Date: 1787

"Fat is foul weather--dims the fancy's sight"

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1788

"Mary observed his character, and wrote down a train of reflections, which these observations led her to make; these reflections received a tinge from her mind; the present state of it, was that kind of painful quietness which arises from reason clouded by disgust; she had not yet learned to be r...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1786, 1787, 1788; 1789

"Like a snow-ball, the mind, fraught with peace in its prime, / Moves swiftly adown the steep shelvings of Time; / Accumulates filth from Society's sons, / And strengthens and hardens its coat as it runs; / Till habit on habit is negligent laid, / And the object appears motley, vile, and ill-made...

— Williams, John [pseud. Anthony Pasquin] (1754-1818)

Date: 1791

"I compared him at this time to a warm West-Indian climate, where you have a bright sun, quick vegetation, luxuriant foliage, luscious fruits; but where the same heat sometimes produces thunder, lightening, and earthquakes in a terrible degree.

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1792

"For it is the right use of reason alone which makes us independent of everything--excepting the unclouded reason--'Whose service is perfect freedom.'"

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: June, 1793

"FANCY, sportive goddess, hail! / Fleeting as the vernal gale, / Hail! thou dear illusive power / Changing with the swift-wing'd hour; / Now despairing, now reviving, / Now with tenfold vigour thriving, / Now tormenting, now delighting, / Now in midst of battle fighting."

— Anonymous

Date: 1796

"Thus he restored his plastic mind to its usual satisfaction, and arose the next morning without a cloud upon his brow."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1817

"The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy, / Chacing away all worldliness and folly; / Coming sometimes like fearful claps of thunder, Or the low rumblings earth's regions under; / And sometimes like a gentle whispering / Of all the secrets of some wond'rous thing / That breathes about u...

— Keats, John (1795-1821)

Date: September 10, 1836

"And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason."

— Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882)

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)