The wall, supported by slender and temporary props, hung tottering in the air; but Dagisteus delayed the attack till he had secured a specific recompense; and the town was relieved before the return of his messenger from Constantinople.
— 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 remained only his memory and his Intended—and I wanted to give that up, too, to the past, in a way—to surrender personally all that remained of him with me to that oblivion which is the last word of our common fate.
— from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

His reinstation of her mother had been chiefly for the girl's sake, and the fruition of the whole scheme was such dust and ashes as this.
— from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Meleager, then, stayed at home with Cleopatra, nursing the anger which he felt by reason of his mother's curses.
— from The Iliad by Homer

Yes, and I would have, but Bitas slave girl commenced grinding in the court, just at the wrong moment; she has reduced our hand mill nearly to powder by grinding day and night for fear she might have four obols to pay for having her own sharpened.
— from The Satyricon — Complete by Petronius Arbiter

" "Gilbert's brother, Charles the Stammerer, was a pious prince, but, having early in life lost his father, Pepin the Mad, who died as a result of his mental infirmity, he wielded the supreme power with all the arrogance of a man who has not been subjected to discipline in his youth, so much so that, whenever he saw a man in a town whose face he did not remember, he would massacre the whole place, to the last inhabitant.
— from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

Towards the close of his life, he gave some manifest indications that he repented of his marriage with Agrippina, and his adoption of Nero.
— from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Complete by Suetonius

Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity.
— from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

My recollections of her merge somewhat, in my memory, with those of my own sister Rosalie.
— from My Life — Volume 1 by Richard Wagner

And I think that I have an indistinct recollection of his mentioning a complex Cretic rhythm; also a dactylic or heroic, and he arranged them in some manner which I do not quite understand, making the rhythms equal in the rise and fall of the foot, long and short alternating; and, unless I am mistaken, he spoke of an iambic as well as of a trochaic rhythm, and assigned to them short and long quantities.
— from The Republic by Plato

[209] He was really a lugubrious person, though on rare occasions he made a good thing, such, for instance, as the statuette of St. Jerome, belonging to M. Gustave Dreyfus.
— from Donatello, by Lord Balcarres by Crawford, David Lindsay, Earl of

Instantly Mahomed clapped his hand roughly over her mouth.
— from The Carpet from Bagdad by Harold MacGrath

But he would not give up his watch, which was in a way, he said to himself, his duty, if—— He followed the girl's movements with disturbed attention, and would hurry into the Park to ride by her, to shut out an unsuitable cavalier, and make little lectures to her as to her behaviour with an embarrassed anxiety which Bice could not understand but which amused more than it benefited the Contessa, to whom this result of her mystification was the best fun in the world.
— from Sir Tom by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

Henrietta tried to exclaim, to inquire, but her lips would not frame one word, her tongue would not leave the roof of her mouth.
— from Henrietta's Wish; Or, Domineering by Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge

They, to whom that Name has been entrusted, by their reception of His mercies are bound to ring it out to all the world.
— from The Expositor's Bible: The Psalms, Vol. 3 Psalms XC.-CL. by Alexander Maclaren

In a quarter of an hour after I had got rid of him M. la Chevardiere called on me, and introduced M. Billaud, the French Consul at Stettin.
— from Complete Project Gutenberg Collection of Memoirs of Napoleon by Various

Rome owes her magnificence to the despotic popes.
— from The Evolution of States by J. M. (John Mackinnon) Robertson

The Senator now claims the merit, and is anxious to sustain the responsibility, of having moved to reject this appropriation.
— from Life of James Buchanan, Fifteenth President of the United States. v. 1 (of 2) by George Ticknor Curtis

Boris Sidis has told the story of a man who used to have a disturbance of the bowels at every new moon, as the result of his memory, acting unconsciously, reminding him of his mother's habit of giving him a purgative about that time.
— from Psychotherapy Including the History of the Use of Mental Influence, Directly and Indirectly, in Healing and the Principles for the Application of Energies Derived from the Mind to the Treatment of Disease by James J. (James Joseph) Walsh

He tried to call out, but his tongue seemed to cleave to the roof of his mouth, and his faint cry was swallowed up in the deep and oppressive silence.
— from Valeria, the Martyr of the Catacombs: A Tale of Early Christian Life in Rome by W. H. (William Henry) Withrow