Date: August 27, 1751

"The painted vales of imagination are deserted, and our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy, and toiling with firm and cautious steps up the narrow tracks of demonstration."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: 1761

"While Frugi liv'd / Thy sorrows kept possession of my heart, / And Love receded from the stronger guest; / Now his dear image rises to my view / So piteously array'd, with such a train / Of tender thoughts assails this shatter'd frame, / That Reason quits her fort, and flies before, / To the las...

— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)

Date: 1761, 1790

"Ev'n from this dark confinement with delight / She [the mind] looks abroad, and prunes herself for flight; / Like an unwilling inmate longs to roam / From this dull earth, and seek her native home."

— Jenyns, Soame (1704-1787); Browne, Isaac Hawkins (1706-1760)

Date: 1755, 1771

"For this, fair hope leads on the' impassion'd soul / Through life's wild labyrinths to her distant goal; / Paints in each dream, to fan the genial flame, / The pomp of riches, and the pride of fame, / Or fondly gives reflection's cooler eye / A glance, an image, of a future sky."

— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)

Date: January 1, 1779

"There [to Heaven's Regions] when the soul, in search of purer day, / Loos'd from mortality's impris'ning clay / Shall swifter than the forked lightning dart."

— Anstey, Christopher (1724-1805)

Date: 1780

Reason's subjects work and return home with "treasures fraught" and display before their queen their "shining spoils, which are laid up in "mental stores."

— Steele, Anne (1717-1778)

Date: 1781, 1791

"Hence rash Belief! may thy wild thoughts again / Ne'er thro the cells of busy fancy rove!"

— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)

Date: 1790, 1794

"How many fine-spun threads of reasoning would my wandering thoughts have broken; and how difficult should I have found it to arrange arguments and inferences in the cells of my brain!"

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: 1809, 1812

"Or through some fairy palace fancy roves, / And studs, with ruby lamps, the fretted roof / Or paints with every colour of the bow / Spotless parterres, all freakt with snow-white flowers, / Flowers that no archetype in nature own."

— Graham, James (1765-1811)

Date: 1814, 1816, 1896

"Solicit Fancy from celestial flights, / To wander o'er the World for frail delights / And crowd Imagination's rooms, immense, / With what relates alone to Time and Sense!"

— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)