my head.
I saw him bend his eye down upon me, and I could hear the
low hum of his plumage, as if the web of every quill in his
great wings vibrated in his strong, level flight. I watched
him as long as my eye could hold him. When he was fairly
clear of the mountain he began that sweeping spiral movement
in which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went without once
breaking his majestic poise till he appeared to sight some
far-off alien geography, when he bent his course
thitherward, and gradually vanished in the blue depths. The
eagle is a bird of large ideas, he embraces long distances;
the continent is his home. I never look upon one without
emotion; I follow him with my eye as long as I can. I think
of Canada, of the Great Lakes, of the Rocky Mountains, of
the wild and sounding sea-coast. The waters are his, and the
woods and the inaccessible cliffs. He pierces behind the
veil of the storm, and his joy is height and depth and vast
spaces."[29]

"Now these insinuations and questions shall be answered in
their proper places; here I will but say that I scorn and
detest lying, and quibbling, and double-tongued practice,
and slyness, and cunning, and smoothness, and cant, and
pretence, quite as much as any Protestants hate them; and I
pray to be kept from the snare of them. But all this is just
now by the bye; _my present subject is my Accuser;_ what I
insist upon here is this unmanly attempt of his, in his
concluding pages, to cut the ground from under my feet;--to
poison by anticipation the public mind against me, John
Henry Newman, and to infuse into the imaginations of my
readers suspicion and mistrust of everything that I may say
in reply to him. This I call poisoning the wells."
("Apologia.")

In exposition and argument, and sometimes in the other forms of
discourse, the topic-sentence may be at the end of the paragraph. This
is for emphasis in narration and description. In exposition and
argument it is better to lead up to an unwelcome truth than to
announce it at once.

"Thus the matter of life, so far as we know it (and we have
no right to speculate on any other), breaks up, in
consequence of that continual death which is the condition
of its manifesting vitality, into carbonic acid, water, and
nitrogenous compounds which certain