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Date: 1702

"Love, Sorrow, and the Sting of vile Reproach, / Succeeding one another in their Course, / Like Drops of Eating Water on the Marble, / At length have worn my boasted Courage down."

— Rowe, Nicholas (1674-1718)

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Date: 1706, 1709

"COME let me Love: or is my Mind / Harden'd to Stone, or froze to Ice?"

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

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Date: 1708

"Passions are too hurrying to last; Vapours that start from a Mercurial Brain, whose wild Chimera's flush the lighter Faculties, which tir'd i'th' vain pursuit of fancy'd Pleasures."

— Baker, Thomas (b. 1680-1)

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Date: 1723

"Look on the Boy, / And let his manly Face, which promiseth / Successful Fortune, steel thy melting Heart / To hold thy own, and leave thine own with him."

— Cibber, Theophilus (1703-1758)

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Date: 1725

"I will give you the saddest Account you have ever yet been entertain'd with; but you must wrap your Heart in a Case of Adamant, or it will melt away in the hearing of it."

— Davys, Mary (1674-1732)

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Date: 1734

"Is then my heart to all the world beside / Softer than melting wax or summer snow, / But to myself harder than adamant?"

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

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Date: 1733-4

"Self-Love but serves the virtuous Mind to wake, / As the small Pebble stirs the peaceful Lake, / The Centre mov'd, a Circle strait succeeds, / Another still, and still another spreads."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

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Date: 1737

"My faults will not be hid from you, and perhaps it is no dispraise to me that they will not: the cleanness and purity of one's mind is never better proved, than in discovering its own faults at first view; as when a stream shows the dirt at its bottom, it shows also the transparency of the water."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

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Date: 1743

"We bleed, we tremble; we forget, we smile: / The mind turns fool before the cheek is dry. / Our quick-returning folly cancels all; / As the tide rushing rases what is writ / In yielding sands, and smooths the letter'd shore."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1743

"Some hearts, in secret hard, unapt to melt, / Struck by the magic of the public eye, / Like Moses' smitten rock, gush out amain."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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