Date: 1734

"I'm in a raging storm, / Where seas and skies are blended, while my soul / Like some light worthless chip of floating cork / Is tost from wave to wave."

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1735, 1763

"'Midst foreign objects not employ'd to roam, / Thought, sadly active, still corrodes at home."

— Melmoth, William, the younger (bap. 1710, d. 1799)

Date: 1737

"As Years advance, th'abated Soul in most / Sinks to low Ebb, in second Childhood lost; / And feeble Age, dishonouring our Kind, / Robs all the Treasures of the wasted Mind"

— Hughes, Jabez (1685-1731)

Date: 1741

"There are are some Persons who complain they cannot remember divine or human Discourses which they hear, when in Truth their Thoughts are wandering half the Time, or they hear with such coldness and Indifferency and a trifling Temper of Spirit, that it is no wonder the Things which are read or s...

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1744

"Yet still, through their disgrace [the passions'], no feeble ray / Of greatness shines, and tells us whence they fell: / But these (like that fallen monarch [Adam] when reclaim'd) / When Reason moderates the rein aright, / Shall re-ascend, remount their former sphere, / Where once they soar'd il...

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"Passion's fierce illapse / Rouzes the mind's whole fabric; with supplies / Of daily impulse keeps the elastic powers / Intensely poiz'd, and polishes anew / By that collision all the fine machine: / Else rust would rise, and foulness, by degrees / Incumbering, choak at last what heaven design'd ...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

Date: 1745

"A soul in commerce with her God is heaven; / Feels not the tumults and the shocks of life; / The whirls of passions, and the strokes of heart."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)