Date: 1800
"The pen is a pacifyer. It checks the mind's career; it circumscribes her wanderings."
preview | full record— Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810)
Date: 1803
"Ah, how the human mind wearies herself / With her own wanderings, and, involved in gloom / Impenetrable, speculates amiss!"
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1814, 1816, 1896
"Solicit Fancy from celestial flights, / To wander o'er the World for frail delights / And crowd Imagination's rooms, immense, / With what relates alone to Time and Sense!"
preview | full record— Woodhouse, James (bap. 1735, d. 1820)
Date: 1820
"And we breathe, and sicken not, / The atmosphere of human thought: / Be it dim, and dank, and gray, / Like a storm-extinguished day, / Travelled o'er by dying gleams; / Be it bright as all between / Cloudless skies and windless streams, / Silent, liquid, and serene; / As the birds within the win...
preview | full record— Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
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."
preview | full record— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
Date: 1919
"My memories simply trooped the colour."
preview | full record— Cummings, Bruce Frederick [pseud. W. N. P. Barbellion] (1889-1919)
Date: 1922
"All night, through the eternity of night, / Pain was my portion though I could not feel. / Deep in my humbled heart you ground your heel, / Till I was reft of even my inner light, / Till reason from my mind had taken flight, / And all my world went whirling in a reel."
preview | full record— McKay, Claude (1889-1948)
Date: August, 22, 2015
"Some philosophers claim that we know nothing of the external world outside our minds--nothing compared to what sways in our minds, in the long, twisting corridors of memory, the vast mental rooms with half-open doors, the ghosts chattering beneath the chandeliers of imagination."
preview | full record— Lightman, Alan (b. 1948)