Date: 1762
"An idle mind, like fallow ground, is the soil for every weed to grow in; in it vice strengthens, the seed of every vanity flourishes unmolested and luxuriant; discontent, malignity, ill humour, spread far and wide, and the mind becomes a chaos, which it is beyond human power to call into order a...
preview | full record— Scott [née Robinson], Sarah (1720-1795)
Date: 1765
"Reason in the bosom pours, / Its growth improves, its fruit matures, / Each counsel of the human brain / Weighs in his scale, and stamps it vain?"
preview | full record— Merrick, James (1720-1769)
Date: 1777
"Almost all the other passions may be made to take an amiable hue; but these two must either be totally extirpated, or be always contented to preserve their original deformity, and to wear their native black."
preview | full record— More, Hannah (1745-1833)
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 ...
preview | full record— Hayley, William (1745-1820)
Date: 1785
"Such rapture filled Lactilla's vacant soul, / When the bright Moralist, in softness dressed, / Opes all the glories of the mental world, / Deigns to direct the infant thought, to prune / The budding sentiment, uprear the stalk / Of feeble fancy, bid idea live, / Woo the abstracted spirit form i...
preview | full record— Yearsley, Ann (bap. 1753, d. 1806)
Date: 1789
"Ah! hide for ever from my sight / The faithless flatterer Hope--whose pencil, gay, / Portrays some vision of delight, / Then bids the fairy tablet fade away; / While in dire contrast, to mine eyes / Thy phantoms, yet more hideous, rise, / And Memory draws, from Pleasure's wither'd flower, / Corr...
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)
Date: 1792
"The business of education in this case, is only to conduct the shooting tendrils to a proper pole; yet after laying precept upon precept, without allowing a child to acquire judgement itself, parents expect them to act in the same manner by this borrowed fallacious light, as if they had illumina...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1796
"Gaiety was so truly the native growth of the mind of Camilla, that neither care nor affliction could chace it long from its home."
preview | full record— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)
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?"
preview | full record— Keats, John (1795-1821)