Date: 1730

"Close crowds the shining atmosphere; and binds / Our strengthen'd bodies in its cold embrace, / Constringent; feeds, and animates our blood; / Refines our spirits, through the new-strung nerves, / In swifter sallies darting to the brain; / Where sits the soul, intense, collected, cool, / Bright ...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1745

"But This, my Friend, these stormy Gusts of Pride / Are foreign to my Love--Till Sigismunda / Be disabus'd, my Breast is Tumult all, / And can obey no settled Course of Reason. / I see Her still, I feel her powerful Image!"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1774

"This activity of imagination, by which it darts with the quickness of lightning, through all possible views of the ideas which are presented, arises from the same perfection of the associating principles, which produces the other qualities of genius."

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)