Date: 1732

"Malice, and Lust, voracious Birds of Prey, / That out-soar Reason, and our Wishes sway; / Desires' wild Seas, on which the wise are tost, / By Pilot Indolence, are safely crost."

— Mitchell, Joseph (c. 1684-1738)

Date: 1735

"God gave us Reason ... A faithful guide to comfort and to save, / Till the mind floats, like Peter on the wave."

— Harte, Walter (1708/9-1774)

Date: 1753

Locke's "guiding Hand th'ideal Blank explores, / And opens wide the Senses' various Doors, / Thro' which the thronging Thoughts their Passage find, / In social Tribes, and stock the peopled Mind."

— Jones, Henry (1721-1770)

Date: 1794

"With shadowy trident how Volition guides, / Surge after surge, his intellectual tides; / Or, Queen of Sleep, Imagination roves / With frantic Sorrows, or delirious Loves."

— Bilsborrow, Dewhurst (fl. 1794)

Date: 1807-8

"So minds debas'd can torture gen'rous acts: / And thus, by terrors haunted, hunger-pinch'd, / Hag-ridden by the demon at their hearts, / Suspicious, tost from thought to thought, they watch'd / The lagging hours of night"

— Burges, Sir James Bland (1752-1824)

Date: 1820

"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)