Date: 1785
"I was surpriz'd, taken unawares, passion ran away with me like an unbroke horse: but I have got him under now; I can govern him with a twine of thread."
preview | full record— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)
Date: 1785
"Threads of politic and shrewd design" that charge the mind with meanings may be (or not, as it were) disentangled from "the puzzled skein"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1788
"Emmeline would then have taken him; but she said no; and sitting down on the ground, held him in her lap, till Barret who had seen her from a window, came out and took him from her; to which, as to a thing usual, she consented, and then walked calmly home with Emmeline, who, extremely discompose...
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)
Date: 1790, 1794
"How many fine-spun threads of reasoning would my wandering thoughts have broken; and how difficult should I have found it to arrange arguments and inferences in the cells of my brain!"
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: December 1790
"But it was the poor man with only his native dignity who was thus oppressed – and only metaphysical sophists and cold mathematicians can discern this insubstantial form; it is a work of abstraction – and a gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or ...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: December 10, 1790; 1791
"When the Student has been habituated to this grand conception of the Art, when the relish for this stile is established, makes a part of himself, and is woven into his mind, he will, by this time, have got a power of selecting from whatever occurs in nature that is grand, and corresponds with th...
preview | full record— Reynolds, Joshua (1723-1792)
Date: 1794
"When we are suddenly awaked by any violent stimulus, the surprise totally disunites the trains of our sleeping ideas from these of our waking ones; but if we gradually awake, this does not happen; and we readily unravel the preceding trains of imagination."
preview | full record— Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802)
Date: 1797
"Thus on the golden thread that Fancy weaves / Buoyant, as Hope's illusive flattery breathes, / The young and visionary Poet leaves / Life's dull realities, while sevenfold wreaths / Of rainbow light around his head revolve."
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)