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)

Date: w. 1794, 1797

"'Tis only those of purer clay / 'From sensual dross refined, / 'In whom the passions pleas'd obey / 'The God within the mind, / 'Who share my delegated aid, / 'Through Wisdom's golden mean convey'd / 'From the first source of sov'reign good."

— Mason, William (1725-1797)

Date: 1799

In Fancy's "filial train," inspiration rides foremost and "Myriads of spruce ideas crowd the rear."

— Grainger, James (1721-1766)