Date: 1776
"By the memory, on the contrary, that great luminary of the mind, things past are exhibited in retrospect; we have no correspondent faculty to irradiate the future: and even in matters which fall not within the reach of our memory, past events are often clearly discoverable by testimony, and by e...
preview | full record— Campbell, George (1719-1796)
Date: 1767, 1778
"The dawning mind would drink each classic ray, / And pants impatient for a brighter day"
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
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."
preview | full record— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)
Date: April, 1778
"Cicero, upon whose mind the advancing rays of celestial philosophy beamed with a brightness very admirable in a Pagan period of time, before the Sun of Righteousness arose, and shone forth in full splendour upon the world, informs us, in his Tusculan Questions, of a very remarkable interview bet...
preview | full record— Boswell, James (1740-1795)
Date: 1779, 1781
"The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of incipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason, without eclipsing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to have been deterred from prosecuting his own design."
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1781
"Her teeming Thoughts with bright Conceptions glow, / Ideas crowd, and Lines spontaneous flow."
preview | full record— Keate, George (1729-1797)
Date: 1781
"He proceeded throughout his life to tread the same steps on the same circle; always applauding his past conduct, or at least forgetting it, to amuse himself with phantoms of happiness which were dancing before him, and willingly turned his eyes from the light of reason, when it would have discov...
preview | full record— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)
Date: 1782
"Let Critic Reason all her light diffuse / O'er the wide empire of this injur'd [Epic] Muse"
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1782
"Where'er that Parent of engaging thought, / Warm Sensibility, like light, has taught / The bright'ning mirror of the mind to shew / Nature's reflected forms in all their glow."
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1782
One may have a mind "Not yet so blank, or fashionably blind, / But now and then perhaps a feeble ray /Of distant wisdom shoots across his way"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)