and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust.
— from Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

; so Servius interprets it, all poets are mad, a company of bitter satirists, detractors, or else parasitical applauders: and what is poetry itself, but as Austin holds, Vinum erroris ab ebriis doctoribus propinatum ?
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

The Grand Lodge has also the inherent power of investigating, regulating, and deciding all matters relative to the craft, or to particular lodges, or to individual Brothers, which it may exercise either of itself, or by such delegated authority, as in its wisdom and discretion it may appoint; but in the Grand Lodge alone resides the power of erasing lodges, and expelling Brethren from the craft, a power which it ought not to delegate to any subordinate authority in England."
— from The Principles of Masonic Law A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages and Landmarks of Freemasonry by Albert Gallatin Mackey

The past he regretted, he was discontented with the present, and the future he had reason to dread: the Oriental bishops successively disengaged their cause from his unpopular name, and each day decreased the number of the schismatics who revered Nestorius as the confessor of the faith.
— 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

Perhaps the skeletal remains of the vertebrates of the past provide the student of fossils with his best facts, on account of the resistant nature of the bones themselves, and because the backboned animals are relatively modern; then, too, the rocks in which their remains occur have not been so much altered by geological agencies, or buried so deeply under the strata formed later.
— from The Doctrine of Evolution: Its Basis and Its Scope by Henry Edward Crampton

He brought into his painting-room stumps of trees, weeds, &c. He even formed models of landscapes on his table, composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking-glass, which, magnified, became rocks, trees, and water.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 328, February, 1843 by Various

The Catechism answers to its title, save insofar as it is à priori in its theism and optimistic in its ethic, as is another work of its author in the same year, A View of the Necessarian or Best Scheme , defending the Shaftesburyan doctrine against the criticism of Crousaz on Pope’s Essay .
— from A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes by J. M. (John Mackinnon) Robertson

When Quentin Durward left his uncle to these sublime meditations, he followed his conductor, Master Oliver, who, without crossing any of the principal courts, led him, partly through private passages exposed to the open air, but chiefly through a maze of stairs, vaults, and galleries, communicating with each other by secret doors and at unexpected points, into a large and spacious latticed gallery, which, from its breadth, might have been almost termed a hall, hung with tapestry more ancient than beautiful, and with a very few of the hard, cold, ghastly looking pictures, belonging to the first dawn of the arts which preceded their splendid sunrise.
— from Quentin Durward by Walter Scott

A great quantity of buffalo skins, dried meat and tallow, and camp furniture was gathered and burned.
— from Minnesota, the North Star State by William Watts Folwell

He generally prides himself, like Major Bagstock, on being “sly, devilish sly.”
— from The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: London to York by Charles G. (Charles George) Harper

Imperial soul, star of a weedy stream, Born where the ghosts of buffaloes still dream, Whose spirit hoof-beats storm above his grave, Above that breast of earth and prairie-fire— Fire that freed the slave.
— from General William Booth Enters into Heaven, and Other Poems by Vachel Lindsay