Date: 1765

"Reason in the bosom pours, / Its growth improves, its fruit matures, / Each counsel of the human brain / Weighs in his scale, and stamps it vain?"

— Merrick, James (1720-1769)

Date: w. 1821, 1840

"It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand which paves it."

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)