High Sentence

I have a project in mind for my introduction to composition class next year. I want to try and impress upon them that it's possible to write a long sentence that is completely controlled, not "wordy" (as they would have it), but rich in detail. This should be a sentence that one can savour, not just "It was awesome."

Here's one that tells a complete story in one sentence (and I'm indebted to ook blog for pointing it out)

Since those moments on the terrace, Harold had daily become more of the solicitous and indirectly beseeching lover; and Esther, from the very fact that she was weighed on by thoughts that were painfully bewildering to her --by thoughts which, in their newness to her young mind, seemed to shake her belief that life could be anything else than a compromise with things repugnant to the moral taste-- had become more passive to his attentions at the very time that she had begun to feel more profoundly that in accepting Harold Transome she left the high mountain air, the passionate serenity of perfect love for ever behind her, and must adjust her wishes to a life of middling delights, overhung with the langourous haziness of motiveless ease, where poetry was only literature, and the fine ideas had to be taken down from the shelves of the library when her husband's back was turned.
(George Eliot, Felix Holt: The Radical 426)