He did not look once again toward the dark house. […] He simply went quietly as if that were his natural manner of moving and passed around the now dimensionless bulk of the house, toward the rear, where the kitchen would be.

I fear my Julia would not deign my lines, Receiving them from such a worthless post.

Once an input stream has failed, it is very hard to unfail it. You can clear the failbit and take your chances, but that is pretty useless in practice. If you cannot tolerate failure, read the input file as a sequence of strings and then parse the strings.

The sagebrush belongs to the composite family, and its immediate cousins are widely distributed. They are known as the artemisias, and there are a host of them, many with important uses in the economy of civilization. Artemisia absinthium is popularly known as wormwood; from it comes the bitter, aromatic liquor known as eau or crême d'absinthe. Many of its cousins grow in Asia and Europe, including the mugwort, used by the Germans as a seasoning in cookery; southernwood, used by the British to drive away moths from linen and woolens and to force newly swarmed bees, which have a peculiar antipathy for it, into the hive