The season of thanks and the voice of full-yielding, The chant of joy and power for boundless fertility. All till'd and untill'd fields expand before me, I see the true arenas of my race, or first or last, Man's innocent and strong arenas.
— from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

'Again, supposing there are two things to which the same function is prescribed in the course of nature, and one of these successfully accomplishes the function by natural action, the other is altogether incapable of that natural action, instead of which, in a way other than is agreeable to its nature, it—I will not say fulfils its function, but feigns to fulfil it: which of these two would in thy view be the stronger?'
— from The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius

When he comes to study allied forms brought from countries not now continuous, in which case he cannot hope to find intermediate links, he will be compelled to trust almost entirely to analogy, and his difficulties will rise to a climax.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition by Charles Darwin

And I know it so well, and in so many several cases, that I could give several relations of good, pious, and religious people who, when they have had the distemper, have been so far from being forward to infect others that they have forbid their own family to come near them, in hopes of their being preserved, and have even died without seeing their nearest relations lest they should be instrumental to give them the distemper, and infect or endanger them.
— from A Journal of the Plague Year Written by a Citizen Who Continued All the While in London by Daniel Defoe

They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistol shots, with blows of the sword, with their fists, at a distance, close at hand, from above, from below, from everywhere, from the roofs of the houses, from the windows of the wine-shop, from the cellar windows, whither some had crawled.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

Instances multiply on the pages of the Kojiki where friend betrayed friend.
— from The Religions of Japan, from the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji by William Elliot Griffis

It probably originates under conditions which are in force both for taboo and the compulsion neurosis, that is, one component of the two contrasting feelings is unconscious and is kept repressed by the compulsive domination of the other component.
— from Totem and Taboo Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics by Sigmund Freud

And a fourth breaks forth at once in all the splendour of a gay equipage, under the title and denomination of a foreign count.
— from The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom — Complete by T. (Tobias) Smollett

And therefore if a man should talk to me of a Round Quadrangle; or Accidents Of Bread In Cheese; or Immaterial Substances; or of A Free Subject; A Free Will; or any Free, but free from being hindred by opposition, I should not say he were in an Errour; but that his words were without meaning; that is to say, Absurd.
— from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

242 —Full brass + Fl., Cl.
— from Principles of Orchestration, with Musical Examples Drawn from His Own Works by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov

The little Coyote stretched and jumped, and, though he sometimes succeeded in getting his paw over the branch, he fell back, flop!
— from Zuñi Folk Tales by Frank Hamilton Cushing

A strange occurrence was that as soon as the aforesaid Mīrzā started from Bakhar for that province the news of the death of Sardār K͟hān, the governor of that place, came.
— from The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri: or, Memoirs of Jahangir (Volume 1 of 2) by Emperor of Hindustan Jahangir

With this proviso it may be stated that the writings of Ward produce the feeling that he regards gre­gar­i­ous­ness as furnishing but few precise and primitive char­ac­ter­is­tics of the human mind.
— from Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War by W. (Wilfred) Trotter

The nasturtium, All pungent leaved and bitter of perfume, Hangs up its goblin bonnet, fairy bought From Gnomeland.
— from One Day & Another: A Lyrical Eclogue by Madison Julius Cawein

I have not myself seen any reason to change the opinion I formed some fifteen years ago, to the effect that it seems likely that the original language of the epic is French, but French of a Walloon or Picard dialect, and that it was written somewhere between the Seine and the Rhine.
— from The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) by George Saintsbury

Here at the Gymnasium, or lycée , founded by Frederick the Great, the boy was to go through the regular school course, sit on the same bench with the sons of ordinary burghers, and in all respects conform to the Gymnasium's regulations.
— from William of Germany by Stanley Shaw

General Clinton says they fell back from the orchard "across a hollow and up another hill not far distant from their own lines," which doubtless refers to undulations on Hogeland's place, and possibly to the then hilly ground about One Hundred and Seventh Street and Eleventh Avenue.
— from The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn Including a new and circumstantial account of the battle of Long island and the loss of New York, with a review of events to the close of the year by Henry Phelps Johnston

True, he had undergone many a brutal jest and cruel practical joke from his cousins; but that was all in the family, not like a blow from an alien king, and one not apologized for, but followed up by a rebuke that seemed to him unjust, lowering him in his own eyes and those of Esclairmonde, and making him ready to gnaw himself with moody vexation.
— from The Caged Lion by Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge

He felt that his regiment was too much “in the air,” too much advanced, although it had already fallen back from the exposed position that it had occupied earlier in the day.
— from The Downfall by Émile Zola