Date: 1774

"From sense abstracted, some, with arduous flight, / Explore the realms of intellectual light."

— Scott, Mary [later Taylor] (1751/2-1793)

Date: 1775

"What fancied zone can circumscribe the Soul, / Who, conscious of the source from whence she springs, / By Reason's light on Resolution's wings, / Spite of her frail / companion, dauntless goes / O'er Libya's deserts and through Zembla's snows? "

— Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Date: 1777

"The philosophical doctrine of the slow recession of bodies from the sun, is a lively image of the reluctance with which we first abandon the light of virtue."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1779

"Darting like hidden sun-beams on my mind, / And make it drunk with bliss."

— Cowley [née Parkhouse], Hannah (1743-1809)

Date: October, 1784

"HUMAN thoughts are like the planetary system, where many are fixed, and many wander, and many continue for ever unintelligible; or rather like meteors, which generally lose their substance with their lustre."

— Anonymous

Date: 1793

"It is curious to observe the first dawn of genius breaking on the mind. Sometimes a man of genius, in his first effusions, is so far from revealing his future powers, that, on the contrary, no reasonable hope can be formed of his success."

— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)

Date: 1796

"He pronounced the most severe sentences upon offenders, which the moment after compassion induced him to mitigate: he undertook the most daring enterprizes, which the fear of their consequences soon obliged him to abandon: his inborn genius darted a brilliant light upon subjects the most obscure...

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)

Date: 1797

"In the eagerness of conversation, and, yielding to the satisfaction which the mind receives from exercising ideas that have long slept in dusky indolence, and to the pleasure of admitting new ones, the Abbot and a few of the brothers sat with Vivaldi to a late hour."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)