Date: 1782

"Pleasure, the rambling Bird! the painted Jay! / May snatch the richest seeds of Verse away; / Or Indolence, the worm that winds with art / Thro' the close texture of the cleanest heart, / May, if they haply have begun to shoot, / With partial mischief wound the sick'ning root; / Or Avarice, the ...

— Hayley, William (1745-1820)

Date: 1782

"Vanity is a shoot from self-love--and self-love, Pope declares to be the spring of motion in the human breast."

— Sancho, Charles Ignatius (1729-1780)

Date: 1784

"In general the faculties of the mind must be expanded to a certain degree, before religion will take root, or flourish among a people; and a certain proportion of civil liberty is necessary, on which to found that expansion of the mind, which moral or religious liberty requires."

— Ramsay, James (1733-1789)

Date: 1798 [1797?]

"Too much abounds, in this romantic age, / The horrid tale, and fear-inspiring page; / The noxious draughts from terror's poison'd bowl, / Shake the firm nerve, emasculate the soul, / The deadly bloit of prejudice impart, / And nip the fairest blossoms of the heart."

— Jones, Jenkin [Captain] (fl. 1798)

Date: 1798 [1797?]

"Too much abounds, in this romantic age, / The horrid tale, and fear-inspiring page; / The noxious draughts from terror's poison'd bowl, / Shake the firm nerve, emasculate the soul, / The deadly bloit of prejudice impart, / And nip the fairest blossoms of the heart."

— Jones, Jenkin [Captain] (fl. 1798)

Date: 1820

"How to entangle, trammel up and snare / Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there / Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?"

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: August 31, 1837

"A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

Date: 1965

"The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut / Hatching / Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot."

— Walcott, Derek (b. 1930)

Date: 1990

"I did not know the soul / is cleaved so that the soul might be restored. / Live wood hewn, / its sap springs from a sticky wound."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 2010

"Yet somehow, while he'd slept, the name had taken up residence in his head, as if he'd gone to sleep listening to a song played over and over, the lyrics digging a rut into his brain like a plow, and now part of his mind was still in that rut and couldn't get out."

— Cronin, Justin