The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me, The sad sharp-chinn'd old man with worn clothes and broad shoulder-band of leather, Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here absorb'd and arrested, The group, (an unminded point set in a vast surrounding,) The attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive base of the streets, The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-press'd blade, Diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting, in tiny showers of gold, Sparkles from the wheel.
— from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

There are full many people in this world Who think that they are wondrous wise in art , And who, as Critics, write about the same In transcendental phrase with capitals, And call it Faith, and Love, and Heaven knows what, And cannot think of it without a gasp And uttering phrases silly, mystical,— Because they are the empty, windy ones, Inflating and inflated, who but blow
— from Songs of the Sea and Lays of the Land by Charles Godfrey Leland

The prosecuting officer refused to make terms with him, and permit him to escape, on condition of furnishing evidence against others, as he had hoped when he made his confession; and when arraigned, he plead not guilty, and upon proper showing, his case was continued to the next term, in January.
— from Bart Ridgeley A Story of Northern Ohio by A. G. (Albert Gallatin) Riddle

The fact that habit and necessity accustom her, in frontier life, to those employments which in older and more conventional communities are deemed unfitting and ungraceful for woman to engage in, makes it none the less striking and admirable, because in doing so she serves a great and useful purpose; she is thereby doing her part in forming new communities in the places that are uninhabited and waste.
— from Woman on the American Frontier A Valuable and Authentic History of the Heroism, Adventures, Privations, Captivities, Trials, and Noble Lives and Deaths of the "Pioneer Mothers of the Republic" by William Worthington Fowler

Whatsoever befalls the hairs that get grey and thin, and the hands that become wrinkled and palsied, and the heart that is worn out by much beating, and the blood that clogs and clots at last, and the filmy eye, and all the corruptible frame; yet, as the heathen said, 'I shall not all die,' but deep within this transient clay house, that must crack and fall and be resolved into the elements out of which it was built up, there dwells an immortal guest, an undying personal self.
— from Expositions of Holy Scripture Second Kings Chapters VIII to End and Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Esther, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes by Alexander Maclaren

History arranged the greatest stage of all time, and on it placed a lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"—all save one, and he the nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true self expression in his chosen field of political action, so self-centered that he forgot the world's tragedy and merged it into his own, making great things little and little things great, one of "life's ironies," the everlasting refutation of the optimistic notion that when there is a crisis fate produces a man big enough to meet it.
— from The Mirrors of Washington by Clinton W. (Clinton Wallace) Gilbert

But he's got an uncommonly pretty sister, as beautiful and sweet-tempered as he is the reverse.
— from The Scarlet Bat: A Detective Story by Fergus Hume

This does not prove, however, that it will now pay to excavate under the streets of the Quaker City, and undermine the buildings in order to wash out this gold, and until Philadelphia shall be provided with a far more copious water supply the most sanguine or suave promoter of great undertakings would find it impossible to obtain subscriptions to any scheme to recover this fugitive gold, or even, perhaps, difficult to give away shares of stock to influential individuals either in or out of councils.
— from Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1899 Volume LIV, No. 5, March 1899 by Various