Date: 1788

"Who for such perishable gaudes would put / A yoke upon his free unbroken spirit, / And gall himself with trammels and the rubs / Of this world's business; so he might stand clear / Of judgment and the tax of idleness / In that dread audit, when his mortal hours / (Which now with soft and silent ...

— Crowe, William (1745-1829)

Date: 1789, 1800

"On his one ruling passion Sir Pope hugely labors, / That, like th'old Hebrew walking-switch, eats up its neighbours."

— Burns, Robert (1759-1796)

Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827

"The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1791

"In his soul was the serpent coil'd round in his heart, hid from the light, as in a cleft rock"

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: October 4, 1802

"Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, / Reality's dark dream! / I turn from you, and listen to the wind, / Which long has raved unnoticed."

— Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)

Date: 1820

"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

"Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung, / From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendour sprung."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

"And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, / Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey"

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

One may have "A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1821

"Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief / Convulse us and consume us day by day, / And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)