Date: w. 1821, 1840

"What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship - what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave - and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where th...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)

Date: 1848

"Indeed you are too fair: / The swan, soft leaning on her fledgy breast, / When to the stream she launches, looks not back / With such a tender grace; nor are her wings / So white as your soul is, if that but be / Twin-picture to your face."

— Keats, John (1795-1821) [in collab. with Brown]

Date: 1850

The poet's mind is "best pleased / While she as duteous as the mother dove / Sits brooding, lives not always to that end, / But like the innocent bird, hath goadings on/ That drive her as in trouble through the groves."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"[H]ow eagerly / And with what flashes, as it were, the mind / Turned this way--that way! sportive and alert / And watchful, as a kitten when at play."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"The relation discovered, must be something remote from all the common tracks and sheep-walks made in the mind."

— Smith, Sydney (1771-1845)

Date: 1851

"And so it happens that the person who reads a great deal—that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

Date: 1854

"Thomas Gradgrind took no heed of these trivialities of course, but passed on as a practical man ought to pass on, either brushing the noisy insects from his thoughts, or consigning them to the House of Correction."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been--in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away--by the fervor of this reproach."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

Date: 1854

"Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one’s self."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Date: 1854

"Patriotism is a maggot in their heads."

— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)