I have generally found the nest of the sedge-warbler on the ground, on a tuft of coarse grass or sedge; the nest of the reed-warbler is supported on four or five tall reeds, and is made of the seed-branches of the reeds and long grass wound round and round; it is made deep, so that the little eggs are not tossed out when the reeds are shaken by the high winds.
— from Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children by W. (William) Houghton

Pure, perfectly beneficent, lived Edith, and never thought of any thing or person, but for its own sake.
— from Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Volume II by Margaret Fuller

‘And these lovely grassy paths,’ she said, ‘that lead everywhere and nowhere, tempting one to travel on in search of something unknown, but with ever, on either side, more sprouting wheat, more pendent vines, more crookedly-branching fig-stems, more tulips, more windflowers, more mountains, more glimpses of towers and belfries in the glittering distance.
— from Lamia's Winter-Quarters by Alfred Austin

He had, indeed, arrived at that age when gravity is at least excusable; although no trace of infirmity appeared in his portly figure and strong-sounding tread.
— from Discipline by Mary Brunton

From Miriam he would ask herself, with all her majesty and beauty, for he had borne the solitude of the camp long enough, and now that on his return no mother's arms opened to welcome him, he felt for the first time the desolation of a single life.
— from Joshua — Volume 1 by Georg Ebers

And in another minute the room was spinning round me; but the wording of the telegram was clear enough: "Come home first train Maisie Dunlop been unaccountably missing since last evening and no trace of her.
— from Dead Men's Money by J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

Conference had made a new law, establishing a new test of orthodoxy, and no one could be taken out as a travelling preacher now, who could not subscribe to the doctrine of the Eternal Sonship, as taught by Richard Watson and Jabez Bunting, in opposition to Adam Clarke.
— from Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again A Life Story by Joseph Barker

For the most delightful moments of the student's course is when he rambles person [ 313 ] ally among the ruins and remnants of long gone ages; sometimes painful are such sights, even deeply so; but never to a righteous mind are they unprofitable, much less exerting a narrowing tendency on the mind, or cramping the gushing of human feeling; for cold, indeed, must be the heart that can behold strong walls tottering to decay, and fretted vaults, mutilated and dismantled of their pristine beauty; that can behold the proud strongholds of baronial power and feudal tyranny, the victims of the lichen or creeping parasites of the ivy tribe; cold, I say, must be the heart that can see such things, and draw no lesson from them.
— from Bibliomania in the Middle Ages by F. Somner (Frederick Somner) Merryweather