Date: w. 1677, published October, 1682

"Some Beams of Wit on other souls may fall, / Strike through and make a lucid intervall; / But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray, / His rising Fogs prevail upon the Day."

— Dryden, John (1631-1700)

Date: 1680

"Bright Reason's ray, / By damp of Wine, within this Hemisphere, / Was quench'd before: and now dim sense, to stay, / Must not expect, long after Her."

— Darby, Charles (bap. 1635, d.1709)

Date: 1682

"'Tis not a Flash of Fancy which sometimes / Dasling our Minds, sets off the slightest Rimes; / Bright as a blaze, but in a moment done; / True Wit is everlasting, like the Sun; / Which though sometimes beneath a cloud retir'd, / Breaks out again, and is by all admir'd."

— Sheffield, John, first duke of Buckingham and Normanby (1647-1721)

Date: November, 1682

"Dim, as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars / To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers, / Is reason to the soul; and as on high, / Those rolling fires discover but the sky / Not light us here; so reason's glimmering ray / Was lent not to assure our doubtful way, / But guide us upward to a better ...

— Dryden, John (1631-1700)

Date: November, 1682

"And as those nightly tapers disappear / When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere / So pale grows reason at religion's sight: / So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light."

— Dryden, John (1631-1700)

Date: November, 1682

"Then those who follow'd reason's dictates right; Liv'd up, and lifted high their natural light; / With Socrates may see their Maker's Face, / While thousand rubric-martyrs want a place."

— Dryden, John (1631-1700)

Date: 1682

"The one 'tis true is wholly void of Reason, but it is also an equivalent Darkness of Mind, that possesses the other."

— L'Estrange, Sir Roger (1616-1704)

Date: 1685

"These bugbears of the mind, this inward hell, / No rays of outward sunshine can dispel; / But nature and right reason must display / Their beams abroad, and bring the darksome soul to day."

— Dryden, John (1631-1700)

Date: 1686

"My Guts are grumbling a kind of Tune, Like the Base Pipes of an Organ: I am starv'd into a Substance so thin, that my Body is transparent; you may see my heart, and the appurtenances, hang up here in its mortal Closet, as easily as a Candle in a Lanthorn."

— D'Urfey, Thomas (1653?-1723)

Date: 1686

"I am starv'd into a Substance so thin, that my Body is transparent; you may see my heart, and the appurtenances, hang up here in its mortal Closet, as easily as a Candle in a Lanthorn."

— D'Urfey, Thomas (1653?-1723)