Date: w. c. 1793? [in MS]

"Deceit to secresy confind / Lawful cautious & refind / To every thing but interest blind / And forges fetters for the mind."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1793

"Exulting Reason from her bondage springs, / Claims Heav'n's wide range, and spreads her eagle wings; / While Superstition, lodg'd with bats and owls, / With Horror, and the hopeless maniac, howls."

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1794

"In every voice: in every ban, / The mind-forg'd manacles I hear."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1794

"Forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity! / In chains of the mind locked up, / Like fetters of ice shrinking together."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1794

"How thoughts to thoughts are link'd with viewless chains, / Tribes leading tribes, and trains pursuing trains."

— Bilsborrow, Dewhurst (fl. 1794)

Date: 1800

"Yet e'en o'er thee, in thy despotic hours, / When thou hast chain'd the mind's excursive powers, / Though to thy gloomy keep by pain betray'd, / That mind can triumph by celestial aid."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1800

"Thy taste ador'd, with Virtue's temperate flame, / Truth, as the fountain both of art and fame; / Yet no ill-founded rule, no servile fear, / Chain'd thy free mind in Fancy's fav'rite sphere."

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1801

"My soul her bondage ill endures; / I pant for liberty like yours."

— Cowper, William (1731-1800)

Date: 1802

"Paint courts, whose sorceries, too seducing bind, / In chains, in shameful slavish chains, the mind; / Courts, where unblushing Flatt'ry finds the way, / And casts a cloud o'er Truth's eternal ray."

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1803

"The polish'd links that form the social chain, / For ages still to ages may remain / Nor snapt by rage, nor undermin'd by art, / If well the rivets join in every part; / But if those links that would the peasant bind, / Gall his chaf'd body, and corrode his mind, / The poor man's iron, and the r...

— Pratt, Samuel Jackson [pseud. Courtney Melmoth] (1749-1814)