The landscape spreads around with a kind of lyrical melancholy: a region which gives no exuberant assurance of being beautiful, but which, in its poverty, attunes the mind to melancholy; a region, however, which knows not of storms and loneliness, but is the peaceful dwelling of quiet and resigned men.
— from The History of Modern Painting, Volume 1 (of 4) Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century by Richard Muther

At a later date Greenland itself vanished from the ken of living men; and romance sported with the fancies suggested by its name as a fertile oasis of green pastures walled in by the ice and snows of its Arctic zone.
— from The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies by Wilson, Daniel, Sir

His adversary was no less forward; for setting spurs to his horse, which was much the swifter, he met Don Quixote so forcibly, before he had run half his career, that without making use of his lance, which it is thought he lifted up on purpose, he overthrew the Knight of La Mancha and Rozinante, both coming to the ground with a terrible fall.
— from The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

The kind old ladies made a real companion of him, and greatly relished his conversation; while at the same time, with their ideas on education, they would never have allowed him, even if he had been so inclined, to forget that he was a child.
— from Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. Volume 1 by George Otto Trevelyan