Though Bryant is always serious, it is worthy of note that he is never gloomy, that he entirely escapes the pessimism or despair which seizes upon most poets in times of trouble.
— from Outlines of English and American Literature An Introduction to the Chief Writers of England and America, to the Books They Wrote, and to the Times in Which They Lived by William J. (William Joseph) Long

Mr. May says that warm weather will probably do much for me, but that till then I must be a prisoner to my room, for that if rheumatism supervenes upon my present inability, there will be no chance of getting rid of it.
— from Yesterdays with Authors by James Thomas Fields

The purpose of these questions, and the use made of the answers upon the argument, is shown by the following extract from the summing up:— "My point is this, gentlemen of the jury, and it is an unanswerable one in my judgment, Mr. District Attorney: If Minnock, fresh from the asylum, forgot this sheet incident when he went to sell his first newspaper article to the World ; if he also forgot it when he went to the coroner two days afterward to make his second affidavit; if he still forgot it two weeks later when, at the inquest, he testified for two hours, without mentioning it, and only first recollected it when he was recalled two days afterward, then there is but one inference to be drawn, and that is, that he never saw it, because he could not forget it if he had ever seen it !
— from The Art of Cross-Examination With the Cross-Examinations of Important Witnesses in Some Celebrated Cases by Francis L. (Francis Lewis) Wellman

Here and there a clear, cold stream trickled from the still unhealed mountainside piled into the sky above me.
— from Vagabonding down the Andes Being the Narrative of a Journey, Chiefly Afoot, from Panama to Buenos Aires by Harry Alverson Franck

They possess too some unknown means (probably in the egg-state) of passing over the ocean, since they are found to inhabit many islands where there are neither mammalia nor snakes.
— from The Geographical Distribution of Animals, Volume 1 With a study of the relations of living and extinct faunas as elucidating the past changes of the Earth's surface by Alfred Russel Wallace

About the same time, I felt an unusual sensation under my pants, in the region of where I sat down.
— from Reminiscences, Incidents, Battles, Marches and Camp Life of the Old 4th Michigan Infantry in War of Rebellion, 1861 to 1864 by Orvey S. Barrett

I've summed up most people inside two seconds."
— from The Coward Behind the Curtain by Richard Marsh

About forty years ago the idea established itself that epilepsy, exhibiting itself in one form or another as "fits," and migraine, the severe periodic sick headache, were interconvertible manifestations of the same underlying morbid process in the brain.
— from The Glands Regulating Personality A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature by Louis Berman

'Thus wilt thou swallow up my poem in thy glib clumsiness, Zabastes!" he said lightly—"And thus wilt them hold up the most tasteless portions of the whole for the judgment of the public!
— from Ardath: The Story of a Dead Self by Marie Corelli

The Dorr scare was a trifle compared to the panic which now seized upon many people in the country towns of New England.
— from Confessions of Boyhood by John Albee