"Chasm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... himself more in these irregular persons, he hardly ever ventured to paint their inner life so as to show how little there was to choose between the sins of those who are at war with society and the sins of those who bend to the yoke of society. He widened rather than narrowed the chasm between the outlaw and the respectable citizen, even while he did not disguise his own romantic interest in the former. He extenuated, no doubt, the sins of all brave and violent defiers of the law, as distinguished from the sins of crafty and cunning abusers of the law. But the leaning ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... the "Ancient Mariner" himself. This is by the way: but take the work altogether, there is nothing else like it; it is a poem by itself; between it and other compositions, in pari materia, there is a chasm which you cannot overpass; the sensitive reader feels himself insulated, and a sea of wonder and mystery flows round him as round the spell-stricken ship itself. It was a sad mistake in the ablest artist— Mr. Scott, we believe—who in his engravings has made the ancient mariner an old decrepit ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... day and a night. In the course of this the vast island of Atalantis, and all its splendid cities and warlike nations, were swallowed up, and sunk to the bottom of the sea, which, spreading its waters over the chasm, formed the Atlantic Ocean. For a long time, however, the sea was not navigable, on account of rocks and shelves, of mud and slime, and of the ruins ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... brought a heart-breaking time to many homes. In some it actually parted father and son, or brother and brother. While it created no such chasm in the Lee family, it brought to Robert E. Lee the bitterest and most trying decision of his ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... hall table. The same stair-carpet mounted between the same walls; the same old French print, in its narrow black frame, faced her on the landing. This visual continuity was intolerable. Within, a gaping chasm; without, the same untroubled and familiar surface. She must get away from it before she could attempt to think. But, once in her room, she sat down on the lounge, a stupor creeping ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... that, in attempting to check my forward motion, I had nearly lost my equipoise, and fallen into the abyss that now yawned before and on either side of me. To pause upon the danger, would, I felt, be to ensure it. Summoning all my dexterity into a single bound, I cleared the chasm; and with one buskined foot (for my hunting costume was strictly Highland) clung firmly to the ledge, while I secured my balance with the other. At this point the rock became gradually broader, so that I now trod the remainder of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... inanity in such feasts—it may be literally called a yawning abyss. The abyss is the vast chasm between the money power employed and the thing it is employed on. To make a big joke out of a broomstick, a barrow and an old hat—that is great. But to make a small joke out of mountains of emeralds and tons ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... have vanished into thin air. If that weapon were picked up in the Quarry Wood, or for that matter in any other part of the estate, the hounds of the law were beaten. Winter's level-headed shrewdness and Furneaux's almost uncanny intuition might have saddled Hilton with blood guiltiness, but a wide chasm must be bridged before they could provide the requisite proof of ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... and some steps leading up to it. By this entrance Mr. Dionysius Cram led them into a small jailer's lodge, with a table and some wooden chairs, in the side of which, opposite to the entrance, was a strong movable grate, between the bars of which might be seen a yawning sort of chasm leading into the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... made deeper the chasm between the one-time friends. It was quite evident to Stanley, from Harry's description of what he had witnessed, that there was an understanding between Paul and Wyndham, otherwise they would never have shaken hands with each other. The fact that Paul could ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... a wide chasm in the history of circumnavigations, all that was attempted in this way, for many years afterwards, being more the effect of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... a shudder came over me. The leap, as regarded distance, was a trifling one, but it was over an almost bottomless chasm, full of the foulest mud, on which the mocassin snakes, the deadliest of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... intend to be kept from either by any ancient authors. He had not the faintest idea how he was going to bridge that chasm—but, as he wrote his Fansy-pansy, ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... faintly; and then, to my intense terror, I saw her stand up on the foot-rest, staring horribly, and throw herself forward into the chasm on our right. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... precipice; for, on the extreme right wing of the rear of the house, it was no more than a gentle inclination of the soil, deepening rapidly towards the left, and there, directly under the extremity of that wing, assuming the appearance of a vast chasm, through the bottom of which a brawling stream chafed the pointed stones, on its way to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... of the well hesitating. It was too far to leap and he remembered that behind the lilac bush he had seen a builder's plank. This he dragged out and passed it across the chasm, leaning the other end upon a ledge of brickwork ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... in the clouds, and the trees, and wind. If it would but creep into this dim, travelling prison, and help her; if it would but come, like sleep, and steal away dark sorrow, and in one moment make grief-joy. But it stayed outside on its wistful wings; and that grand chasm which yawns between soul and soul remained unbridged. For what could she say? How make him speak of what he was going to do? What alternatives indeed were now before him? Would he sullenly resign his seat, and wait till he could find Audrey Noel again? But even if he did find her, they ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the Archbishop when he sees him. As for your letter, it makes me mad: slidikins, I have been the best boy in Christendom, and you come with your two eggs a penny.