= KEY: Loose \a.\. SYN: Unbound, detached, flowing, scattered, sparse, incompact, vague, inexact, rambling, dissolute, licentious.
— from A Complete Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms or, Synonyms and Words of Opposite Meaning by Samuel Fallows

D’Artagnan took a pen and wrote: Madame, Until the present moment I could not believe that it was to me your first two letters were addressed, so unworthy did I feel myself of such an honor; besides, I was so seriously indisposed that I could not in any case have replied to them.
— from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Hence, in reading the romanticists, who went to these sources for their material, we are seldom wearied but often surprised; and the surprise is like that of the sunrise, or the sea, which always offers some new beauty and stirs us deeply, as if we had never seen it before.
— from English Literature Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World by William J. (William Joseph) Long

It is working in the denary (or ten) scale of notation, a system undoubtedly derived from the fact that our forefathers who devised it had ten fingers upon which they were accustomed to count, like our children of to-day.
— from Amusements in Mathematics by Henry Ernest Dudeney

Why hadn't June come to Irene, as she usually did, and it occurred to him suddenly that he had seen nothing of June for a long time now.
— from The Forsyte Saga, Volume I. The Man Of Property by John Galsworthy

When this was done, and all safe upon deck, the captain ordered the mate, with three men, to break into the round-house, where the new rebel captain lay, who, having taken the alarm, had got up, and with two men and a boy had got firearms in their hands; and when the mate, with a crow, split open the door, the new captain and his men fired boldly among them, and wounded the mate with a musket ball, which broke his arm, and wounded two more of the men, but killed nobody.
— from The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

“I like him best of them all,” said unreasonable Diana.
— from Anne of the Island by L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery

While induction moves from fragmentary details (or [Pg 82] particulars) to a connected view of a situation (universal), deduction begins with the latter and works back again to particulars, connecting them and binding them together.
— from How We Think by John Dewey

I went on to suggest that we should try to run away, but we soon rejected the project as futile, and, to be perfectly honest, I do not believe that either of us would really have left Ayesha even if some superior power had suddenly offered to convey us from these gloomy caves and set us down in Cambridge.
— from She by H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard

And the best that is in them is what they are interested in, the thing by which they make their living, the thing they’ve specialized on and sat up days and nights over, and even dreamed about.
— from Martin Eden by Jack London

Our ministers at foreign courts had hitherto, on occasions of ceremony, worn a simple uniform, directed for them by the Department, which, whatever may have been its merits or its demerits as a costume, was sufficient to distinguish the wearer from “one of the upper court servants.”
— from Life of James Buchanan, Fifteenth President of the United States. v. 2 (of 2) by George Ticknor Curtis

This scheme, fraught with dangers and seemingly unsurmountable difficulties, has survived; and, thanks to the predominance of Prussia and the genius of two great emperors, the seemingly heterogeneous mass has been moulded into a strong and powerful Empire.
— from The New Map of Europe (1911-1914) The Story of the Recent European Diplomatic Crises and Wars and of Europe's Present Catastrophe by Herbert Adams Gibbons

I was not then of age; and the young lady, not half so artful as her mother, yielded to my addresses before the mother's plot could be ripened, and so utterly disappointed it.
— from Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson

Its beginning was traced back to a visit of Arnauld to Holland in A.D. 1681, and its effects were seen in the circulation of prayer-books, tracts, and sermons, urging diligent reading of Scripture, in the depreciation of the worship of Mary, of indulgences, of images of saints and relics, rosaries and scapularies (§ 186, 2 ), processions and fraternities, in the rigoristic strictness of the confessional, the use of the common language of the country in baptism, marriage, and extreme unction, etc.
— from Church History, Volume 3 (of 3) by J. H. (Johann Heinrich) Kurtz

The chanting of the coral reef far out at sea, unceasing, day and night, is the song the sirens sang to strong Ulysses, in the dream dreamed for all ages by the old Greek poet, long ago.
— from In the Strange South Seas by Beatrice Grimshaw

Eight Dollars Reward RAN away from the Subscriber, the 17th instant, a likely Negro Fellow, (named CATO) about five feet seven inches high, about twenty years old, had on when he went away, a grey bear-skin double-breasted Jacket with large white metal buttons, and striped under ditto, long striped trowsers, with leather breeches under them, a sailor's Dutch Cap; he has pimples in his face, SPEAKS GOOD ENGLISH, very nice about the hair, tells a very plausible story, upon any extraordinary occasion, and pretends to have a pass signed by John Nelson.
— from The Journal of Negro History, Volume 1, January 1916 by Various

He found upon holding it close to his eyes in the dim light, that a double row of hooks was attached to it beneath, and that there were half a dozen good trout leaping and squirming upon different sides of it.
— from Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City: His Progress and Adventures by S. R. (Samuel Rutherford) Crockett

The start back was made so late that the party did not reach the arsenic spring until dusk.
— from Bloom of Cactus by Robert Ames Bennet

Although a father and a husband, having a wife (Martha) and two children (Mary Ann and Susan Jane), he felt that his lot as a slave utterly debarred him from discharging his duty to them; that he could exercise no rights or privileges whatever, save as he might obtain permission from his master.
— from The Underground Railroad A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom, As Related by Themselves and Others, or Witnessed by the Author. by William Still

Three years of folly, passed without profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and added, in a somewhat unusual degree, to my bodily stature, when, after a week of soulless dissipation, I invited a small party of the most dissolute students to a secret carousal in my chambers.
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe — Volume 2 by Edgar Allan Poe