Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Then the inexpressive strain / Diffuses its inchantment: fancy dreams / Of sacred fountains and Elysian groves, / And vales of bliss: the intellectual power / Bends from his awful throne a wondering ear, / And smiles: the passions, gently sooth'd away, / Sink to divine repose, and love and joy /...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Where virtue, rising from the awful depth / Of truth's mysterious bosom, doth forsake / The unadorn'd condition of her birth; / And dress'd by fancy in ten thousand hues, / Assumes a various feature, to attract, / With charms responsive to each gazer's eye, / The hearts of men."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1745

"Tis the cradle of the Soul, / From Instinct sent, to rock her in disease, / Which her physician, Reason, will not cure."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1746, 1753

"The SOUL, inhabiting the Brain, or acting, where it doubtless does, immediately behind the Optic Nerves, stamps, instantaneously upon the Eye, and Eyebrow, a struck Image of conceiv'd Idea: And that in Fact it does This, and that it does it, in the very Instant of Conception, every Man must ever...

— Hill, Aaron (1685-1750)

Date: October 13, 1759

"My heart, a victim to thine eyes, / Should I at once deliver, / Say, would the angry fair one prize / The gift, who slights the giver?"

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1770

"Spontaneous joys, where nature has its play, / The soul adopts and owns their firstborn sway; / Lightly they frolic o'er the vacant mind, / Unenvied, unmolested, unconfined."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1773

"But was it made for nothing else beside / Passions to draw, and Reason to be Guide? / Was so much Art employ'd to drag and drive / Nothing within the Vehicle alive? / No seated Mind that claims the moving Pew, / Master of Passions, and of Reason too?"

— Byrom, John (1692-1763)

Date: 1785

"From shadows thinner than the fleeting night / That floats along the vale, or haply seems / To wrap the mountain in its hazy vest, / (Which the first sun-beam dissipates in air.) / How dost thou conjure monsters which ne'er mov'd / But in the chaos of thy frenzied brain!"

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

Date: 1788

"Our mind's unhelm'd, our attributes decay--"

— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)

Date: 1794

"With shadowy trident how Volition guides, / Surge after surge, his intellectual tides; / Or, Queen of Sleep, Imagination roves / With frantic Sorrows, or delirious Loves."

— Bilsborrow, Dewhurst (fl. 1794)