—Well; but stay, I will look over my book: adad, I think there was a chasm between my N.2 and N.3. Faith, I will not promise to write to you every week; but I will write every night, and when it is full I will send it; that will be once in ten days, and that will be often enough: and if you begin to take up ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... might have missed love and still have retained life, with a woman love and life were interchangeable terms. That one emotion represented not only her sole opportunity of joy, it constituted as well her single field of activity. The chasm between marriage and spinsterhood was as wide as the one between children and pickles. Yet so secret was this intense absorption in the thought of romance, that Mrs. Pendleton, forgetting her own girlhood, would have ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... warlike, is largely due to the fact that, so long as the customs of the natives are not inimical to good government or to their own well-being, they studiously refrain from interfering with them. Nor is there the same social chasm separating Europeans and natives in the Insulinde which is found in Britain's Eastern possessions. Were a British official in India to marry a native woman he would be promptly recalled in disgrace; if a Dutch official marries a native woman she is accorded the same social recognition ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... Black Bruin opened his powerful jaws and with a single bite crushed the vertebras of the neck. Then, with a grunt of deep satisfaction, he lifted the limp figure in his arms as high as he could, and flung it into the yawning chasm below. ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... brawny, strong right hand He lifted up the child, And held him where the clefted rocks Formed a chasm deep and wild ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... a young girl wandering with her herd of goats upon the Mettenalp, lost her way amidst a mountain storm, and fell into a chasm of the rock, where she lay white ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... very long time to make out all this, for every now and then my brain seemed to lose its power for a while, and every thing whirled about me. Especially there was that awful sensation of sinking down, down through the pebbles into some chasm that was bottomless. I had never either felt pain or fainted before, and ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the cavern, if it could be termed so, adjusted it against the transverse rock, which served as a roof, and made signs for the lady to ascend it, while he held it fast below. She did so, and found herself on the top of a broad rock, near the brink of the chasm into which the brook precipitates itself. She could see the crest of the torrent flung loose down the rock, like the mane of a wild horse, but without having any view of the lower platform from ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... dog teams were joined, and reluctant to give up they advanced again; but very soon the last of the four sledges disappeared, and was found hanging vertically up and down in an ugly-looking chasm. To the credit of the packing not a single thing had come off, in spite of the jerk with which it had fallen. It was, however, too heavy to haul up as it was, but, after some consultation, the indefatigable Feather proposed that he should be let ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... urticate each eye, Noctivagous ghouls haste to stroke Each goblin shank of hoary sage. Then pomp of gloom breaks into bloom, The Temple's arch cracks as we sigh, A clashing sound above that spoke Blind wrath unto each Wizard's rage, Revealed the chasm of stark Doom. Unto the peaks and gables black, Syrian airs like Orpheus Lull sequestered afrites to sleep, A witch smites her high biforous— A symbol of king Typhon's wrack! Where crystal lamps shine most glorious, Twin legions lie in cajons bleak,— Tokens ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... and fastening the loose ends. I have stood in the road under the nest looking straight up till my head swam, trying to make out just how she did it, but all I could see was the bird standing astride the chasm she was trying to bridge, and busy with the hanging strings. Slowly the maze of loose threads takes a sacklike form, the bottom of the nest thickens, till some morning you see the movement of the bird inside it; her beak comes through the sides ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... and had spent the few hours of remaining daylight in scouring the country along the road to the North. At dawn the next day he was away to the mountain, and with a black-tracker at his heels, explored as much of that wilderness of gully and chasm as nature permitted to him. He had offered to double the reward, and had examined a number of suspicious persons. It was known that he had been inspecting the prison a few hours before the escape ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... told us that the cave was not known to white men until 1802, though he did not acknowledge that the natives were ignorant of its existence. For many years no one could advance beyond three miles from the entrance, further progress being stopped by a deep chasm called the "Bottomless Pit." At length, however, a daring guide threw a ladder over it, and thus getting across, he explored six more miles of this underground region. A bridge has now been constructed, ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... their hands. They fawned at his feet as though trying to show him their scorched bodies. Then for a single moment they saw the form of the ape-man as he struggled to follow the others. His strength failed him, however. He fell backwards into the burning chasm. ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... miles in length is no uncommon feat of engineering. A canyon, however, cannot be tunnelled, and if too wide for cantilever or suspension bridges, a detour of many miles is necessary. In crossing a deep chasm the route of transportation may aggregate ten or fifteen times the distance spanned ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... his senses would attempt descending. I bethought me, however, to try the creek which drained the coomb, and see whether it might not have made itself a smoother way. In a few minutes I found myself at the upper end of a chasm in the rocks, something like Twll Dhu, only on a greatly larger scale; the creek had found its way into it, and had worn a deep channel through a material which appeared softer than that upon the ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... half-muffled clang of some great iron-tongued funeral bell. Then came the rain, introduced swiftly by the deafening clatter of another thunder crash that made one stagger like a ship in a wild sea, and we strained our eyes to gaze into a visionary chasm cleaved in twain by the furious lightning. Playing upon the face of