I was hail-fellow-well-met with bad men; I was in the center of riot, drunkenness, and debauchery; but the purifying influence of my love kept me safe from all.
— from Lady Audley's Secret by M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon

I immediately sent Ord a copy of Rosecrans' dispatch and ordered him to be in readiness to attack the moment he heard the sound of guns to the south or south-east.
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

Monday afternoon his widow, mother, relatives, mates of the fire department, and his other friends, (I was one, only lately it is true, but our love grew fast and close, the days and nights of those eight weeks by the chair of rapid decline, and the bed of death,) gather'd to the funeral of this young man, who had grown up, and was well-known here.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

A LITTLE INTERLUDE Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his—the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets ...
— from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott (Francis Scott) Fitzgerald

Here he engaged a couple of rooms, dark and badly furnished.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The next day, the happy barbarian was distinguished above a crowd of recruits, dancing and exulting after the fashion of his country.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Jeffrey says: "Malcolm Graeme has too insignificant a part assigned him, considering the favor in which he is held both by Ellen and the author; and in bringing out the shaded and imperfect character of Roderick Dhu as a contrast to the purer virtue of his rival, Mr. Scott seems to have fallen into the common error of making him more interesting than him whose virtues he was intended to set off, and converted the villain of the piece in some measure into its hero.
— from The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott

Therefore more than melancholy, quite mad, brute beasts, and void of reason, so Chrysostom contends; or rather dead and buried alive, as [437] Philo Judeus concludes it for a certainty, of all such that are carried away with passions, or labour of any disease of the mind.
— from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

It was a rough, narrow trail, and led over an old lava flow--a black ocean which was tumbled into a thousand fantastic shapes--a wild chaos of ruin, desolation, and barrenness--a wilderness of billowy upheavals, of furious whirlpools, of miniature mountains rent asunder--of gnarled and knotted, wrinkled and twisted masses of blackness that mimicked branching roots, great vines, trunks of trees, all interlaced and mingled together: and all these weird shapes, all this turbulent panorama, all this stormy, far-stretching waste of blackness, with its thrilling suggestiveness of life, of action, of boiling, surging, furious motion, was petrified!--all stricken dead and cold in the instant of its maddest rioting!--fettered, paralyzed, and left to glower at heaven in impotent rage for evermore!
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

Concluding the series begun in the preceding illustrations, these Nazi leaflets tried to lower American morale by combining oestrum, resentment, discouragement and inter-American hatred.
— from Psychological Warfare by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger

A nun demure, of lowly port; Or sprightly maiden of Love’s court, In thy simplicity the sport Of all temptations; A queen in crown of rubies drest; A starveling in a scanty vest; Are all, as seem to suit thee best, Thy appellations.
— from The Every-day Book and Table Book. v. 2 (of 3) or Everlasting Calendar of Popular Amusements, Sports, Pastimes, Ceremonies, Manners, Customs and Events, Incident to Each of the Three Hundred and Sixty-five Days, in past and Present Times; Forming a Complete History of the Year, Month, and Seasons, and a Perpetual Key to the Almanac by William Hone

I put it to the ladies whether this was not a case of real distress, after all my hardships and my constancy, to be put off with such an excuse?
— from Frank Mildmay; Or, the Naval Officer by Frederick Marryat

There is another topic which we feel obliged to comment on, regretting deeply, as we do, that the President has given us occasion for it, and believing, as we would fain do, that his own better judgment will lead him to abstain from it in the future.
— from The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V Political Essays by James Russell Lowell

The Parish Church of Riva deserves attention; it is really a handsome building, and has much of interest in its interior.
— from Tyrol and Its People by Clive Holland

Regiments restrain the zeal of the crowd to obtain the few posts of vantage from which the consecration of the waters is visible, and keep open a lane for the carriages of royalty, diplomats, and invited guests.
— from Russian Rambles by Isabel Florence Hapgood

I thought she'd feel hurt if we didn't take her, after she'd been telling us girls all these fairy tales about her native land where she loved to milk twenty cows at three A.M. I thought she'd simply leap at the chance of rural delights, and now she isn't going along with us at all.
— from Greenacre Girls by Izola L. (Izola Louise) Forrester

Their leader Stephen had become so great that there was provided for him a carriage, decorated with flags and tapestries of brilliant colors, and over him was a canopy of rich draperies as a protection from the heat of the sun.
— from The Historical Child Paidology; The Science of the Child by Oscar Chrisman

That his military abilities were of the very highest order, may be judged of by the fact that, with the resources of the poor monarchy of Sweden, not at that period containing two millions of inhabitants, he entirely defeated a coalition of Russia, Denmark, and Poland, headed by the vast capacity and persevering energy of Peter the Great, and numbering not less than forty millions of subjects under its various sovereigns.
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 by Various

The mounted infantry man, British or Indian, a stone or two heavier, and weighted with rifle, ammunition, and accoutrements, on an underbred twelve-hand pony, had no chance of riding down a "Bo."
— from The Pacification of Burma by C. H. T. (Charles Haukes Todd) Crosthwaite

But miserable was my disappointment: I was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation; English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, Churchman and Sectary, Freethinker and Religionist, Patriot and Courtier, united in their rage against the man who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I. and the Earl of Strafford; and after the first ebullitions of their fury were over, what was still more mortifying, the book seemed to sink into oblivion.
— from Life and Correspondence of David Hume, Volume 1 (of 2) by John Hill Burton