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Date: 1743

"Darkness has more divinity for me: / It strikes thought inward; it drives back the soul / To settle on herself, our point supreme! / There lies our theatre; there sits our judge."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

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Date: 1744, 1772, 1795

"For to the brutes / Perception and the transient boons of sense / Hath fate imparted: but to man alone / Of sublunary beings was it given / Each fleeting impulse on the sensual powers / At leisure to review; with equal eye / To scan the passion of the stricken nerve / Or the vague object strikin...

— Akenside, Mark (1720-1771)

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Date: August 27, 1751

"The painted vales of imagination are deserted, and our intellectual activity is exercised in winding through the labyrinths of fallacy, and toiling with firm and cautious steps up the narrow tracks of demonstration."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

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Date: 1761

"While Frugi liv'd / Thy sorrows kept possession of my heart, / And Love receded from the stronger guest; / Now his dear image rises to my view / So piteously array'd, with such a train / Of tender thoughts assails this shatter'd frame, / That Reason quits her fort, and flies before, / To the las...

— Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811)

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Date: 1755, 1771

"For this, fair hope leads on the' impassion'd soul / Through life's wild labyrinths to her distant goal; / Paints in each dream, to fan the genial flame, / The pomp of riches, and the pride of fame, / Or fondly gives reflection's cooler eye / A glance, an image, of a future sky."

— Cawthorn, James (1719-1761)

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Date: January 1, 1779

"There [to Heaven's Regions] when the soul, in search of purer day, / Loos'd from mortality's impris'ning clay / Shall swifter than the forked lightning dart."

— Anstey, Christopher (1724-1805)

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Date: 1781, 1791

"Hence rash Belief! may thy wild thoughts again / Ne'er thro the cells of busy fancy rove!"

— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)

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Date: 1790, 1794

"How many fine-spun threads of reasoning would my wandering thoughts have broken; and how difficult should I have found it to arrange arguments and inferences in the cells of my brain!"

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

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