The gulf of rock yawns,—you can't gaze a minute Without an awful wish to plunge within it.
— from Don Juan by Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron

And so the tocsin clangs, and Dragoons gallop; and can do nothing, having gallopped: National Guards stream in like the gathering of ravens: your exploding Thunder-chain, falling Avalanche, or what else we liken it to, does play, with a vengeance,—up now as far as Stenai and Bouille himself.
— from The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle

You are a martyr, my Borenka, I am ruining you, and I shall go on ruining you. . . .
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

He had two ladies staying with him: his niece Annabella, a fine dashing girl, or rather young woman,—of some five-and-twenty, too great a flirt to be married, according to her own assertion, but greatly admired by the gentlemen, who universally pronounced her a splendid woman; and her gentle cousin, Milicent Hargrave, who had taken a violent fancy to me, mistaking me for something vastly better than I was.
— from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

One morning at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter to his dictation, he came and bent over me, and said—“Jane, have you a glittering ornament round your neck?”
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

Mrs. Highcamp was weaving a garland of roses, yellow and red.
— from The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories by Kate Chopin

A narrow fellow in the grass Occasionally rides; You may have met him, — did you not, His notice sudden is.
— from Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete by Emily Dickinson

Above twenty of those clad in this costume were full-grown girls, or rather young women; it suited them ill, and gave an air of oddity even to the prettiest.
— from Jane Eyre: An Autobiography by Charlotte Brontë

"His grace only returned yesterday, and is very tired, sir," he said.
— from Leslie's Loyalty by Charles Garvice

Consequently, in April 1817, a literary periodical called the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine was started by two gentlemen of some experience in literary matters, with the assistance of Mr. William Blackwood, an enterprising Edinburgh publisher, whose reputation had grown of recent years to considerable dimensions.
— from James Frederick Ferrier by Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane

Grand old Ramsey, you are right now; if not, many of us have a poor chance.
— from A History of the Durham Miner's Association 1870-1904 by John Wilson

She who sat by the cradled bed of childhood, "the first, the last, the faithfulest of friends," she, the guardian of infancy, is the loving and never to be forgotten guide of riper years.
— from Woman on the American Frontier A Valuable and Authentic History of the Heroism, Adventures, Privations, Captivities, Trials, and Noble Lives and Deaths of the "Pioneer Mothers of the Republic" by William Worthington Fowler

She could not, however, stand alone where all others went in pairs or parties; so she approached a group of her own scholars, great girls, or rather young women, who were standing watching some hundreds of the younger children playing at blind-man's buff.
— from Shirley by Charlotte Brontë

Go on repeating your platitudes, and by the time you find you are cursing your own stupid persistence, you may swear you have made a convert to your opinions.
— from Lord Kilgobbin by Charles James Lever