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)

Date: 1850

"For though I was most passionately moved / And yielded to all changes of the scene / With an obsequious promptness, yet the storm / Passed not beyond the suburbs of the mind"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1854

"Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human happiness."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)