Date: 1817
"But he, the bard of every age and clime, / Of genius fruitful, ardent and sublime, / Who, from the glowing mint of fancy, pours / No spurious metal, fused from common ores, / But gold, to matchless purity refined, / And stamp'd with all the godhead in his mind."
preview | full record— Gifford, William (1756-1826)
Date: 1823
The "venom'd shafts" of Cupid "empoison mortal joy," "Drawing from heav'n the soul of man to earth, / With foul alloy debasing purest treasure."
preview | full record— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)
Date: w. 1821, 1840
"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
Date: 1911
"I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good...
preview | full record— Hulme, T. E. (1883-1917)
Date: 1992
"Only behind a waterfall of brutal and pleasurable sensations, thought Patrick, accepting the leather-clad menu without bothering to glance up, could he hide from the bloodhounds of his conscience. . There, in the cool recess of the rock, behind that heavy white veil, he would hear them yelping a...
preview | full record— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)
Date: 1992
"Or--he must stop thinking about it--or [his consciousness seemed] like a solution of saturated copper sulphate under the microscope, when it suddenly transforms and crystals break out everywhere on its surface."
preview | full record— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)
Date: 2000
"I glimpsed a molten core to consciousness, a protean heat where everything could be reshaped. Yes, a molten core, like the core of the earth, deeper than the deposits of civilisation, beyond the complacencies of archaeology."
preview | full record— Edward St. Aubyn (b. 1960)