Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa. Nature made him, and then broke the mould.

-Ariosto, Ludovico
  Orlando Furioso, canto10, stanza 84.

   While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire.

-Jeffers, (John) Robinson
  Tamar and Other Poems,'Shine, Perishing Republic'.

Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent; which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green spear through the dead leaves and throughthemould, thrusts a scaled bud through years of darkness until, one day, the light discovers it and shakes the flower free andöwe are aliveöwe are flowering for our moment upon the earth? This is the moment which after all, we live foröthe moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal.

-Beauchamp
   Journal entry,  Apr.

They die not,öfor their life was death,öbut cease; And round their narrow lips the mould falls close.

-Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
The House of Life,'The Choice', pt.1.

With each generation the entire race passes through the body of its womanhood as through a mould, reappearing withtheindeliblemarks ofthat mould upon it, that as the os cervix of woman, through which the head of the human infant passes at birth, forms a ring, determining for ever the size at birth of the human head†so exactly the intellectual capacity, the physical vigour, the emotional depth of woman, forms also an untranscendable circle, circumscribing with each successive generation the limits of expansion of the human race. 720

-Iron
Women and Labour, ch.3.