Nevertheless, after several attempts at conversation with Olivain he foresaw that many days passed thus would prove exceedingly dull; and the count’s agreeable voice, his gentle and persuasive eloquence, recurred to his mind at the various towns through which they journeyed and about which he had no longer any one to give him those interesting details which he would have drawn from Athos, the most amusing and the best informed of guides.
— from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas

Officers and Trustees: John W. Gardner (CFR); Morris Hadley; James A. Perkins (CFR); Robert F. Bacher; Caryl P. Haskins (CFR); C. D. Jackson (CFR); Devereux C. Josephs (CFR); Nicholas Kelley (CFR); Malcolm A. MacIntyre (CFR); Margaret Carnegie Miller; Frederick Osborn (CFR); Gwilym A. Price; Elihu Root, Jr. (CFR); Frederick Sheffield; Charles Spofford (CFR); Charles Allen Thomas.
— from The Invisible Government by Dan Smoot

We had but a glimpse of her in her beauty and innocence, but at last she rises before us in all the moral silence of a ghost, with fixed, glazed, and passionless eyes, revealing death, judgment, and eternity.—Professor Wilson.
— from Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol. 1 A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer

The Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Hindoos, Gauls, and Peruvians, each regarded themselves as the inventors of astronomy, an honour which Josephus deprives them of by ascribing it to the antediluvian patriarchs.
— from Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects by Caithness, James Sinclair, 14th earl of

En général, ces granits en couches horizontals redent ce pays charmant; car, quoiqu'il y ait, comme je l'ai dit, des couches qui forment des saillies, cependant elles sont pour l'ordinaire arrangées en gradins, ou en grandes assises posées en reculement les unes derrière les autres, et les bords de ces gradins sont couverts de la plus belle verdure, et d'arbres distribués de la manière la plus pittoresque.
— from Modern Painters, Volume 4 (of 5) by John Ruskin

Twenty-four Knights of the Bath were created, and, with all the ancient pomp and splendour—for Henry had a keen eye for the picturesque—the usual procession from Tower to Westminster duly impressed, by its glitter, a populace ever ready to acclaim a coronation, in the too-human hope that the new will prove better than the old.
— from The Tower of London by Arthur Poyser

Nevertheless French chemists have amply proved by actual experiment that plants can grow and produce excellent results without any aid from the soil at all.
— from Science in Arcady by Grant Allen