page 4 of 6     per page:
sorted by:

Date: 1807-8

"[T]hrough the cells / And channels of his phrensy-stricken brain / Rage and confusion rush'd; the solemn peal / Broke on his ear like his salvation's knell, / Whilst his vext conscience struggled, but too late, / To rend th' insatiate demon from his heart"

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

preview | full record

Date: 1807-8

"So minds debas'd can torture gen'rous acts: / And thus, by terrors haunted, hunger-pinch'd, / Hag-ridden by the demon at their hearts, / Suspicious, tost from thought to thought, they watch'd / The lagging hours of night"

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

preview | full record

Date: November 10, 1813

"I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intellect. This may look like affectation, but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruptions prevents an earthquake."

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

preview | full record

Date: w. August 1814

"Fill for me a brimming bowl / *And let me in it drown my soul: */ But put therein some drug, designed */ To Banish Women from my mind."

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

preview | full record

Date: 1815

The wavering motions of the mind are like "quivering light" reflected off a confined "crystal flood" in a brass cistern

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

preview | full record

Date: 1816

"[T]ort'ring pangs" and inexplicable woe may "like a torrent" overwhelm the soul

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

preview | full record

Date: 1816

"Yet must I think less wildly:--I have thought / Too long and darkly, till my brain became, / In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought, / A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame."

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

preview | full record

Date: 1816

"Nor is it discontent to keep the mind / Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil / In the hot throng, where we become the spoil / Of our infection"

— Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron (1788-1824)

preview | full record

Date: 1817

"The wise Stagyrite speaks of no successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls (as Hobbs;) nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch eng...

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

preview | full record

Date: 1817, 1818

There is "One mind, the type of all, the moveless wave / Whose calm reflects all moving things that are"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

preview | full record

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.