Date: 1760-1761, 1762

"Reason cannot resolve. It lends a ray to shew the horrors of my prison, but not a light to guide me to escape them."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1766

"We talked of the pleasures of temperance, and of the sun-shine in the mind unpolluted with guilt."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1763, 1767

"The guardian genius of his dawning thought, / Who wide disclos'd to wisdom's sacred ray / The eager inlets of his ample mind, / And pour'd upon each opening mental cell, / The virtue-forming scientific beam / With letter'd and religious radiance fill'd, / The fair expanses of his princely soul, ...

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1768

"And is all this to be lighted up in the heart for a beggarly account of three or four louisd'ors, which is the most I can be overreach'd in?"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1768

"I got my dinner; and after I had enlightened my mind with a bottle of Burgundy, I at it again--and after two or three hours pouring upon it, with almost as deep attention as ever Gruter or Jacob Spon did upon a nonsensical inscription, I thought I made sense of it."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1770

"But all his serious thoughts had rest in Heaven. / As some tall cliff, that lifts its awful form, / Swells from the vale and midway leaves the storm, / Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, / Eternal sunshine settles on its head."

— Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?-1774)

Date: 1772

"In Reason's Judgement, all would faintly shine, / If not the Lustre of the Soul were thine"

— Whyte, Samuel (1733-1811)

Date: 1772

"'There oft, with fond, maternal Love, / 'She visits whom the Nine approve; / 'Beam'd from the Mind's interior Powers"

— Whyte, Samuel (1733-1811)

Date: 1776

"Nothing is so swift as thought; a ray of recollection beamed upon my mind, and brought back to my remembrance the once smiling countenance of Nancy Weston, whose father had been one of the under masters at Winchester, at whose house I boarded, when I was placed at college there."

— Griffith, Elizabeth (1720-1793)

Date: 1767, 1778

"The dawning mind would drink each classic ray, / And pants impatient for a brighter day"

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)