I like those classics especially though.
From War and peace:
At the edge of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times the age of the
birches that formed the forest, it was ten times as thick and twice as tall as
they. It was an enormous tree, its girth twice as great as a man could
embrace, and evidently long ago some of its branches had been broken off and
its bark scarred. With its huge ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically, and
its gnarled hands and fingers, it stood an aged, stern, and scornful monster
among the smiling birch trees. Only the dead-looking evergreen firs dotted
about in the forest, and this oak, refused to yield to the charm of spring or
notice either the spring or the sunshine.
“Spring, love, happiness!” this oak seemed to say. “Are you not weary of that
stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and always a
fraud? There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! Look at those cramped dead
firs, ever the same, and at me too, sticking out my broken and barked fingers
just where they have grown, whether from my back or my sides: as they have
grown so I stand, and I do not believe in your hopes and your lies.”
Now that’s poetry.