Date: 1742

"On minds of dove-like innocence possess'd, / On lighten'd minds, that bask in Virtue's beams, / Nothing hangs tedious; nothing old revolves / In that for which they long, for which they live."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1744

"Yet still, through their disgrace [the passions'], no feeble ray / Of greatness shines, and tells us whence they fell: / But these (like that fallen monarch [Adam] when reclaim'd) / When Reason moderates the rein aright, / Shall re-ascend, remount their former sphere, / Where once they soar'd il...

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"His mighty mind travelled round the intellectual world; and, with a more than eagle's eye, saw, and has pointed out blank spaces, or dark spots in it, on which the human mind never shone."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1760, 1776

"Fond he surveys thy mild maternal face, / His bashful eye still kindling as he views, / And, while thy lenient arm supports his pace, / With beating heart the upland path pursues: / The path that leads, where, hung sublime, / And seen afar, youth's gallant trophies, bright / In Fancy's rainbow r...

— Beattie, James (1735-1803)

Date: 1761, 1790

"Ev'n from this dark confinement with delight / She [the mind] looks abroad, and prunes herself for flight; / Like an unwilling inmate longs to roam / From this dull earth, and seek her native home."

— Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787); Browne, Isaac Hawkins (1706-1760)

Date: 1767

"Ordinary minds seldom rise above the dull uniform tenor of common sentiments, like those animals that are condemned to creep on the ground all the days of their life; but the most lawless excursions of an original Genius, like the flight of an eagle, are towering, though devious; its path, as th...

— Duff, William (1732-1815)

Date: 1769

"Pox on their philosophy! Instead of demonstrating the immortality of the soul, they have plainly proved the soul is a chimæra, a will o' the wisp, a bubble, a term, a word, a nothing!"

— Smollett, Tobias (1721-1777)

Date: September, 1770

"This double feeling is of various kinds and various degrees; some minds receiving a colour from the objects around them, like the effects of the sun beams playing thro' a prism; and others, like the cameleon, having no colours of their own, take just the colours of what chances to be nearest them."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1775

"What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, / Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, / By Reason's light on Resolution's wings, / Spite of her frail / companion, dauntless goes / O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? "

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1767, 1778

"Here science, like the sun, see radiant rise, / With intellectual beam, through mental skies, / To gild, to gladden all th' improving space, / With taste, with candor, learning, sense, and grace; / To light up all the mind's remotest cells, / Where fancy fledges, and where genius dwells."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)