Her voice was a charming contralto, evidently partially trained, and promising with coming years to be worth consideration.
— from Betty Gordon at Boarding School; Or, The Treasure of Indian Chasm by Alice B. Emerson

If you, O reader, or I were bound to stand up in that court, dressed in wig and gown, and to tell a story that would take six hours in the telling, the one or the other of us knowing it to be his special duty so to tell it that judge, and counsellors, and jury, should all catch clearly every point that was to be made,—how ill would that story be told, how would those points escape the memory of the teller, and never come near the intellect of the hearers!
— from Lady Anna by Anthony Trollope

Every flower that wealth can purchase diffuses its perfume on one side; whilst every stench a canal can exhale poisons the air on the other.
— from Italy; with sketches of Spain and Portugal by William Beckford

It may be that this value is, except in the rarest cases, all that a critic can ever pretend to—that he may be happy if, as few do, he reaches this.
— from Matthew Arnold by George Saintsbury

And Master Don began to give them less and less of his society in the daytime, and to wander from morn to dewy eve in solitude and independence; though whether he went up mountains to admire the view, or visited ruins and waterfalls, or spent his days hunting rabbits, no one at Applethwaite Cottage could even pretend to guess.
— from The Talking Horse, and Other Tales by F. Anstey

In one of those swift rushes the mind makes in high-strung moments, I saw myself and Coralie, close enfolded, pacing the world together, o'er hill and plain, through storied cities, past rows of applauding relations,—I
— from Dream Days by Kenneth Grahame

"Nae man in a civilised country ever played the pliskies ye hae done—but e'en pickle in your ain pock-neuk—I hae gi'en ye wanting.
— from Rob Roy — Volume 02 by Walter Scott