Society became my glittering bride,

And airy hopes my children.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): The Excursion. Book iii.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act v. Sc. 1.

Execute their airy purposes.

John Milton (1608-1674): Paradise Lost. Book i. Line 430.

From reveries so airy, from the toil

Of dropping buckets into empty wells,

And growing old in drawing nothing up.

William Cowper (1731-1800): The Task. Book iii. The Garden. Line 188.

A thousand fantasies

Begin to throng into my memory,

Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire,

And airy tongues that syllable men's names

On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.

John Milton (1608-1674): Comus. Line 205.