"There is nothing to excuse," Daisy began, in perfectly well-bred tones, "the mistake was natural.
— from Bessie's Fortune: A Novel by Mary Jane Holmes

For once there is no too evident desire to stun the hearer.
— from Philip Hale's Boston Symphony Programme Notes by Philip Hale

This is not the ethic dative.
— from Milton's Comus by John Milton

As they all protested their innocence to the moment of death, and exhibited a remarkably Christian deportment throughout the dreadful scenes they were called to encounter from their arrest to their execution, there was reason to apprehend that the people would gradually be led to feel a sympathy for them, if not to entertain doubts of their guilt.
— from Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II With an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects by Charles Wentworth Upham

Significant words, which will one day throw light upon the depths of the Italian nature, the eldest daughter of modern civilization, imbued with her right of primogeniture, persisting in her grudge against the transalpines, the rancorous inheritor of Roman pride and of antique patriotism.
— from The Modern Regime, Volume 1 by Hippolyte Taine

The compound I require to change you into grasshoppers must be mixed on the first day of September; and as this is now the eighth day of September I must wait nearly a year before I can work the enchantment.
— from The Enchanted Island of Yew Whereon Prince Marvel Encountered the High Ki of Twi and Other Surprising People by L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum

But the instinct which had warned me of so much, did not warn me of that, and it was with no other feeling than one of surprise that I noted the extreme deference with which he opened his mother's door for me, and waited even in that moment of natural agitation and suspense for me to pass over the threshold before he presumed to enter himself.
— from The Mill Mystery by Anna Katharine Green

There is a breaking strain to discipline that is applied, there is none to esprit de corps .
— from The Nameless Island: A Story of Some Modern Robinson Crusoes by Percy F. (Percy Francis) Westerman

Definite and accurate terminology is necessary to express definite and accurate knowledge; but one may use vague expressions where the definite ones would convey no ideas.
— from The Evolutionist at Large by Grant Allen