He also instructed the soldiers to use long pikes, and to thrust them forward to receive the sword-cuts of the enemy.
— from Plutarch's Lives, Volume 1 (of 4) by Plutarch

And so much easier is it to believe what we have seen and known, than what we hear of only, that we remember him but with admiration and respect; these descriptions of him, when morally insane, seeming to us like portraits, painted in sickness, of a man we have only known in health.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 1 by Edgar Allan Poe

Up before 5 o’clock and alone at setting my Brampton papers to rights according to my father’s and my computation and resolution the other day to my good content, I finding that there will be clear saved to us L50 per annum, only a debt of it may be L100.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

What would have satisfied the ancient would seem to us like penury.
— from The Unseen World, and Other Essays by John Fiske

Feet of ordinary length, rather slender; tarsus covered anteriorly with a few scutella, the uppermost long, posteriorly edged; toes free, scutellate above; claws slender, compressed, arched, acute.
— from Ornithological Biography, Volume 1 (of 5) An Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America by John James Audubon

The carnal scholar that he was, did he not seek to understand life pedantically, partaking of it mostly with prostitute models instead of those of affluent means?
— from An Apostate: Nawin of Thais by Steven David Justin Sills

Your friend Miss Cox has been in to see us and was just as jolly as could be, but when the [63] other girls are around she treats us like perfect strangers.
— from At Boarding School with the Tucker Twins by Nell Speed

Following the small stream, which came into the harbor at this point, for three miles, by an easy and regular ascent between lofty mountains on either side with a slope of about forty-five degrees, and over ground and patches of snow thrown up like potato-hills, they reached its head, and there, fortunately, found another stream running in the other direction.
— from Farthest North The Life and Explorations of Lieutenant James Booth Lockwood, of the Greely Arctic Expedition by Charles Lanman

—Buds flattish or oblong-conical, few-scaled, 2-4 buds often superposed, the uppermost largest [Pg 47] and far above the axil.
— from Handbook of the Trees of New England by Henry M. (Henry Mason) Brooks

“But what recesses of mind, of heart, of soul, this untranslatable language penetrates and brightens up!
— from The Parisians — Complete by Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron