Botany is an active science, and the discoveries of the torrid zone might enrich the herbal of Dioscorides with two thousand plants.
— 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

However wayward and tigerish and undomestic she may be, she then desires to be the acknowledged possession and belonging of the man, even to her own dishonour.
— from Three Weeks by Elinor Glyn

and, in casting up those wonderful accounts, which he kept by notches on a tally-stick, nothing was more amusing than to witness his bewilderment and confusion, the inconceivable blunders he would make, even to his own disadvantage, all sure to end at last in the heart-spoken confession that it was “clean beyand him,” and “he 'd leave it all to your honor; pay just what ye plaze, and long life to ye!” Is it that women have some shrewd perception of character denied to men?
— from Barrington. Volume 1 (of 2) by Charles James Lever

The door swung open, revealing the sanitized-for-your-protection brightness of the bathroom, the water sloshed on the floor by Mimi earlier, the heaps of damp towels.
— from Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow

Thus a double and treble wrong is done, and the notion of a curse working upon successive generations is subordinate to the conception of the injury which a man entails to his own descendants by forcing on them a stately house founded upon a sin.
— from A Study of Hawthorne by George Parsons Lathrop

Although deciding that Edward Drysdale was unfit for the naval profession, he did not think that the failure of the young man's physical nerve in one of the most murderous encounters that had occurred during the war, was attributable to deficiency of true courage, and as a proof that it was not, Captain Otway mentioned that the young man had jumped overboard during half a gale of wind, and when night was falling, and saved, at much peril to himself, a seaman's life.
— from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. V, No. XXV, June, 1852 by Various

[112] "I don't know 'zackly, but I reckon I let out a yell an' shut my eyes to hide out dat awful sight.
— from The Boy Chums Cruising in Florida Waters or, The Perils and Dangers of the Fishing Fleet by Wilmer M. (Wilmer Mateo) Ely

The second is that to bring the adolescent mind face to face with sexual matters engenders the habit of dwelling upon the sexual passion, and in that may lie spiritual havoc and physical ruin.
— from Sex-education A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its relation to human life by Maurice A. (Maurice Alpheus) Bigelow

Bands of music enlivened the hours of day, and afforded opportunity for dancing in the evening.
— from Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field: Southern Adventure in Time of War. Life with the Union Armies, and Residence on a Louisiana Plantation by Thomas Wallace Knox