He took her maidenhead, and then she crept into his bed every night.
— from The Romance of Lust: A classic Victorian erotic novel by Anonymous

New Zealand, for instance, with its lofty mountains and diversified stations, extending over 780 miles of latitude, together with the outlying islands of Auckland, Campbell and Chatham, contain altogether only 960 kinds of flowering plants; if we compare this moderate number with the species which swarm over equal areas in Southwestern Australia or at the Cape of Good Hope, we must admit that some cause, independently of different physical conditions, has given rise to so great a difference in number.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition by Charles Darwin

THE MILLION DEAD, TOO, SUMM'D UP The dead in this war—there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and valleys and battle-fields of the south—Virginia, the Peninsula—Malvern hill and Fair Oaks—the banks of the Chickahominy—the terraces of Fredericksburgh—Antietam bridge—the grisly ravines of Manassas—the bloody promenade of the Wilderness—the varieties of the strayed dead, (the estimate of the War department is 25,000 national soldiers kill'd in battle and never buried at all, 5,000 drown'd—15,000 inhumed by strangers, or on the march in haste, in hitherto unfound localities—2,000 graves cover'd by sand and mud by Mississippi freshets, 3,000 carried away by caving-in of banks, &c.,)—Gettysburgh, the West, Southwest—Vicksburgh—Chattanooga—the trenches of Petersburgh—the numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere—the crop reap'd by the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery, inflammations—and blackest and loathesomest of all, the dead and living burial-pits, the prison-pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle, &c., (not Dante's pictured hell and all its woes, its degradations, filthy torments, excell'd those prisons)—the dead, the dead, the dead— our dead—or South or North, ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)—or East or West—Atlantic coast or Mississippi valley—somewhere they crawl'd to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of hills—(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons, bleach'd bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are occasionally found yet)—our young men once so handsome and so joyous, taken from us—the son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend from the dear friend—the clusters of camp graves, in Georgia, the Carolinas, and in Tennessee—the single graves left in the woods or by the roadside, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)—the corpses floated down the rivers, and caught and lodged, (dozens, scores, floated down the upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the pursuit of Lee, following Gettysburgh)—some lie at the bottom of the sea—the general million, and the special cemeteries in almost all the States—the infinite dead—(the land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes' exhalation in Nature's chemistry distill'd, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)—not only Northern dead leavening Southern soil—thousands, aye tens of thousands, of Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

Your submitting, on my account, to such cruel insults from my father, lays me under an obligation I shall ever own.
— from History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

He did not know that his mode of behavior in relation to Kitty had a definite character, that it is courting young girls with no intention of marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil actions common among brilliant young men such as he was.
— from Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

He whistled for a few minutes, and then said crustily: “ I am going to sea— you may go home if you think proper.”
— from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven Edition Table Of Contents And Index Of The Five Volumes by Edgar Allan Poe

They hung to the horses’s tails, clung to their manes and the stirrups, closed in on every aide in scorn of dangerous hoofs—and out of their infidel throats, with one accord, burst an agonizing and most infernal chorus: “Howajji, bucksheesh!
— from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

But it is the next step in the employment of co-ordinates which is of special interest and use to the morphologist; and this step consists in the alteration, or “transformation,” of our system of co-ordinates and in the study of the cor­re­spon­ding transformation of the curve or figure inscribed in the co-ordinate network.
— from On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

In church doorways we may see certain voussoirs of the arch allowed to project from the hollow of [121] the concave moulding, and their surfaces carved into bosses of ornament; while, again, the doorway is emphasized by the recurring lines of the mouldings, with their contrasting planes of light and shadow, and the point of their spring is marked [122] by a carved lion, controlled in the design of its contour by the squareness of the block of stone upon which it is carved (see illustration, p. 121 ).
— from Line and Form (1900) by Walter Crane

And the striking contrast between the plain, mean exteriors of the oldest Roman churches—rough, time-stained, and unfinished since their erection—and their gorgeous interiors, with their forests of columns separating the aisles, and the series of richly-sculptured and brilliantly-frescoed chapels, all blazing with gold and marble,—a contrast that reminds us of the surprising difference between the outside of a common clumsy geode lying in the mud, and the sparkling crystals in the drusic cavity at the heart of it,—would lead us to infer that the outer walls were raised in haste to secure the valuable materials on the spot, before they could be otherwise appropriated.
— from Roman Mosaics; Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood by Hugh Macmillan

'When Doll told me all this,' she concluded, 'I had no longer any doubt that the man whom they had succeeded in placing in Newgate was none other than yourself, my poor Will—so I took a coach and drove here.'
— from The Orange Girl by Walter Besant

Connell scattered his men and they stole carefully into the fastnesses, finding on all sides evidences of hasty departure.
— from Jane Cable by George Barr McCutcheon

For some months a stubborn antagonism to the Providence who ordained the sufferings of life had been steadily increasing in me, and this sullen challenge, "Is God good?"
— from Autobiographical Sketches by Annie Besant

So the chief economic value of the earlier machinery applied to spinning consisted in the fact that it enabled each spinner to work an increased number of spindles, performing with each the same simple process as that which he formerly performed with one.
— from The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production by J. A. (John Atkinson) Hobson

Lord Hemsworth, on his knees before her, fastening her skates, asked her some question relating to a strap, and, looking up as she did not answer, marvelled at the splendid colour in her cheek, and the flash in the eyes looking beyond him over his head.
— from Diana Tempest, Volume III by Mary Cholmondeley