Date: 1730

"Whether we send our Reason's piercing Rays / Beneath the Great, unbounded Deep, / Where Storms and Tempests sleep, / Whether unrein'd Imagination strays / Thro' the black, Howling Desart's pathless Ways, / The Deep and Howling Wilderness declare / The Omnipresent Godhead there."

— Woodward, George (b. 1708?)

Date: 1730

"Whether amid the Gloom we stray, / And send our Intellectual Ray / Up to the pure, cærulean Plains on high, / There all the Glories of the Sky, / As round the liquid Space / They run their bright, ætherial Race."

— Woodward, George (b. 1708?)

Date: 1730

"As thus we talk'd, / Our hearts would burn within us, would inhale / That portion of divinity, that ray / Of purest Heaven, which lights the glorious flame / Of patriots, and of heroes."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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: 1730

"Fancy, fair Mistress of the Poet's Mind, / For ever changing, yet, for ever kind; / Soft, o'er his Dreams, her formful Radiance shed, / And his rapt Soul thro' Heaven's thin Purlieus led; / Seated beside the Star-invading Dame, / Whose Steeds, Wind-footed, paw'd the lambent Flame, / High, as a W...

— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)

Date: 1730

"And thou, my youthful Muse's early friend, / In whom the human graces all unite: / Pure light of mind, and tenderness of heart; / Genius, and wisdom; the gay social sense, / By decency chastised; goodness and wit, / In seldom-meeting harmony combined; / Unblemish'd honour, and an active zeal / F...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1730

"What dreadful havoc in the human breast / The passions make, when unconfin'd, and mad, / They burst, unguided by the mental eye, / The light of reason; which in various ways / Points them to good, or turns them back from ill."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

Date: 1731

"Wherefore though all Cogitations be formally in the Soul, and not in the Body, yet these sensitive Cogitations being in the Soul no otherwise than as vitally united to the Body, they are not so properly the Cogitations of the Soul, as of the mixed, or both together, as Plotinus calls it, the Com...

— Cudworth, Ralph (1617-1688)

Date: 1731

"In the day they [Phantasms] are shut out and disappear, the Senses and Understanding working, as the lesser Fire is made to disappear by the Greater; and small Griefs and Pleasures by Great ones. But when we are at rest in our Beds, the least Phantasms make Impressions upon us."

— Cudworth, Ralph (1617-1688)

Date: 1731

"Secondly, Neither doth every Involuntary Phantasm, or such as the Soul is not Conscious to it self to have purposely excited or raised up within it self, seem to be a Sensation or Perception of a thing, as existing without us; for there may be Straggling Phantasms, which come into the Mind we kn...

— Cudworth, Ralph (1617-1688)