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Date: 1746

"Social friends, / Attuned to happy unison of soul; / To whose exalting eye a fairer world, / Of which the vulgar never had a glimpse, / Displays its charms; whose minds are richly fraught / With philosophic stores, superior light; / And in whose breast, enthusiastic, burns / Virtue, the sons of ...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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Date: 1746

"For lofty sense, / Creative fancy, and inspection keen / Through the deep windings of the human heart, / Is not wild Shakespeare thine and Nature's boast?"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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Date: 1746

"With inward view, / Thence on the ideal kingdom swift she turns / Her eye; and instant, at her powerful glance, / The obedient phantoms vanish or appear; / Compound, divide, and into order shift, / Each to his rank, from plain perception up / To the fair forms of Fancy's fleeting train."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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Date: 1746

Yet the kind source of every gentle art, / And all the soft civility of life: / Raiser of human kind! by Nature cast, / Naked, and helpless, out amid the woods / And wilds, to rude inclement elements; / With various seeds of art deep in the mind / Implanted, and profusely pour'd around / Material...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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Date: 1746

"While there with thee the enchanted round I walk, / The regulated wild, gay Fancy then / Will tread in thought the groves of attic land; / Will from thy standard taste refine her own, / Correct her pencil to the purest truth / Of Nature, or, the unimpassion'd shades / Forsaking, raise it to the ...

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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Date: 1746

"For me, when I forget the darling theme, / Whether the blossom blows, the summer-ray / Russets the plain, inspiring Autumn gleams; / Or Winter rises in the blackening east; / Be my tongue mute, may fancy paint no more, / And, dead to joy, forget my heart to beat!"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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Date: 1748

"What, what is virtue, but repose of mind, / A pure ethereal calm, that knows no storm?"

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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Date: 1748

"Ten thousand great ideas fill'd his mind; / But with the clouds they fled, and left no trace behind."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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Date: 1748

"When in the Hall of Smoke they congress hold, / And the sage berry, sun-burnt Mocha bears, / Has clear'd their inward eye: then, smoke-enroll'd, / Their oracles break forth mysterious as of old."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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Date: 1748

"But more he search'd the mind, and roused from sleep / Those moral seeds whence we heroic actions reap."

— Thomson, James (1700-1748)

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