Unto thine ear I hold the dead sea-shell Cast up thy Life's foam-fretted feet between; Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen Which had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell Is now a shaken shadow intolerable, Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen. —Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
— from Leaves of Life, for Daily Inspiration by Margaret Bird Steinmetz

ear I hold the dead-sea shell Cast up thy Life's foam-fretted feet between; Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen Which had Life's form and Love's, but by my spell Is now a shaken shadow intolerable, Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen.
— from The Home Book of Verse — Volume 1 by Burton Egbert Stevenson

There are some that are sour, selfish, intent only upon themselves, that give us a scowl of suspicion for greeting and turn their shoulder as one who would say “I don’t know you and I don’t want to.
— from Kitty of the Roses by Ralph Henry Barbour

[a fine Irish retriever of my friend's]; but do not again end any letter to me so abruptly, without even signing your name, because it gives me a most uncomfortable notion that I have not got all you have written, that you have, by mistake, put only a part of your letter in your envelope, and so sent it off unfinished to me.
— from Records of Later Life by Fanny Kemble

For a moment or two, after she spread it out upon the table, she looked at the many pieces to be wrought up into a well-finished whole, and thought of the hours of hard labor it would require to accomplish the task.
— from Lizzy Glenn; Or, The Trials of a Seamstress by T. S. (Timothy Shay) Arthur

It gladdens some and saddens some, It opens up the way to rum, It fills the pen, the cells of jails, It wags the tongue with many tales.
— from Treading the Narrow Way by Robert Emmet Barrett