One drop of blood, one single drop, came out of the white feathers of the angel's wings and fell upon the ship in which the prince sat, burnt into it, and weighed upon it like thousands of hundredweights, dragging it rapidly down to the earth again; the strong wings of the eagles gave way, the wind roared round the prince's head, and the clouds around—were they formed by the smoke rising up from the burnt cities?—took strange shapes, like crabs many, many miles long, which stretched their claws out after him, and rose up like enormous rocks, from which rolling masses dashed down, and became fire-spitting dragons.
— from Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen by H. C. (Hans Christian) Andersen

CHAPTER 51 T he bland and open-hearted proprietor of Bachelor’s Hall slept on amidst the congenial accompaniments of rain, mud, dirt, damp, fog, and rats, until late in the day; when, summoning his valet Tom Scott to assist him to rise, and to prepare breakfast, he quitted his couch, and made his toilet.
— from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens

"Deep as a monk, silent as a Benedictine, crafty as a priest, this man would have been a Tiberius in Rome, a Richelieu under Louis XIII. or a Fouche under the Convention."
— from Repertory of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z by Anatole Cerfberr

He took up his burden again, and returned upstairs, looking about him and trying to account for the blood-spot.
— from The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

It is reported that Apelles only used three colours, black, red, and yellow, and Rembrandt used little else.
— from The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed

There the wonders of the magnetic sleep grew more and more wonderful every day; the patients acquired the gift of prophecy; their vision extended over all the surface of the globe; they could hear and see with their toes and fingers, and read unknown languages, and understand them too, by merely having the book placed on their stomachs.
— from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay

I fear she leads him a rather uncomfortable life, though, happily, he is too dull to perceive the extent of his misfortune.
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion.
— from Adam Bede by George Eliot

(Literarische Anstalt, Rütten und Loening, 1909.)
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. (Ernest Watson) Burgess

A shadow meting sunlight on the long green slopes aroused it, and it hummed above the tumbling hasty foam, and penetrated hanging depths of foliage, sad-hued rock-clefts, dark green ravines; it became convulsed where the mountain threw forward in a rushing upward line against the sky, there to be severed at the head by cloud.
— from Vittoria — Volume 8 by George Meredith

The monument is a remarkably ugly lump of stone, which perhaps was meant for a fountain, but there is no water.
— from The Life of the Moselle From its source in the Vosges Mountains to its junction with the Rhine at Coblence by Octavius Rooke

Callista found she was remembering too mechanically; names and faces would not coalesce to any rationally useful larger pattern.
— from The Trial of Callista Blake by Edgar Pangborn

Five minutes had scarcely elapsed when we heard a gunshot, and the hunter made his appearance with a rather ugly little animal, having a dark-brown coat, short feet, ears and eyes almost imperceptible, a mouth furnished with formidable incisors, and on each side of its jaws a vast pouch filled with earth.
— from Adventures of a Young Naturalist by Lucien Biart

Anger rose up like a whirlwind in his mind; but to indulge it was to lose for ever the cause which, indeed, was already lost.
— from The Sorceress (complete) by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

The challenger held the sheep's dung, but the other, who could not find any dung of camels (for there are no camels in that island), took cow-dung, of which there was a great quantity, and rolling up little balls of it, placed them on the lines.
— from Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and Topographical with Notices of Its Natural History, Antiquities and Productions, Volume 1 by Tennent, James Emerson, Sir

When the heavens are rolled up like a scroll, what will it avail me that I passed with one whom I loved with an earthly love this brief existence?"
— from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics by Various

The Imperialists, therefore, after despatching a force of some 6000 men, under Antonio de Leyva, to hold Pavia, threw some troops into its citadel, and retreated under Lannoy and Pescara to Lodi, while Bourbon hastened to Germany to collect fresh forces.
— from Europe in the Sixteenth Century, 1494-1598, Fifth Edition Period 4 (of 8), Periods of European History by A. H. (Arthur Henry) Johnson

The responsibility for this barbarous act rests upon Louvois who advised it and Louis who allowed it.
— from Early European History by Hutton Webster

One of the children thus developed was a typical waif of the slums, a ragged urchin loitering in the streets of New York, and sleeping in store-entrances and hall-ways, until one day taken in charge by a kindly policeman.
— from Psychology and parenthood by H. Addington (Henry Addington) Bruce