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Date: 1709, 1810

"Yet the silly wand'ring mind, / Loth to be too much confin'd, / Roves and takes her daily tours, / Coasting round the narrow shores, / Narrow shores of flesh and sense, / Picking shells and pebbles thence: / Or she sits at fancy's door, / Calling shapes and shadows to her, / Foreign visits still...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

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Date: 1734

"What worlds of worth lay crowded in that breast! / Too strait the mansion for th'illustrious guest."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

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Date: 1734

"If I but close my eyes, strange images / In thousand forms and thousand colours rise, / Stars, rainbows, moons, green dragons, bears and ghosts, / An endless medley rush upon the stage, / And dance and riot wild in reason's court / Above control."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

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Date: 1735

"Hope may some boundless Future Bliss embrace, / But What, or When, or How, or Where, / Are Mazes all, which Fancy runs in vain"

— Hughes, John (1678?-1720)

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Date: 1735

"Nor can the narrow Cells of human Brain / The vast immeasurable Thought contain"

— Hughes, John (1678?-1720)

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Date: 1737

"Yet when my trembling Soul's dislodg'd, wou'd be / No Room of State within the Grave for me."

— Rowe [née Singer], Elizabeth (1674-1737)

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Date: October, 1739

"Bid Fancy quit her fairy cell, / In all her colours drest / While prompt her sallies to control, / Reason, the judge, recalls the soul / To Truth's severest test."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

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Date: 1742

"No more shall trickling Sorrows roll / Thro' those dear Windows of his Soul."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

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Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Such then is the abode / Of folly in the mind; and such the shapes / In which she governs her obsequious train."

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

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Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"For to the brutes / Perception and the transient boons of sense / Hath fate imparted: but to man alone / Of sublunary beings was it given / Each fleeting impulse on the sensual powers / At leisure to review; with equal eye / To scan the passion of the stricken nerve / Or the vague object strikin...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.