's wings, / Spite of her frail / companion, dauntless goes / O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? "

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1779, 1781

"The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason, without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1781

"Her teeming Thoughts with bright Conceptions glow, / Ideas crowd, and Lines spontaneous flow."

— Keate, George (1729-1797)