He himself sat down and stared helplessly into the future.
— from The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

A servant led in the favourite bard Demodocus, and set him in the midst of the company, near one of the bearing-posts supporting the cloister, that he might lean against it.
— from The Odyssey Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original by Homer

and, some days after, she had it again christened by a minister; the King, and Lord of Oxford, and Duchesse of Suffolk, being witnesses: and christened with a proviso, that it had not already been christened.
— from The Diary of Samuel Pepys — Complete by Samuel Pepys

It is, sir, favorable to this view of the designs of the slave power, that both the whig and the democratic party bent lower, sunk deeper, and strained harder, in their conventions, preparatory to the late presidential election, to meet the demands of the slavery party than at any previous time in their history.
— from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass

Katerina Ivanovna, however, put off expressing her feelings for the time and contented herself with treating her coldly, though she decided inwardly that she would certainly have to put Amalia Ivanovna down and set her in her proper place, for goodness only knew what she was fancying herself.
— from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“You had better go down and see him, Ivan.
— from The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie

"The difficulty of descending a steep hill in wet weather may be imagined," he says, "The heavy rains had made it (the descent south of Thornhill) a complete puddle which afforded no sure footing to man or beast.
— from Toronto of Old Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario by Henry Scadding

‘Two friends o’ mine, as works the Oxford Road, and is up to all kinds o’ games, has got the deputy-shepherd safe in tow, Sammy; and ven he does come to the Ebenezer Junction (vich he’s sure to do: for they’ll see him to the door, and shove him in, if necessary), he’ll be as far gone in rum-and-water, as ever he wos at the Markis o’ Granby, Dorkin’, and that’s not sayin’ a little neither.’
— from The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Now, my young friends, I daresay that you will think I am very young to lecture you; but remember that I have been round the world, and I should have been very dull and stupid had I not reaped some advantage from the voyage.
— from A Voyage round the World A book for boys by William Henry Giles Kingston

In 1669, eleven years after the death of Judge Fell, she married George Fox, whom she survived eleven years, dying at Swartmoor Hall in February 1702, nearly eighty-eight years old.
— from Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 by John Roby

o' the Gleam,—Tom, with his clothes torn and covered with dust,—Tom, changed suddenly to a haggard and terrible unlikeness of himself, his face drawn and withered, its healthy bronze colour whitened to a sickly livid hue,—Tom, with such an expression of dazed and stupid horror in his eyes as to give the impression that he was heavily in drink, and dangerous.
— from The Treasure of Heaven: A Romance of Riches by Marie Corelli

"Mr. Ingpen has lived away from the district, and so have I. You haven't.
— from These Twain by Arnold Bennett

And now, with a clearness and a fairness that astonished Kearney, this strange-looking fellow proceeded to prove how he had weighed the whole difficulty, and saw how, in the nice balance of the two great parties who would contest the seat, the Repealer would step in and steal votes from both.
— from Lord Kilgobbin by Charles James Lever

And she always let me look at the arm, as I had been first doctor; and she held it up in a graceful manner, curving at the elbow, and with a sweep of white roundness going to a wrist the size of my thumb or so, and without any thimble-top standing forth, such as even our Annie had.
— from Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor by R. D. (Richard Doddridge) Blackmore

There is one member of the family (Drosophyllum Lusitanicum), an almost shrubby plant, which grows on dry and sunny hills in Portugal and Morocco—which the villagers call "the flycatcher," and hang up in their cottages for the purpose—the glandular tentacles of which have wholly lost their powers of movement, if they ever had any, but which still secrete, digest, and absorb, being roused to great activity by the contact of any animal matter.
— from Darwiniana; Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism by Asa Gray

So, to find Mount Dunstan rushing down a steep hill into this thing, was edifying.
— from The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Till then, hope had cheered my days and shed her influence on my slumbers; she then deserted me—and each succeeding day was marked with misery!
— from The Mysterious Wanderer; Vol. II by Sophia Reeve