the unruffled river, with a brilliancy at once awful and enchanting, this singular flitting and wavering of the heavenly electricity, as it flashed ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... which the dialogue is spoken. The latter corresponds with the honorable German term Singspiel, and one will not go far astray if he associate both terms with the English operas of Wallace and Balfe, save that the French and Germans have generally been more deft in bridging over the chasm between speech and song than their British rivals. Opera comique has another characteristic, its denouement must be happy. Formerly the Theatre national de l'Opera-Comique in Paris was devoted exclusively to ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... them. Petra, the city of the Nabataeans, is in a narrow valley between steep overhanging rocks, so difficult of approach that a handful of men could guard it against the largest army. Not more than two horsemen can ride abreast through the chasm in the rock by which it is entered from the east, while the other entrance from the west is down a hillside too steep ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Chaffer sprang—sprang down the precipitous chasm which yawned beneath them, a distance of nearly thirty feet. As he went down, with his graceful body hanging in the air, and his handsome head, with its curved horns, thrown back, he turned himself diagonally, striking his feet sharply every now and then against the face of the rock in his ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... less than a thousand feet; and from many parts of their wildly piled outline, huge crags projected in monstrous mammoth forms, as if to plunge to the billows of forest beneath. At no point of this vast impassible boundary was there a chasm or declivity discernable by which we could make our exit, except the one thus ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... tottering spires nodded around him, and fell thundering across his path; and though he had repeatedly faced these dangers on the most terrific glaciers, and in the wildest weather, it was with a new and oppressive feeling of panic- terror that he leaped the last chasm, and flung himself, exhausted and shuddering on the firm turf ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... to sit down when he reached the bottom of a chasm that divided the summits of two towering fells. He had crossed the higher of the two without much trouble except for a laborious scramble over large, rough stones, but the ascent of the other threatened to be difficult. It rose in front, ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... ice as a bit of slow-moving glacier is dislodged, lightning, and the roar of thunder somewhere below where I lie—these are the artillery of the range, and from them I am safe. I am too small for their heavy guns. But a shelving trail on the verge of a chasm, a slip on an ice-field, a rolling stone under a horse's foot—these are the weapons I fear ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... get to the other side was to follow along these smaller cracks where they made a crooked natural bridge across the chasm. Even Seppi's stout heart quailed a little as he gazed down into the depths of the huge rifts. The walls of ice gleamed with wonderful greens and blues, but he had no heart to admire ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... sailor, he knew a thousand tricks of boat-craft that they had never heard of. We flew, we flew through cloven ridges, we became a wind ourselves, and while I tell it he was beside them, had gathered himself as if to leap the chasm between time and eternity, and had landed among them in the Speed. The wherry careened with the shock and the water poured into her, and she flung headlong and away as his foot spurned her. Heaven knows why she didn't upset, for I thought of nothing but the scene ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... steered us toward the right bank. The men paddled for their lives so as to land as quickly as possible, as we were now less than a hundred metres from the portentous jump. The current was terrific, and the canoe was floating sideways nearer and nearer the awful chasm. The coast line on the right, was almost vertical, and there was no place where we could hold on to anything and land. So down floated the canoe, my men horror-stricken. Once or twice they were able to seize a creeping vine hanging down ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... this hypocrisy. She was seized with the temptation to flee somewhere with Leon to try a new life; but at once a vague chasm full of darkness ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... feels their breath on her cheek; it is useless to turn at bay; there is hardly time to measure with her eye the depth of the ravine, or its width. A step back, another forward, an almost superhuman leap, and she has cleared the awful chasm.... 'Look before you leap,' is one of caution's maxims. We may stand looking till it is too late to leap. There are times when we must put our 'fate to the touch, to win or lose it all;' there are times when ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... their locations. The convent of the Hagia Triada is indeed on a plain, but at the foot of the range of hills which skirts the Akroteri to the north, and is thus almost shut in from two sides, while to the south the plain extends to Suda Bay, which is hidden in the chasm between the Akroteri and Mount Malaxa, and beyond which the mountains of Sphakia rise in picturesque and alluring redundance of ravine and massive rock. All the nearer plain is green with the olive-orchards, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... find myself unable to express all that I felt upon the loss of such a "Guide, Philosopher, and Friend." I shall, therefore, not say one word of my own, but adopt those of an eminent friend, which he uttered with an abrupt felicity: "He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best: there is nobody; no man can be said to put you ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... consciousness of national variation. The French in Canada are to remain intensely French, and the Dutch in South Africa intensely Dutch; though both are to be divided from the world outside the British Empire by an unbridgeable moral chasm. To imperialism so conceived facts lend no support. The loyal acceptance of British Imperial citizenship by Sir Wilfred Laurier or General Botha constitutes something more subtle, something, to adapt Lord Milner's phrase, less insular but more cosmopolitan than imperial egoism. ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... What mighty magic is this name! Erstwhile it made the tyrant tremble on his throne and the hearts of the down-trodden leap for joy. Now, over the chasm of two score years, it causes the drooping hopes of freemen to bud anew, and the smoldering embers of their ambition to ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... spot, and from shore to shore of the Zambesi (which is here more than a mile wide) a huge crack, one hundred yards across, suddenly opened. Into this the river disappears with a mighty thunder, as though to lose itself in the centre of the earth. Four hundred feet down the bottom of the chasm is reached, and, beating themselves against the opposite wall, the waters struggle to find an outlet, throwing up in their fury white clouds of spray, which rise to a height of one thousand two hundred feet, and can be seen for ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... He's been in three real wars and about a dozen little ones, and he's built thousands of miles of railroads, I don't know how many thousands, but Captain Stuart knows; and he built the highest bridge in Peru. It swings in the air across a chasm, and it rocks when the wind blows. And the German Emperor made him ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... searched the hen-house, where the fowls on their perches crowded close because of the chill of the evening. He even ran to the bars and looked down across the narrow ravine to which the clearing sloped. Beyond the chasm-like gorge he saw presently on the high ascent opposite footprints that had broken the light frostlike coating of ice on the dead leaves and moss—climbing footprints, swift, disordered. He looked back again at the lantern where Millicent had flung it in her haste. Her mission was plain now. ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... unsolved. It has always been believed that he found his way to Europe and met with some curious adventures there, and Poe himself certainly alleged that such was the case. Numbers of mythical stories have been invented to account for this chasm in the poet's life, and most of them self-evidently fabulous. In a recent biography of Poe an attempt had been made to prove that he enlisted in the army under an assumed name, and served for about eighteen months in the artillery in a highly creditable manner, receiving ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... alternative, but the best he could do, and Jack breathed a sigh of relief as he found the hind wheels going over the brink of the chasm. ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... the rest to precede him from the room. When he was alone he smiled sheepishly, and also disdainfully; he knew that the chasm between himself and the others was a real chasm, and not a figment of his childish diffidence, as he had sometimes suspected it to be. Then he turned the gas out. A beautiful faint silver surged through the window. While the debate was in progress, the sun had been going ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... moment when she came upon the bridge, to look off to the right where the waters of the little run came hurrying along through a narrow wooded chasm in the hill, murmuring to her of the time when a little child's feet had paused there and a child's heart danced to its music. The freshness of its song was unchanged, the glad rush of its waters was as joyous as ever, but the spirits were quieted that used to answer it with sweeter freshness ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... we crept up to her, for she was a little in front, and were rewarded with a view that was positively appalling in its gloom and grandeur. Before us was a mighty chasm in the black rock, jagged and torn and splintered through it in a far past age by some awful convulsion of Nature, as though it had been cleft by stroke upon stroke of the lightning. This chasm, which was bounded by a precipice on the hither, and presumably, though ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... finally came to a hovering stop, then dropped rapidly toward the salt-encrusted plain. It came to rest at last on the bottom of a great, bowl-shaped hollow situated at the end of a chasm whose gray, rock-strewn sides rose in rugged terraces for miles back into the sky. In a few moments a panel in the vessel's side rolled noiselessly upward, disclosing a brilliant light, and from the interior of the airship soon appeared two figures who paused at the aperture ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... be; and to perform his duty with the same patient courage and sagacity that had marked him from the beginning. "An unlucky cannon-ball of the enemy," as he observes, did some damage at this period to his diary, but it happened at a moment when comparatively little was doing, so that the chasm was of less consequence. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... cut-water in thick smoke beat in the schooner's broadside: down went her masts to leeward like fishing-rods whipping the water; there was a horrible shrieking yell; wild forms leaped off on the Agra, and were hacked to pieces almost ere they reached the deck—a surge, a chasm in the ear, filled with an instant rush of engulfing waves, a long, awful, grating, grinding noise, never to be forgotten in this world, all along under the ship's keel—and the fearful majestic monster passed on over the blank she had made, ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... this extremity he prayed to the gods to extricate him, and by their favor he made his escape."[94] This myth may, perhaps, be the germ from which have sprung the numerous folk-tales about the desertion of a younger brother in some pit or chasm, into which ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... trail, which wound around huge fragments of rock riven from the cliffs in prehistoric days. He was awed by the immensity of the chasm and talked continuously to his horse which shuffled along behind paying careful attention to the footing. Arrived at the stream the horse drank. Sundown mounted and rode along the narrow level paralleling the river course. The canon widened, and before ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... from the absurd excesses of slothful optimism to the vertigo of unplumbed pessimism. They are not used to looking at life except from behind a parapet. A barrier of comfortable illusions has hidden from them, hitherto, the chasm above which, clinging to the face of the precipice, winds the narrow path along which man is marching. Here and there the wall has crumbled. The footing is treacherous. But we must pass, nevertheless. We shall pass. Our fathers had ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... about for it so far into the rocky chasm that he saw no more than a gleam of sunlight outside the opening, and he couldn't take a hundreth part of the ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... set, and darkness covered the City of the Dead, but the moon shone above the valley of the kings' tombs, and the projecting masses of the rocky walls of the chasm threw sharply-defined shadows. A weird silence lay upon the desert, where yet far more life was stirring than in the noonday hour, for now bats darted like black silken threads through the night air, owls hovered aloft on wide-spread ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... equally outspoken and unanimous. Thus they had fewer disagreements than many a loving couple, and perhaps more points of insignificant contact, while all the time there was not even the pretence of love between them. Their lives made a chasm bridged by threads. ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the earliest settlers at rest there beneath the sod. This was the last indication of the presence of the town, the final impression to carry away into the wide country, where the road ran through field and forest. As they sped along, they plunged into a chasm of blackness, caused by the trees on both sides of the road which appeared to be constantly closing upon them. In the darkness of that stygian tunnel, dashing blindly through threatening obscurity, she yet felt no terrors, for a band of steel seemed to hold her ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... for the Bridge, which ye look upon, Manly hest knit stone with stone. The loved word of a woman's mouth Bound the thundering chasm with a rocky growth. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... across a precipice and ordered his son to climb on it and seize the nest. The son duly climbed—carrying with him his grandmother's stick. When he had reached the top the father did all he could to shake the son down into the chasm, and even removed the long stick on which he had climbed. But the lucky boy had already inserted his grandmother's stick into the crevasse and remained suspended, while the father—really believing that he had at last succeeded in disposing of his son—gaily returned to ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... rough where rocks covered the ground, and I dreaded a return of the roller, when we might have been swept helplessly away. The dangers to be encountered by keeping inland were equally great. We might be struck by lightning, crushed by falling trees, or losing our way, fall into some gully or chasm. ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... and at the Falls in the evening most exquisite illuminations were exhibited for the pleasure of the visitor—lines of fire running along the cliffs while other kinds of light intensified the natural splendour of the scene. During his several days at this point, the Prince saw Blondin cross the chasm on a rope; attended service at the little church in the Canadian village; paid a brief visit to the American fort on the other side of Niagara River; saw the Welland Canal and visited Queenston Heights ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... Italy was studded in the earlier middle ages, having but little of the Gothic grace of grandeur which belongs to the ecclesiastical architecture of the same time; but rude, vast, and menacing even in decay. A wooden bridge was thrown over the chasm, wide enough to admit two horsemen abreast; and the planks trembled and gave back a hollow sound as Glyndon ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had been examined we rode through the gloomy chasm-like gate, turned sharply to the left, and found ourselves standing on the edge of a half-dry river bed. Below us stretched line after line of double-humped camels, some crowded in yellow-brown masses which seemed all heads and curving necks, ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... "The chasm of sky above my head Is Heaven's profoundest azure. No domain For fickle, short-lived clouds, to occupy, Or to pass through;—but rather an abyss In which the everlasting stars abide, And whose soft gloom, and boundless depth, might tempt The curious eye to look ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... of heat in his face as he passed the chasm between the withdrawal of Dan and Biddy from the firm and his solution of the amalgam. He did not care to dwell upon that, because Eldred had sued him to recover his stock, claiming that it was bought in under false pretenses. Neither ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... dangerous and subversive doctrines contained in this baleful fiction. What solemn protests must have been laid with the ink on the rollers and impressed upon those wicked sheets! what pious warnings must have been secretly folded and stitched in that number of "The Overland Monthly"! Across the chasm of years and distance the author stretches forth the hand of sympathy and forgiveness, not forgetting the gentle proof-reader, that chaste and unknown nymph, whose mantling cheeks and downcast eyes gave the first indications ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... abolition of the Roman burgess-communities -sine suffragio-, which were gradually merged in the community of full burgesses. The levelling spirit of the party of progress suggested the abolition of distinctions within the middle class, while the chasm between burgesses and non-burgesses was at the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... principles through life; and those principles gradually undermined everything that was noble and generous in character; just as those deep under-ground currents, noiseless in their course, work through fine-grained rock, and produce a chasm. Everything with Chesterfield was self: for self, and self alone, were agreeable qualities to be assumed; for self, was the country to be served, because that country protects and serves us: for self, were friends to be sought and cherished, as useful auxiliaries, or pleasant accessories: in ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... the situation and peculiar circumstances of the place, sometimes with a rivulet on one hand, gently stealing through the glade, at other with a cataract tumbling from above, raging with foam, and rebounding with a thousand echoes from below, or silently engulphed in a gloomy pool, or yawning chasm. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... restrain by fear, and God would have all restraint from evil to spring from love. The gulf between these two principles is immeasurably wide and deep, quite as much so as the chasm between heaven and hell. I said: Human laws restrain by fear. Why does the heart murderer not kill? He is afraid that if he kills me, and it is found out on him, somebody else will kill him who feels himself in as much danger from his bloody hand as I was. Why ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... that cry and anticipated the wishes of his friends. Leaving them with their raft, he struck powerfully out toward the drowning man, and they both went down in the vast sea chasm together. When they came in view again upon the crest of the swell, the Newfoundland had the hair of the man's head in his teeth and had begun his return. A moment later the gasping man threw out his hands and caught the settee with ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... people will know the full truth and then there will be a dreadful reckoning for those who have plunged a noble and peace-loving nation into this fathomless chasm of misfortune. