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Date: 1742

"A soul immortal, spending all her fires, / Wasting her strength in strenuous idleness, / Thrown into tumult, raptured, or alarm'd, / At aught this scene can threaten, or indulge, / Resembles ocean into tempest wrought, / To waft a feather, or to drown a fly."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1745

"But This, my Friend, these stormy Gusts of Pride / Are foreign to my Love--Till Sigismunda / Be disabus'd, my Breast is Tumult all, / And can obey no settled Course of Reason. / I see Her still, I feel her powerful Image!"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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Date: 1746

"Man, in a storm of passions daily whirl'd, / Lives but the jest, and riddle of the world."

— Ruffhead, James

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Date: 1746, 1749

"For Peace and War succeed by Turns in Love, / And while tempestuous these Emotions roll, / And float with blind Disorder in the Soul."

— Francis, Philip (1708-1773)

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Date: 1760-7

"But here, you must distinguish--the thought floated only in Dr. Slop's mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swiming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man's understanding, without being carried backwards o...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

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Date: 1762

"Pure from th' eternal Source of Being came / That Ray divine that lights the human Frame: / Yet oft, forgetful of it's heavenly Birth, / It sinks obscur'd beneath the Weight of the Earth: / Mechanic Pow'rs retard it's Flight, and hence / The Storms of Passion, and the Clouds of Sense: / 'Tis Lif...

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

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Date: 1766

"Should you but discompose the tide, / On which Ideas wont to ride, / Ferment it with a yeasty Storm, / Or with high Floods of Wine deform."

— Lloyd, Evan (1734-1776)

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Date: 1755, 1771

"And yet, let but a zephyr's breath begin/ To stir the latent excellence within-- / Waked in that moment's elemental strife, / Impassion'd genius feels the breath of life; / The' expanding heart delights to leap and glow, / The pulse to kindle, and the tear to flow."

— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)

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Date: 1774

"This activity of imagination, by which it darts with the quickness of lightning, through all possible views of the ideas which are presented, arises from the same perfection of the associating principles, which produces the other qualities of genius."

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

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Date: 1784

"Thy piercing thought / Unaided saw each movement of the mind, / As skilful artists view the small machine, / The secret springs and nice dependencies, / And to thy mimic scenes, by fancy wrought / To such a wond'rous shape, th'impassion'd breast / In floods of grief, or peals of laughter bow'd, ...

— Jago, Richard (1715-1781)

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