Date: w. 1763, 1776
"By mercy prompted his correcting hand / Inflicts the stroke of salutary pain, / To check tyrannic Passions's wild demand, / And free our Reason from it's slavish chain."
preview | full record— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)
Date: 1777
"Is there no Senator, whose soul disdains / To bear about his mind the golden chains / Of base Corruption?"
preview | full record— Combe, William (1742 -1823)
Date: 1777
"Not like a cloyster'd drone, to read and doze, / In undeserving, undeserv'd repose; / But reason's influence to diffuse; to clear / The enlighten'd world of every gloomy fear; / Dispel the mists of error, and unbind / Those pedant chains that clog the freeborn mind."
preview | full record— Lyttleton, George, 1st Baron Lyttleton (1709-1773)
Date: 1777, 1810
"Here soars the poet, all, impassioned mind, / And leaves his earthly clog behind."
preview | full record— Stockdale, Percival (1736-1811)
Date: 1778
"But, as an author of great fame / (I can't just recollect his name) / Has somewhere said, who seeks to bind / By force, or fraud, a woman's mind, / With locks, and bolts, and bars, and chains, / But gets his labour for his pains."
preview | full record— Moore, Sir John Henry (1756-1780)
Date: November 9, 1779
"Thus, conscience freed from ev'ry clog, / Mahometans eat up the hog."
preview | full record— Cowper, William (1731-1800)
Date: 1780
"Shall vanity enslave this freeborn mind, / And chains of sense my nobler passions bind?"
preview | full record— Steele, Anne (1717-1778)
Date: 1780
"In vain my fetter'd thoughts attempt to fly / And weakly fluttering mean the distant sky!"
preview | full record— Steele, Anne (1717-1778)
Date: 1781
"My head and ears confus'd, I find / One cannot here relax the Mind, / In vain she strives to slip her chains, / Law, Law, through all these regions reigns; / So back to Chambers I return, / More Patience, and more Law, to learn."
preview | full record— Keate, George (1729-1797)
Date: 1781
"When love is fetter'd, all is fire, / And tender passion soon decays; / Like those sweet birds which soon expire, / When we wou'd force their tuneful lays."
preview | full record— Whalley, Thomas Sedgwick (1746-1828)