The thought unhallowed the memory of that last hour, made a mock of the word he had come to speak, and defiled even the reconciling silence upon which it fell.
— from The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

The St. Peter was tossed about on the turbulent and unfamiliar waters of the Aleutian archipelago, where the crew experienced an adventure so fraught with suffering and dire events that it is quite beyond compare in the history of discoveries.
— from Vitus Bering: the Discoverer of Bering Strait by Peter Lauridsen

Then the skillful statesmen and diplomatists (especially Talleyrand, who managed to sit down in a particular chair before anyone else and thereby extended the frontiers of France) talked in Vienna and by these conversations made the nations happy or unhappy.
— from War and Peace by Tolstoy, Leo, graf

'This is not the conduct I should have expected from you, sir;' said she, 'I did not expect to see you in my house, after you had been informed, that your visits were no longer agreeable, much less, that you would seek a clandestine interview with my niece, and that she would grant one.' Valancourt, perceiving it necessary to vindicate Emily from such a design, explained, that the purpose of his own visit had been to request an interview with Montoni, and he then entered upon the subject of it, with the tempered spirit which the sex, rather than the respectability, of Madame Montoni, demanded.
— from The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Ward Radcliffe

I began to watch them in a stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like madness.
— from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

If he were not a thoroughly selfish and altogether wilful person, but very much the reverse, it was not the fault of his parents, but rather the operation of a benignant nature that had bestowed on him a generous spirit and a tender heart, though accompanied with a dangerous susceptibility that made him the child and creature of impulse, and seemed to set at defiance even the course of time to engraft on his nature any quality of prudence.
— from Sybil, Or, The Two Nations by Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield

A number of such texts, apart from their linguistic importance, will serve as documents embodying the native ideas without any foreign admixture, and it will also show the long way which lies between the crude native statement and its explicit, ethnographic presentation.
— from Argonauts of the Western Pacific An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea by Bronislaw Malinowski

The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

Such a diversion, even though it may seem to be pretty hard work, represents a real mental rest because the part of the brain that is usually occupied gets its rest, the blood being diverted to other parts of the brain.
— from Religion And Health by James J. (James Joseph) Walsh

The origin of evil, the [16] ineradicable tendency of the human heart to sin and do evil, the mournful spectacle of ruin and desolation in the moral world, and the future life are the same inscrutable mysteries to us as to them.
— from The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 Address Delivered by Daniel Davenport, of Bridgeport, Conn. by Daniel Davenport

For the same reason, we may warn the geologist to be on his guard, and not hastily to assume that the temperature of the earth in the present era is a type of that which most usually obtains, since he contemplates far mightier alterations in the position of land and sea, at different epochs, than those which now cause the climate of Europe to differ from that of other countries in the same parallels.
— from Principles of Geology or, The Modern Changes of the Earth and its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology by Lyell, Charles, Sir

'Surely,' said he, 'some rose of Paradise hath found a soul and drifted earthward to blossom here.'
— from The Little Colonel's House Party by Annie F. (Annie Fellows) Johnston

Suddenly upon the night air, however, there came now another sound, silencing and deadening all else--a sound that subdued and deadened even the clatter of harness and accoutrements, the voices of the men, the songs of the birds of night.
— from The Scourge of God: A Romance of Religious Persecution by John Bloundelle-Burton

It is generally useless to try to shoot a double, even though a dozen easy shots are in the air at once; and yet, occasionally, on a day when Koos-ey-oonek is busy elsewhere, it may happen that the birds flush across a wide, bare space.
— from The Killer by Stewart Edward White

His father was a small farmer in Skye, and, dying early, the family emigrated to America.
— from The Monkey That Would Not Kill by Henry Drummond

I had grown As wizards seem, who mingle sensual rites And forms impure with murderous spells and dark Enchantments; till the simple people held My very weakness wisdom, and believed That in my blood-stained palace-halls, withdrawn, I kept the inner mysteries of Zeus And knew the secret of all Being; who was A sick and impotent wretch, so sick, so tired, That even bloodshed palled.
— from The Epic of Hades, in Three Books by Lewis Morris