Under the influence of these initiators Gilles de Rais signed a letter to the devil in a meadow near Machecoul asking him for "knowledge, power, and riches," and offering in exchange anything that might be asked of him with the exception of his life or his soul.
— from Secret Societies And Subversive Movements by Nesta Helen Webster

At this point a ring at the bell sounds in the hall.
— from The Bet, and other stories by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

The king of the Goths, who no longer dissembled his appetite for plunder and revenge, appeared in arms under the walls of the capital; and the trembling senate, without any hopes of relief, prepared, by a desperate resistance, to defray the ruin of their country.
— 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

Any one and every one is owner of the library, (indeed he or she alone is owner,) who can read the same through all the varieties of tongues and subjects and styles, and in whom they enter with ease, and make supple and powerful and rich and large.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

All being made ready with much labor, and the hour come, the sultan was aroused in the dead of the night, and the sharpened axe that was to sever the rope from the great iron ring was put into his hand, and he struck with it, and the rope parted and rushed away, and the ceiling fell.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

95 There day by day the holy train Performed all rites as rules ordain.
— from The Rámáyan of Válmíki, translated into English verse by Valmiki

The latter belongs to this chapter, and they are such medicines, whose nature is to strengthen the heart, and fortify it against the poison, as Rue, Angelica, &c.
— from The Complete Herbal To which is now added, upwards of one hundred additional herbs, with a display of their medicinal and occult qualities physically applied to the cure of all disorders incident to mankind: to which are now first annexed, the English physician enlarged, and key to Physic. by Nicholas Culpeper

And, next, in doing this he is agonising his mother to no purpose, and in despite of her piteous and repeated appeals for mercy.
— from Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. (Andrew Cecil) Bradley

Nor even at the risk of meriting the charge of absurdly believing in enchantments, can I restrain the admission that sometimes, even now, when leaving the crowded city to wander out July and August among the Adirondack Mountains, far from the influences of towns and proportionally nigh to the mysterious ones of nature; when at such times I sit me down in the mossy head of some deep-wooded gorge, surrounded by prostrate trunks of blasted pines and recall, as in a dream, my other and far-distant rovings in the baked heart of the charmed isles; and remember the sudden glimpses of dusky shells, and long languid necks protruded [pg 296] from the leafless thickets; and again have beheld the vitreous inland rocks worn down and grooved into deep ruts by ages and ages of the slow draggings of tortoises in quest of pools of scanty water; I can hardly resist the feeling that in my time I have indeed slept upon evilly enchanted ground.
— from The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville

Such systems, such sciences, can subsist nowhere but in those incorporated societies for education, whose prosperity and revenue are in a great measure independent of their industry.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

As St. Mark was with St. Luke and St. Paul at Rome, and acted as St. Peter's interpreter, St. Luke had the opportunity of learning from him many facts concerning St. Peter.
— from The Books of the New Testament by Leighton Pullan

He convoked the various antagonistic worlds of philosophy and religion, and they all appeared, in the guise of a fleshless shape, like that in which art embodies Time,—an old man bearing in one hand a scythe, in the other a broken globe, the human universe.
— from Seraphita by Honoré de Balzac

does the day grow dim? Rose, will she open the crimson core Of her heart to him? Above his head a tangle glows Of wine-red roses, blushes, snows, Closed buds and buds that unclose, Leaves, and moss, and prickles too; His hand shook as he plucked a rose, And the rose dropped dew.
— from Poems by Christina Georgina Rossetti

The confusion is increased by the unexpected turn given to the character of Posa, and reaches a climax when we learn from the Grand Inquisitor that he has been pulling all the strings from first to last, and that the entire tragedy was foreordained in the secret archives of the Holy Office.
— from The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller by Calvin Thomas

For, vast though its population and resources are, they cannot be made available for war except under the impulse of a great enthusiasm simultaneously dominating all its members, like that which has led them all to share in this war; and if its directors were to undertake an aggressive and conquering policy, not only could they not count upon general support, but they would probably bring about the disruption of the Empire.
— from The Character of the British Empire by Ramsay Muir

In a couple of hours they left behind them the worst of the gorges and cañons, flinty peaks and ridges, and dropped down into a long crooked valley floored with dry sand ankle deep and grown over with a gray shrub plainly akin to California sage brush.
— from Daughter of the Sun A Tale of Adventure by Jackson Gregory

Sure, 'tis the same thing as pearls and rubies, and what Mandarins and Emperors wear.
— from In the Misty Seas: A Story of the Sealers of Behring Strait by Harold Bindloss

I shall never ," continued he, in a low tone, and as if talking to himself, " never forget it; it recalled too vividly ," and here, methought, his eye glanced at the veiled picture, when, suddenly starting up, he fetched from one of the shelves the volume containing that play, and read aloud some
— from The International Magazine, Volume 4, No. 5, December 1851 by Various

Were the mental culture of any people founded solely on a dead, cold, abstract science, to the exclusion of all poetry; such a mere mathematical people—with minds thus sharpened and pointed by mathematical discipline, would and could never possess a rich and various intellectual existence; nor even probably ever attain to a living science, or a true science of life.
— from The Philosophy of History, Vol. 1 of 2 by Friedrich von Schlegel