Eventually they saw a very placid and prosperous man in his shirt sleeves, with a face as round as the recently sunken moon, and rays of red whisker around the low arc of it, who was leaning on a post above the sluggish tide.
— from The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton

He was a very young man—not yet thirty—tall and dark, with broad cheek-bones and little eyes; his forefathers had probably come from one of the many alien races of Russia.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

And all in such free flowing outlines; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity; in its epic melody, and repose of reconcilement.
— from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle

The Arian ecclesiastics, who ventured to show themselves in the streets, were exposed to the most imminent danger of their lives; and Ambrose enjoyed the merit and reputation of rescuing his personal enemies from the hands of the enraged multitude.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

There were a number of shanties or huts, such as may be met with in the remote parts of the Bog of Allan—rude places with wattled walls, plastered with mud and roofs of rude thatch made from stable refuse—such places as one would not like to enter for any consideration, and which even in water-colour could only look picturesque if judiciously treated.
— from Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker

I am alone most of the time; every week, indeed almost every day, write some—reminiscences, essays, sketches, for the magazines; and read, or rather I should say dawdle over books and papers a good deal—spend half the day at that.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana

The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant's; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.
— from Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

And in Hélène’s salon, which Rumyántsev himself honored with his visits, regarding Hélène as a remarkably intelligent woman, they talked with the same ecstasy in 1812 as in 1808 of the “great nation” and the “great man,” and regretted our rupture with France, a rupture which, according to them, ought to be promptly terminated by peace.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

For, as cannot be too often repeated, a law is merely a record of recurrences; and in human affairs there can be no recurrences of the same aggregate either of causes or results.
— from Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics With Some of Their Applications by William Thomas Thornton

In December, 1803, as prudence did not appear to require a rigid adherence p. 207 to these regulations, it was agreed, at a church meeting, that the writing a paper should be left to the inclination of the candidates, and that they should in future be proposed at one meeting, and received, or rejected, at the next.
— from Brief Records of the Independent Church at Beccles, Suffolk Including biographical notices of its ministers,and some account of the rise of nonconformity in the East Anglian counties by S. Wilton (Samuel Wilton) Rix

You look and see a little lonely cloud, a breath of transparent mist; you look and see spaces sprinkled with diamond dust, or something even more awesome, reaches of radiance that seem to lie on the borderland of Eternity.
— from Lotus Buds by Amy Carmichael

It was Priya who persuaded me to withhold the revenue due on Lakhimpur, by promising me a reward of Rs. 2,000 if [ 112 ] the estate was auctioned.
— from Tales of Bengal by S. B. Banerjea

In fact, to anyone who had recently supped upon pork chops, or to the cheerful mind of the late lamented Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, of raw-head-and-bare-bones memory, this old tower and its clock might have appeared as the Ogre Time, or some huge Cyclopean ghoul of night, watching and gloating, with its burning eye, over the surely passing hours of the thousand slumberers lying for a season sweetly unconscious of the fleeting of life beneath, and counting each heave of breath which as it passes must bring all nearer and nearer to its maw.
— from The Sunny South: An Autumn in Spain and Majorca by John William Clayton

Why then are not miracles and revivals of religion constant and uniform?
— from Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3) by Augustus Hopkins Strong

He was an acceptable prisoner to Bauda, who had charge of the making and repair of roads and bridges, so Huahine was quickly sentenced and put to work with others who were paying their taxes by labor.
— from White Shadows in the South Seas by Frederick O'Brien

Similarly, most of the estimates— many already reversed, others reversible—by the men of that age, of each other, can be explained.
— from Byron by John Nichol