Rawdon's generosity, when they were first married, has already been described and lauded.
— from Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

He lay down upon the ground, the youngest boy clambered on his back, and bending down a little head of golden curls, played at hiding in the beast's shaggy skin.
— from Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen by H. C. (Hans Christian) Andersen

Upon recollection, however, I have a notion they are both dead; at least the mother is; yes, I am sure Mrs. Tilney is dead, because Mrs. Hughes told me there was a very beautiful set of pearls that Mr. Drummond gave his daughter on her wedding-day and that Miss Tilney has got now, for they were put by for her when her mother died.”
— from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

He that was a mariner today, is an apothecary tomorrow; a smith one while, a philosopher another, in his volupiae ludis ; a king now with his crown, robes, sceptre, attendants, by and by drove a loaded ass before him like a carter, &c. If Democritus were alive now, he should see strange alterations, a new company of counterfeit vizards, whifflers, Cumane asses, maskers, mummers, painted puppets, outsides, fantastic shadows, gulls, monsters, giddy-heads, butterflies.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

One morning at breakfast, Diana, after looking a little pensive for some minutes, asked him, “If his plans were yet unchanged.”
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

And, though it, be all one, yet my imagination makes as great a difference as betwixt death and life, betwixt throwing myself into a burning furnace and plunging into the channel of a river: so idly does our fear more concern itself in the means than the effect.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

He then divides the exterior of these angles, by drawing a line parallel with the opposite side of the triangle, and immediately perceives that he has thus got an exterior adjacent angle which is equal to the interior.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

Persons of noble blood are less envied in their rising; for it seemeth but right done to their birth: besides, there seemeth not so much added to their fortune; and envy is as the sunbeams, that beat hotter upon a bank or steep rising ground, than upon a flat; and, for the same reason, those that are advanced by degrees are less envied than those that are advanced suddenly, and per saltum .
— from Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients by Francis Bacon

On one of the benches, which stood in a continuous row along the wall, a girl of eight, in a brown dress and long black stockings, lay asleep on a coat lined with fox.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

In the story told of the old bridge over the Main at Frankfort, a bridge-contractor and his troubles are substituted for the old woman and her cow; instead of a black dog a live rooster appears, driven in front of him by the contractor.
— from British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Wirt Sikes

Poor Mary, whose life had thus far been one of sadness, anxiety, and ill-health, sat on her horse almost bent double, and looking like a woman of middle age, although she was only twenty.
— from Agnes Strickland's Queens of England, Vol. 2. (of 3) Abridged and Fully Illustrated by Agnes Strickland

Akbar was painted all over with vermilion and blue decorations, and looked as if butter would not melt in his mouth.
— from Guns of the Gods: A Story of Yasmini's Youth by Talbot Mundy

The bright orange, black, and red colouring of their backs made a beautiful design and looked as though an artist had painted them.
— from Star: The Story of an Indian Pony by Forrestine C. (Forrestine Cooper) Hooker

Copped Hall itself stood out on a bare down almost like some mediæval castle, backed by the dark masses of forest, while to the west of it the slopes of Fort Obelisk could barely be distinguished, so flat were they and so well screened by greenery.
— from The Invasion of 1910, with a full account of the siege of London by William Le Queux

In this case the figures are held on a kind of lever sustained by catgut: this, being very sensitive to moisture, twists and shortens on damp days, and untwists and lengthens as the air becomes dry and light.
— from Harper's Young People, August 17, 1880 An Illustrated Weekly by Various

North of the Boyne estuary is Dundalk Bay, in itself a beautifully disposed body of water which, if not possessed of the ruggedness of the fiords of Western Ireland, is in every way an attractive setting for Dundalk itself, which is mostly a town of one long vertebrate street along which short spines radiate for a brief distance and lose themselves in the background of hills or in the strand of the sea.
— from Romantic Ireland; volume 2/2 by Blanche McManus

This 'unnecessary' and 'inexcusable' war (as it has been called in England) represents the only hope of a nation agonising between death and life.
— from The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Volume 2 of 2) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

They left no stone unturned to procure a majority, and brought down a lord who is in a state of drivelling idiotcy, and quite incapable of comprehending what he was about.
— from The Greville Memoirs, Part 2 (of 3), Volume 2 (of 3) A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 by Charles Greville