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... the air was resonant with the sound of falling water. Three miles above the falls of the Gatineau and the Rideau, the main Ottawa River descended with a roar and a whirl of white foam and rainbow-tinted mist into the chasm called the Chaudiere or Kettle. On a later occasion he describes the way in which the Algonkins propitiated the Spirit of ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... not exceed twenty feet. Sorely pressed by hunger, the adventurers determined, at all hazards, to cross to the opposite side, in hopes of finding a country that might afford them sustenance. A frail bridge was constructed by throwing the huge trunks of trees across the chasm, where the cliffs, as if split asunder by some convulsion of nature, descended sheer down a perpendicular depth of several hundred feet. Over this airy causeway the men and horses succeeded in effecting their passage with the loss of a single Spaniard, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... ugliness. His only thought now was how to be revenged for this unpardonable insult. He could not kill her, as she wisely kept to the encampment of Mantara. After some months Tanuau sickened and died. The corpse was conveyed across the island to be let down the chasm of Raupa, the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... His son, a brave youth, was left for dead by his sister's ravishers; but I found him in this dreary solitude, and he told me the too general story of his wounds and his despair. Indeed, lady, when I heard your shrieks from the opposite side of the chasm, I thought they might proceed from this poor boy's sister, and I flew to ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... helpless. Perhaps she would be frightened at the darkening solitude, and try to find her path homeward, on the edge of that slippery, beetling rock. With no hand to sustain, no eye to guide, how could she help falling into the watery chasm below? In her fears for Alice, she forgot her own imaginary danger, and flew on, sending her voice before her, bearing on its trembling tones ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... twenty or thirty dollars' damage to the community; but for that gambler, who last night took that young man's thousand dollars—nothing! For that man who broke in upon the purity of a Christian household, and by a perfidy and adroitness that beat the strategy of hell, flung that girl into the chasm of earthly despair, from which her lost soul goes shrieking to the bottomless pit—nothing! For those who "fleeced" a young man, and induced him to filch from his employers vast sums of money, until, in his agony, he came to an officer of the church, and frantically asked ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... towards the ranges. He had also spent several days in the bush without finding any trace of the party when he camped one evening on the edge of one of the many deep ravines the torrents wear out of the hillsides. It stretched, a dim shadowy chasm, across his path, and looking down he could faintly see the firs that clung here and there to the sides of it loom faintly black through the drifting mist. It was too dark to seek for a way of descending ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... like liquid ruby. He had stepped back so completely into his past, of a little, pitiful suppliant, yet never wholly intimidated, boy, in this gloomy, pungent interior, that he started, as across a chasm of time, when the doctor arose, came forward, and spoke again. "Be seated," he said, with an imperious wave towards a chair, and ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... immortal thou forth dost career From thy deep rocky chasm; beheld has no eye The mighty one's cradle, and heard has no ear At his ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... and the appearance of which was very imposing, especially as it was much enhanced by numerous statues. In the centre of the Forum was the plain called the Curtian Lake, where Curtius is said to have cast himself into a chasm or gulf, which closed on him, and so he saved his country. On one side were the elevated seats or suggestus, a sort of pulpits from which magistrates and orators addressed the people, usually called Rostra, because adorned with the beaks of ships ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... look, and as the wave retired, rushed after it to the very brink of the chasm, and flung ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... South of this dark chasm, and directly opposite Nifl-heim, the realm of mist, was another world called Muspells-heim, the home of elemental fire, where all was warmth and brightness, and whose frontiers were continually guarded by Surtr, the flame giant. This ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... holy, the inexpressible, the mysterious Night. Afar off lies the world, buried in some deep chasm: desolate and lonely is the spot it filled. Through the chords of the breast sighs deepest sorrow. I will sink down into the dewdrops, and with ashes will I be commingled. The distant lines of memory, desires of youth, the dreams of childhood, a ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... blood leaps in his quivering breast Voila! 'Tis his enemies near! There's a chasm deep on the mountain crest Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear! They follow him close and they follow him fast, And he flies like a mountain deer; Then a mad, wild leap and he's safe at last! Oh, the sweet Saint Gabrielle hear! A cry and a leap and the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... inmost place an instant beyond uttering, A casement and a chasm and a thunder of doors undone, A seraph's strong wing shaken out the shock of its unshuttering That split the shattered sunlight from a ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... epigrammatically explained the creative or rather the re-creative power of the Will, in his "Buddhist Catechism." He there shows—of course, speaking on behalf of the Southern Buddhists—that this Will to live, if not extinguished in the present life, leaps over the chasm of bodily death, and recombines the Skandhas, or groups of qualities that made up the individual into a new personality. Man is, therefore, reborn as the result of his own unsatisfied yearning