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Date: 1850

"Behold an emblem of our human mind / Crowded with thoughts that need a settled home, / Yet, like to eddying balls of foam / Within this whirlpool, they each other chase / Round and round, and neither find / An outlet nor a resting-place!"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

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Date: 1850

"No familiar shapes / Remained, no pleasant images of trees, / Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; / But huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men, moved slowly through the mind / By day, and were a trouble to my dreams."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

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Date: 1851

"Just as a spring, through the continual pressure of a foreign body, at last loses its elasticity, so does the mind if it has another person’s thoughts continually forced upon it."

— Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788-1860)

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Date: 1852

"Alas! is even love too weak / To unlock the heart, and let it speak?"

— Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)

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Date: 1852

"Ah! well for us, if even we, / Even for a moment, can get free / Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd; / For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd!"

— Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)

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Date: 1852

"Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, / From the soul's subterranean depth upborne / As from an infinitely distant land, / Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey / A melancholy into all our day."

— Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)

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Date: 1852

"A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, / And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again."

— Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)

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Date: 1854

A priest can "secretly impress / On the soft wax of Woman's yielded mind / Each vile impression, which a Jesuit loves"

— Montgomery, Robert (1807-1855)

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Date: 1854

"t was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom."

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

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Date: 1854

"All closely imprisoned forces rend and destroy. The air that would be healthful to the earth, the water that would enrich it, the heat that would ripen it, tear it when caged up. So in her bosom even now; the strongest qualities she possessed, long turned upon themselves, became a heap of obdura...

— Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)

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The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.