Then do I bid burn scented galbanum, And, honey-streams through reeden troughs instilled, Challenge and cheer their flagging appetite To taste the well-known food; and it shall boot To mix therewith the savour bruised from gall, And rose-leaves dried, or must to thickness boiled By a fierce fire, or juice of raisin-grapes From Psithian vine, and with its bitter smell Centaury, and the famed Cecropian thyme.
— from The Georgics by Virgil

It was a very quiet winter, yet a very pleasant one to Christie, for she felt herself loved and trusted, saw that she suited, and believed that she was doing good, as women best love to do it, by bestowing sympathy and care with generous devotion.
— from Work: A Story of Experience by Louisa May Alcott

We must command the soul not to withdraw and entertain itself apart, not to despise and abandon the body (neither can she do it but by some apish counterfeit), but to unite herself close to it, to embrace, cherish, assist, govern, and advise it, and to bring it back and set it into the true way when it wanders; in sum, to espouse and be a husband to it, so that their effects may not appear to be diverse and contrary, but uniform and concurring.
— from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete by Michel de Montaigne

A working woman, christened Rachael, after a long illness once again appearing at the ringing of the Factory bell, and passing to and fro at the set hours, among the Coketown Hands; a woman of pensive beauty, always dressed in black, but sweet-tempered and serene, and even cheerful; who, of all the people in the place, alone appeared to have compassion on a degraded, drunken wretch of her own sex, who was sometimes seen in the town secretly begging of her, and crying to her; a woman working, ever working, but content to do it, and preferring to do it as her natural lot, until she should be too old to labour any more? Did Louisa see this? Such a thing was to be.
— from Hard Times by Charles Dickens

“His parlor was draped in black, black silk embroidered in gold.
— from Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant by Guy de Maupassant

Again he says, "The world was mightily bent on addressing their requests and supplications, not to the Deity immediately, but by some Mediator between the Gods and men."
— from The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors; Or, Christianity Before Christ by Kersey Graves

"Liza, my dear, I was wrong ... forgive me, my dear," I began, but she squeezed my hand in her fingers so tightly that I felt I was saying the wrong thing and stopped.
— from White Nights and Other Stories The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Volume X by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I have well-authenticated cases in which men or women have committed suicide by hanging themselves, or taking poison, in the tops of high trees; by throwing themselves upon swiftly revolving circular saws; by exploding dynamite in their mouths; by thrusting red-hot pokers down their throats; by hugging red-hot stoves; by stripping themselves naked and allowing themselves to freeze to death on winter snow-drifts out of doors, or on piles of ice in refrigerator-cars; by lacerating their throats on barbed-wire fences; by drowning themselves head downward in barrels; by suffocating themselves head downward in chimneys; by diving into white-hot coke-ovens; by throwing themselves into craters of volcanoes; by shooting themselves with ingenious combinations of a rifle with a sewing-machine; by strangling themselves with their hair; by swallowing poisonous spiders; by piercing their hearts with corkscrews and darning-needles; by cutting their throats with hand-saws and sheep-shears; by hanging themselves with grape vines; by swallowing strips of under-clothing and buckles of suspenders; by forcing teams of horses to tear their heads off; by drowning themselves in vats of soft soap; by plunging into retorts of molten glass; by jumping into slaughter-house tanks of blood; by decapitation with home-made guillotines; and by self-crucifixion.
— from McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 by Various

Her thoughts were deep, vague, dreamy, invaded by both sides of every question.
— from Villa Rubein, and Other Stories by John Galsworthy

Nor does it bite between six o’clock and midnight.
— from Frenzied Fiction by Stephen Leacock

The silence of that depopulated plain, with its pathetic bits of ruin here and there—ruins, to be sure, identified and written down in books, but speaking for themselves with a more woeful and suggestive voice than can be uttered by any mere historical associations, through the very depths of their dumbness and loss of all distinction—went to the spectator’s heart.
— from A Son of the Soil by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

One type of construction, perhaps the earliest, is to clamp the wood-work together and beautifully decorate it by branching scrolls of iron-work.
— from Arts and Crafts Essays by Members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society by Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society

Ever since this Expedition Wurtzbourg has enjoy’d a profound Tranquillity; which has render’d 279.png 276 it so rich and powerful as it is at this Day: Its Buildings both sacred and profane, as I have already had the Honour to mention to you, are very magnificent, and its Cathedral is a vast great Building, which contains immense Wealth: All the Ornaments of the Altar, the Pulpit, and the Two great Candlesticks before the Altar, are of solid Silver, as are also several Statues of our Saviour, the Holy Virgin, and some Saints as big as the Life: Besides all this Wealth there are beautiful and magnificent Hangings in the Choir, which represent some Passages of the Old Testament History:
— from The Memoirs of Charles-Lewis, Baron de Pollnitz, Volume IV Being the Observations He Made in His Late Travels from Prussia thro' Germany, Italy, France, Flanders, Holland, England, &C. in Letters to His Friend. Discovering Not Only the Present State of the Chief Cities and Towns; but the Characters of the Principal Persons at the Several Courts. by Pöllnitz, Karl Ludwig, Freiherr von

In this, which is generally known as the Græco-Roman period, the interiors were decorated with paintings, the general scheme being based on an architectural setting, the wall areas being divided into bays by slender columns, sometimes by pilaster panels, with plinth, or dado, {41} frieze, and cornice, the prevailing colours being red, buff and black.
— from Design and Tradition A short account of the principles and historic development of architecture and the applied arts by Amor Fenn

There is an old-fashioned air about the house, combined with a great degree of comfort and a full attainment of all the objects which American travellers desire in baths, barber's shop, reading-room, 20 bar, and the like.
— from Hesperothen; Notes from the West, Vol. 1 (of 2) A Record of a Ramble in the United States and Canada in the Spring and Summer of 1881 by Russell, William Howard, Sir