Sitting with her on Sunday evening—a wet Sunday evening—the very time of all others when, if a friend is at hand, the heart must be opened, and everything told; no one else in the room, except his mother, who, after hearing an affecting sermon, had cried herself to sleep, it was impossible not to speak; and so, with the usual beginnings, hardly to be traced as to what came first, and the usual declaration that if she would listen to him for a few minutes, he should be very brief, and certainly never tax her kindness in the same way again; she need not fear a repetition; it would be a subject prohibited entirely: he entered upon the luxury of relating circumstances and sensations of the first interest to himself, to one of whose affectionate sympathy he was quite convinced.
— from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

They brought him also the friendship of Walter Scott, who, like others, regarded Crabbe as one of the first poets of the age.
— from English Literature Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World by William J. (William Joseph) Long

The duke came to himself slowly and like one recovering consciousness after a heavy sleep, and the duchess and all who had fallen prostrate about the garden did the same, with such demonstrations of wonder and amazement that they would have almost persuaded one that what they pretended so adroitly in jest had happened to them in reality.
— from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

She was entreated to give them as much of her time as possible, invited for every day and all day long, or rather claimed as part of the family; and, in return, she naturally fell into all her wonted ways of attention and assistance, and on Charles's leaving them together, was listening to Mrs Musgrove's history of Louisa, and to Henrietta's of herself, giving opinions on business, and recommendations to shops; with intervals of every help which Mary required, from altering her ribbon to settling her accounts; from finding her keys, and assorting her trinkets, to trying to convince her that she was not ill-used by anybody; which Mary, well amused as she generally was, in her station at a window overlooking the entrance to the Pump Room, could not but have her moments of imagining.
— from Persuasion by Jane Austen

The inhabitants of trading cities, by importing the improved manufactures and expensive luxuries of richer countries, afforded some food to the vanity of the great proprietors, who eagerly purchased them with great quantities of the rude produce of their own lands.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingled hope and pain.
— from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois

We had an adjourned cause in the Consistory that day—about excommunicating a baker who had been objecting in a vestry to a paving-rate—and as the evidence was just twice the length of Robinson Crusoe, according to a calculation I made, it was rather late in the day before we finished.
— from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

He would like to offer these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish but very enthusiastic belief in such a possibility,—a belief which never deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better-known pages of “The Overland Monthly,” he was able to demonstrate to a larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and the poem of the “Heathen Chinee.”
— from The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales With Condensed Novels, Spanish and American Legends, and Earlier Papers by Bret Harte

Howbeit, by reinvigorated confidence in himself and some conscientious industry, he managed to get together in a year six or eight of these sketches, which, in a volume called “The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches,” gave him that encouragement in America and England that has since seemed to justify him in swelling these records of a picturesque passing civilization into the compass of the present edition.
— from The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales With Condensed Novels, Spanish and American Legends, and Earlier Papers by Bret Harte

It was succeeded by an analytical phase, based upon the application to color of the scientific theories of light, of Rood, Chevreuil and Helmholtz.
— from Paul Gauguin, His Life and Art by John Gould Fletcher

Among his many works are: “The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches,” “The Heathen Chinee,” “Plain Language from Truthful James,” “Poems,” “East and West Poems,” “Echoes of the Foot-Hills,” “Poetical Works,” “Thankful Blossom,” “Drift from Two Shores,” “Flip and Other Stories,” “By Shore and Sedge,” “The Queen of the Pirate Isle,” “On the Frontier,” “Snow Bound at Eagle’s,” “Tales of the Argonauts and Other Sketches,” “A Waif of the Plains,” “Three Partners,” and “In the Hollow of the Hills.”
— from Through the Year with Famous Authors by Mabel Patterson

After numerous delays Mr. Arden had at length been presented to the living of Rundell Canonicorum, and in one of the last days of April Harriet Delavie had become his wife.
— from Love and Life: An Old Story in Eighteenth Century Costume by Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge

The Weekly Magazine of 1776 strongly recommends the art of lace-making as one calculated to flourish in Scotland, young girls beginning to learn at eight years of age, adding: "The directors of the hospital of Glasgow have already sent twenty-three girls to be taught by Madame Puteau, [1214] a native of Lisle, now residing at Renfrew; you will find the lace of Renfrew cheaper, as good and as neat as those imported from Brussels, Lisle, and Antwerp."
— from History of Lace by Palliser, Bury, Mrs.

I had rather live on raw clams and sea-weed.'
— from I've Been Thinking; or, the Secret of Success by A. S. (Azel Stevens) Roe

These diabolical and anti-social laws of Rome caused a Roman Catholic (Beauregard) to be the man chosen to fire the first 685 gun at Fort Sumter, against the flag of Liberty, on the 12th of April, 1861.
— from Fifty Years in the Church of Rome by Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy

"She was very rejected last night afther she coming in," said Johnny Connolly, manipulating as he spoke the length of rusty chain and bit of stick that fastened the door.
— from All on the Irish Shore: Irish Sketches by E. Oe. (Edith Oenone) Somerville

How came it that a composer, who had lovingly placed many splendid tributes upon the high altar of his art, was so estimated, by at least one responsible critic, as to merit severe castigation of such a character as this:— "Signor Verdi is the one prophet of Italian opera, and since this paragraph was penned, the waning of the coarse light of his star is pretty distinctly to be observed.
— from Verdi: Man and Musician His Biography with Especial Reference to His English Experiences by Frederick James Crowest

I lit out and lay around in barns and corn cribs, living on raw carrots and what eggs I found in the straw, till I guessed they must be tired looking for me, and then one morning early I crept out and scared an old black aunty who was feedin' chickens into fits.
— from On the Lightship by Herman Knickerbocker Vielé