Date: 1723

"Look on the Boy, / And let his manly Face, which promiseth / Successful Fortune, steel thy melting Heart / To hold thy own, and leave thine own with him."

— Cibber, Theophilus (1703-1758)

Date: 1725

"I will give you the saddest Account you have ever yet been entertain'd with; but you must wrap your Heart in a Case of Adamant, or it will melt away in the hearing of it."

— Davys, Mary (1674-1732)

Date: 1734

"Is then my heart to all the world beside / Softer than melting wax or summer snow, / But to myself harder than adamant?"

— Watts, Isaac (1674-1748)

Date: 1733-4

"Self-Love but serves the virtuous Mind to wake, / As the small Pebble stirs the peaceful Lake, / The Centre mov'd, a Circle strait succeeds, / Another still, and still another spreads."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1737

"My faults will not be hid from you, and perhaps it is no dispraise to me that they will not: the cleanness and purity of one's mind is never better proved, than in discovering its own faults at first view; as when a stream shows the dirt at its bottom, it shows also the transparency of the water."

— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)

Date: 1743

"We bleed, we tremble; we forget, we smile: / The mind turns fool before the cheek is dry. / Our quick-returning folly cancels all; / As the tide rushing rases what is writ / In yielding sands, and smooths the letter'd shore."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1743

"Some hearts, in secret hard, unapt to melt, / Struck by the magic of the public eye, / Like Moses' smitten rock, gush out amain."

— Young, Edward (bap. 1683, d. 1765)

Date: 1759

"Minds slothful, like uncultivated Earth, / To Weeds of Vice, and Folly, give a Birth; / Silver, and Gold, for Want of proper Use, / Their Splendor lose, and cancrous Rust produce; / Streams owe their Purity, to active Speed, / If Waters stagnate, they Corruption breed."

— Marriott, Thomas (d. 1766)

Date: 1759

"Their grief, however, like their joy, was transient; every thing floated in their mind unconnected with the past or future, so that one desire easily gave way to another, as a second stone cast into the water effaces and confounds the circles of the first."

— Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784)

Date: Published serially, 1765-1770

"O, my Sister, I would to Heaven that he had now been present, as I have been present, to have his Soul melted and minted as mine has been"

— Brooke, Henry (c. 1703-1783)