Consider the following examples:
And yet, for a word spoken with kindness, I would have resigned the peacock's feather in my cap as the merest of baubles.
-- Thomas De Quincey, Confessions Of An English Opium Eater And Suspiria De Profundis
This is not right nor just: for surely a woman's affection
Is not a thing to be asked for, and had for only the asking.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Miles Standish
Such is the order of things, and shady groves and cooling grots are abandoned for drawing rooms at ninety-six, and half-a-score sickly orange-trees tubbed on the top of a staircase.
-- Theodore Edward Hook, Humorous Works, Fashionable Parties
I'm not quite sure of what to make of the for in these sentences. Can I replace them with "instead of" without much change in meaning?
Please walk me through them one by one.