for objective existence. Col. Olcott puts it in ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... haunt Of savage bears, into a home for man; Extirpated the dragon's brood, that wont To rise, distent with venom, from the swamps; Rent the thick misty canopy that hung Its blighting vapors on the dreary waste; Blasted the solid rock; across the chasm Thrown the firm bridge for the wayfaring man. By the possession of a thousand years The soil is ours. And shall an alien lord, Himself a vassal, dare to venture here, Insult us by our own hearth fires—attempt To forge the chains of bondage for our hands, And do us shame on our own proper ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... means of knowing that Broffin's momentary preoccupation was chargeable to a fruitless interview lately concluded; or that in driving away to the house three squares up the street he was bridging the narrow gap between a man-hunter and his quarry—a gap which had suddenly grown into a chasm for the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... are merely imaginative. A large portion of the contradictions we meet in our cases is explicable by the fact that one man is the victim of his fancies and the other is not. The great number of such fancies is evinced by the circumstance that there can nowhere be found a chasm or boundary between the simplest fancies of the normal individual and the impossible imaginings of the lunatic. Every man imagines frequently the appearance of an absent friend, of a landscape he has once seen. The painter draws even the features of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... was Earth, seen from its eight-thousand-mile-wide shadow, unlighted even by the Moon. There was no faintest relief from its absolute darkness. It was as if, in the midst of the splendor of the heavens, there was a chasm through which one glimpsed the unthinkable nothing from which creation was called in the beginning. Until one realized that this was simply the dark side of Earth, the spectacle was ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the five cities and spread desolation in the flourishing valley took place. As the sun arose, the ground trembled and opened, red-hot stones and burning cinders, which fell like a storm of fire upon the surrounding country, being emitted from the yawning chasm. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... also hunt it with dogs, and shoot it when it climbs up trees. When we came to the bridge of hide-rope it looked more rickety and impassable than ever. Just fancy a few rotten-looking strips of leather slung across a chasm some ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... But the North's side of the question was not his side. He had been conquered in arms but not convinced in spirit. While he had respect and even admiration for many of his old foes, and malice toward none, he still felt that there was a bridgeless chasm between them, and, by the instincts of his nature, he kept himself aloof. If he could perform an act of kindness to a Northerner he would do so unhesitatingly; then he would turn away with the impulse ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... Dolphin was a doomed ship; that awful chasm in the deck could never be covered in and made secure in time to prevent her foundering; I therefore rapidly cast over in my mind what would be best to do. In a minute I had the necessary idea, which it seemed had at the same moment presented itself to the carpenter, for ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... Count Ugolino's Sons. Third Division of the Ninth Circle, Ptolomaea: Traitors to their Friends. Friar Alberigo, Branco d' Oria. XXXIV. Fourth Division of the Ninth Circle, the Judecca: Traitors to their Lords and Benefactors. Lucifer, Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. The Chasm of Lethe. ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... have led my old aunt. She approves affectionately, but all the same she said, very quietly, as she left the perfection of our room, "It was better in my time." I am thrilled by one of our windows, whose wings are opened wide upon the darkness; the appeal which the chasm of that window makes across the distances enters into me. One night, as it seems to me, it was open ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... with agonized faces, he would make a struggle so violent, so resolute, that even that dead body was galvanized into a ghastly distortion of tortured life. Always in vain; always the same collapse of despair and exhaustion; the chasm between thought and speech could not be bridged. They brought everything they could think of his possibly wanting; they brought to his room everyone with whom he had ever had any sort of more than casual relations—Torrey, among scores ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... wander, where of old From Delphi's chasm the mystic vapor rose, And trembling nations heard their doom foretold By the dread spirit throned 'midst rocks and snows. Though its rich fanes be blended with the dust, And silence now the hallowed haunt possess, Still is the scene of ancient rites august, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... presents itself (as we trust will often be the case), we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large to our reader; but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy his notice, we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our history; but shall hasten on to matters of consequence, and leave such periods of ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... those who are stamped with less vigour, or who have heedlessly nurtured the insidious reptile till it poisoned the vital stream it sucked? Can I, conscious of my secret sins, throw off my fellow creatures, and calmly see them drop into the chasm of perdition, that yawns to receive them. No! no! The agonized heart will cry with suffocating impatience—I too am a man! and have vices, hid, perhaps, from human eye, that bend me to the dust before God, and loudly tell me when all is mute, that we are formed of the same ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Royce fall a prey—how shall an influence influence? how shall a relation relate? Any conjunctive relation between two phenomenal experiences a and b must, in the intellectualist philosophy of these authors, be itself a third entity; and as such, instead of bridging the one original chasm, it can only create two smaller chasms, each to be freshly bridged. Instead of hooking a to b, it needs itself to be hooked by a fresh relation r' to a and by another r" to b. These new relations are but two more ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... original are lost, making a chasm of seventy-five years. The translator's object being to publish the work of Livy only, he has not thought it