Not but that other gods, as meet, There hold the highest seat: For, free and lawless as the rest may seem, Good Sense and Reason bear a sway supreme.
— from Fables of La Fontaine — a New Edition, with Notes by Jean de La Fontaine

Those that are yet more gentle and curious, their admiration is commonly confined to reasonable creatures only; not in general as they are reasonable, but as they are capable of art, or of some craft and subtile invention: or perchance barely to reasonable creatures; as they that delight in the possession of many slaves.
— from Meditations by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius

Meanwhile bear my grief-stricken soul to those wooded hills, to those green meadows stretched far and wide along the blue Niemen; to those fields painted with various [pg 2] grain, gilded with wheat, silvered with rye; where grows the amber mustard, the buckwheat white as snow, where the clover glows with a maiden's blush, where all is girdled as with a ribbon by a strip of green turf on which here and there rest quiet pear-trees.
— from Pan Tadeusz Or, the Last Foray in Lithuania; a Story of Life Among Polish Gentlefolk in the Years 1811 and 1812 by Adam Mickiewicz

The revolution of seventeen centuries has instructed us not to press too closely the mysterious language of prophecy and revelation; but as long as, for wise purposes, this error was permitted to subsist in the church, it was productive of the most salutary effects on the faith and practice of Christians, who lived in the awful expectation of that moment, when the globe itself, and all the various race of mankind, should tremble at the appearance of their divine Judge.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Then it came out upon the other side, and there were more crashings and clatterings, and over it was flopped, like a pancake on a gridiron, and seized again and rushed back at you through another squeezer.
— from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Its success at the time was enormous, and Richardson began another series of letters (he could tell a story in no other way) which occupied his leisure hours for the next six years.
— from English Literature Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World by William J. (William Joseph) Long

That is the Lady of the Lake, said Merlin; and within that lake is a rock, and therein is as fair a place as any on earth, and richly beseen; and this damosel will come to you anon, and then speak ye fair to her that she will give you that sword.
— from Le Morte d'Arthur: Volume 1 by Malory, Thomas, Sir

Felix soon learned that the treacherous Turk, for whom he and his family endured such unheard-of oppression, on discovering that his deliverer was thus reduced to poverty and ruin, became a traitor to good feeling and honour, and had quitted Italy with his daughter, insultingly sending Felix a pittance of money, to aid him, as he said, in some plan of future maintenance.
— from Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Pyrrhus, accordingly, began to await what the lady should do, and Nicostratus having, a few days after, made, as he oftentimes used to do, a great dinner to certain gentlemen, Madam Lydia, whenas the tables were cleared away, came forth of her chamber, clad in green samite and richly bedecked, and entered the saloon where the guests were.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

"The Monotremes derive their name from the circumstance that there is, as in birds and reptiles, but a single aperture at the hinder extremity of the body from which are discharged the whole of the waste-products, together with the reproductive elements; the oviducts opening separately into the end of this passage, which is termed the cloaca.
— from Austral English A dictionary of Australasian words, phrases and usages with those aboriginal-Australian and Maori words which have become incorporated in the language, and the commoner scientific words that have had their origin in Australasia by Edward Ellis Morris

As neither Luther, Melancthon, Huss, Zwingli, Calvin nor any of the reformers of that age received revelation from heaven authorizing them to establish the Church, we find that the world was still without the plan of salvation, and that the products of the Reformation, as religious bodies, are the offspring of the mother church, described in the Scriptures as the "mother of harlots and abomination of the earth."
— from Cowley's Talks on Doctrine by Matthias F. Cowley

While the minister withdrew to the writing table, the Emperor asked whether a trustworthy horseman could be had, since the Spaniard was disabled; and Reitzenstein, Beust, and Van der Kapellen, in whom implicit confidence could be placed, had been sent off that morning.
— from Barbara Blomberg — Volume 04 by Georg Ebers

Mrs. Hopkins's parrot had been observing Kitty, first with one eye and then with the other, evidently preparing to make a remark, but awkward with a stranger.
— from The Guardian Angel by Oliver Wendell Holmes

This property is not only invested to his entire satisfaction, as regards convenience, security, and returns, but also in a way that is connected with some of the best sentiments of his nature.
— from The Chainbearer; Or, The Littlepage Manuscripts by James Fenimore Cooper

Criminals going to suffer, always ride backwards, as some conceive to increase the ignominy, but more probably to prevent them being shocked with a distant view of the gallows; as, in amputations, surgeons conceal the instruments with which they are going to operate.
— from 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose

[Pg 16] III THE JOURNEY TO THE NORTH T he good ship Yucatan steadily ploughed her way along the rock-bound Alaskan coast until, at noon of the second day, she nosed her way into the entrance of that great indentation of the coast known as Resurrection Bay, and finally concluded her own northbound journey at the docks of the town of Seward, which lies at the head of that harbor.
— from The Young Alaskans by Emerson Hough