As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiring effect upon life as wider interests cursorily embraced.
— from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

" The date-palm is figured as a tree of life on an Egyptian sepulchral tablet, older than the Exodus, now preserved in the museum at Berlin.
— from Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism With an Essay on Baal Worship, on the Assyrian Sacred "Grove," and Other Allied Symbols by Thomas Inman

Polybius, one of the very best authorities, states that of the ten eminent nobles who were sent at that time, nine returned when their mission failed at the hands of the senate.
— from De Officiis by Marcus Tullius Cicero

363 It is a large island, and has a good port with two entrances—one to the west and the other to the east northeast.
— from The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 33, 1519-1522 Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century by Antonio Pigafetta

The nearer moon of Mars makes a complete revolution around the planet in a little over seven and one-half hours, so that she may be seen hurtling through the sky like some huge meteor two or three times each night, revealing all her phases during each transit of the heavens.
— from A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

This opened to the enemy not only the means of converting cotton into money, which had a value all over the world and which they so much needed, but it afforded them means of obtaining accurate and intelligent information in regard to our position and strength.
— from Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete by Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson) Grant

“I was countin' on that one thing to explain Nelson's absence.
— from Pole Baker: A Novel by Will N. (Will Nathaniel) Harben

Many of the southern Kechua tribes referred for their origin to the extreme northwest as known to them, to the ancient city of Lambayeque on the Pacific coast, a locality which, according to Bastian, [287] held a place in their traditions equivalent to that of Culiacan, “the Home of the Ancestors,” in the legendary lore of the Aztecs.
— from The American Race A Linguistic Classification and Ethnographic Description of the Native Tribes of North and South America by Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison) Brinton

The mothers, who have gone on hitherto in their lax amours with a certainty that any consequences that might result would be rather in their favour than otherwise, have been bringing a host of wretched urchins into the world and consigning them over to the estate nurses, sans soin ; and now the produce of the last six years is returned upon their hands, unless they will consent to apprentice them; this they will not do, out of spite to their masters, but take the trouble on themselves they will not: so the squalid little wretches starve and die off shockingly; and those that live are locked up in their mother’s house while she is at work, doing nothing but quarrel, growing up in absolute uselessness, and with no chance of improving….
— from Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments by Louise Imogen Guiney

About this time too the Calvinists published their confession of faith, and in a preamble addressed to the king, declared that they, although a hundred thousand strong, kept themselves nevertheless quiet, and like the rest of his subjects, contributed to all the taxes of the country; from which it was evident, they added, that of themselves they entertained no ideas of insurrection.
— from History of the Revolt of the Netherlands — Complete by Friedrich Schiller

All your muscles are, up to this point, alert but tensed only to the extent necessary to draw the shaft.
— from Hunting with the Bow & Arrow by Saxton T. (Saxton Temple) Pope