His somewhat theatrical genius demanded more than a fine stage; it required a public.
— from Juliette Drouet's Love-Letters to Victor Hugo Edited with a Biography of Juliette Drouet by Louis Guimbaud

Improbable as this story was I believed it immediately, and agreed to go with him, while my heart leaped for joy: and, indeed, he conducted me to a black young woman, who was so like my sister, that, at first sight, I really thought it was her: but I was quickly undeceived; and, on talking to her, I found her to be of another nation.
— from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African Written By Himself by Olaudah Equiano

The Norwegian ponies are usually small and cream-coloured, with black manes and tails or white manes and tails; always, from some incomprehensible reason, with manes and tails different in colour from their bodies.
— from Chasing the Sun by R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne

It is not easy for such good Americans as we are to adapt our tongues to foreign titles, and for some inexplicable reason "marquis" is much more difficult for us "to handle," as Angela says, than "count," and the Italian "marchese" is quite impossible.
— from Italian Days and Ways by Anne Hollingsworth Wharton

To this it may be added as a consideration not without philosophical weight that the motives, the thoughts, the hopes, the fears, perhaps even the manners, which have defrayed the expense of the literary production of this generation, together with the literary forms in which, according to custom, they have embodied and ensconced themselves, have been treated with unexampled, certainly with unsurpassed, thoroughness, and must now be near exhaustion; while it is by no means clear that any fresh set is ready to take their place.
— from A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895) by George Saintsbury

Learned men, in cells and cloisters, have worn out their lives in vainly endeavoring to connect incongruous events, and to account for startling improbabilities, recorded of this period.
— from Wolfert's Roost, and Miscellanies by Washington Irving

To abstain from speaking is regarded as very difficult.
— from Book of Wise Sayings Selected Largely from Eastern Sources by W. A. (William Alexander) Clouston

The planets which are within the system of this sun appear according to a fixed situation in respect to the sun: Mercury appears behind, a little towards the right; the planet Venus to the left, a little backwards; the planet Mars to the left in front; the planet Jupiter likewise to the left in front, but at a greater distance; the planet Saturn directly in front, at a considerable distance; the Moon to the left, at a moderate height: the satellites also appear to the left relatively to their own planets.
— from Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There by Emanuel Swedenborg

S. As Admiralty Sound and Lake Fagnano bound the Cordillera to the north in Tierra del Fuego, so at the eastern side of the Cordillera in the southernmost part of the continent there is a longitudinal depression which separates the Andes from some independent ridges pertaining to a secondary parallel broken chain called the pre-Cordillera.
— from The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia Volume 1 of 28 by Project Gutenberg

The reasons were unanswerable for the refusal of the States to bind themselves to a foreign sovereign in regard to the interior administration of their commonwealth; but that diversity of religious worship should be considered incompatible with the health of the young republic—that the men who had so bravely fought the Spanish Inquisition should now claim their own right of inquisition into the human conscience—this was almost enough to create despair as to the possibility of the world's progress.
— from PG Edition of Netherlands series — Complete by John Lothrop Motley

As I can scarcely expect to be believed upon my own word, as to what our ancestors at that time were willing to accept for Shakspeare, I refer the reader to that collection to verify my report.
— from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1 Miscellaneous Prose by Charles Lamb

But if, when the wine should have mellow'd with time, Being bottled and binn'd, to a flavor sublime, It retains the same acrid, incongruous taste, Why, the sooner to throw it away that we haste
— from Lucile by Lytton, Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, Earl of