his duty to attempt to supply this deficiency, either by a compilation of his own, or by transcribing or translating those of others. The leader, however, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... lump within him. We must beat them to the chasm! Those words of Wabi's brought him to the terrible realization that his own powers of endurance were rapidly ebbing. His race behind Mukoki to the burning cabin had seemed to rob the life from the muscles of his limbs, and each step now added ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... thought, like the inspiration of the poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the prophet." Such is the first act of knowing, and in this first act the mind passes from idea to being without ever suspecting the depth of the chasm it has passed. It passes by means of the power which is in it, and is not astonished at what it has done. It is subsequently astonished when by reflection it returns to the analysis of the results, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... her, imitate her, and produce something that resembles her phenomena. How great, how enormous, this demand is, is not always kept in mind; and the true artist himself learns it by experience only, in the course of his progressive development. Nature is separated from Art by an enormous chasm, which genius itself is unable to ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... lake known as "Big Lonely," a body of forsaken water about ten miles long, surrounded by swamps and burnt-lands. From the foot of Big Lonely the river raged away over a mile of thundering ledges, through a chasm known to the lumbermen as "The Devil's Trough." The fury of this madness having spent itself between the black walls of the canyon, the river continued rather sluggishly its long course toward the sea. A few miles below ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... over vast rocky deposits forms a horizontal watercourse, which in its turn is overshadowed with immense masses of rock. The water easily forces its way between these till it reaches the solid lava, when it leaves its high, narrow, and thickly-wooded banks, and plunges into the deep chasm it has itself worn away. The pouring rain unfortunately prevented me from sketching this fine fall. It was raining when I reached the convento of Majaijai, and it was still raining when I left it three days later, nor was there ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... speed. Swiftly we whirled around a bend, and there we were right on top of the dreadful canyon. Straight ahead was what seemed to be a solid wall of rock. The river looked to have no outlet; but as we drew nearer we saw that there was a narrow chasm in the stony face, and at this the water was rearing and charging with an ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... every Indian boy knows a fact which the white engineers of the Pacific Railway found out for themselves—that is, that a herd of buffaloes will always find the best passes through mountain ranges, and then they will go over them by the best and easiest grades. Only by bridging a chasm, or blasting rocks, or by much digging, did the railway men ever improve upon the paths pointed ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... opened out before them as the Ariel sank down after her leap across the ridge. The interior of the mountain mass took the form of an oval valley, as nearly as they could guess about fifty miles long by perhaps thirty wide. All round it the mountains seemed to rise unbroken by a single gap or chasm to between three and four thousand feet above the lowest part of the valley, and above this again the peaks rose high into the sky, two of them to the snow-line, which in this latitude was over ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... not very winding. They met with no noxious exhalations, nor did any chasm bar the path. There was no reason for stopping for a whole hour; James Starr, Madge, Harry, and Simon Ford walked on, though there was nothing to show them what was the exact direction of ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... than his words, wiped out that chasm of time that had been placed between them. It was as if she had talked with him yesterday. She felt hideously familiar with him—on the same mental and moral plane ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... to drive over a chasm in the cliffs. My ball made a bee line for the beach, bounced on a rock, and disappeared into a cave. Henry's "Pink Spot," which really seemed to have a chance of winning a hole at last, found the wind too much for it and followed ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... not then, but at every moment of his life. "The moral laws vindicate themselves" without the intervention of any external tribunal. And, therefore, the eternal progress of the man in us is maintained uninterruptedly across the gloomy chasm of death, under other circumstances, no doubt, but still it is the same ceaseless approach towards the Infinite Ideal, the same untiring journey along "the everlasting way". All are in that "way," we may be sure, even those whom we ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... to cast-iron, wrought-iron, steel, it becomes a highway for the commerce of nations, over the mountains and under them. It becomes bones, muscles, body for the inspiring soul of steam. It holds up the airy bridge over the deep chasm. It is obedient in your hand as blade, hammer, bar, or spring. It is inspirable by electricity, and bears human hopes, fears, and loves in its own bosom. It has been raised from valueless ore. Change it again to something as far above steel as that is ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... her, and, accustomed to act upon her independent impulses, she seized a hooded waterproof cloak, and slipped out of the house unperceived. The rain was falling steadily along the descending trail where she walked, but beyond, scarcely a mile across the chasm, the wintry distance began to confuse her brain with the inextricable swarming of snow. Hurrying down with feverish excitement, she at last came in sight of the arching granite portals of their domain. ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... eye, His visage haughty, curls around his brow. White as a summer blossom he appears; His valor proved by many feats of war. God! what a Baron, had he Christian faith! He spurs his horse until the crimson blood Reddens its flanks, and lightly bounds across A mighty chasm full fifty feet in width. The Pagans cry:—"He can defend his marche. With him none 'mong the French can cross a lance; Will they or not, their lives are forfeit now. Yea Carle was mad who did ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... in the chasm of night and the Pass, one waiting upon the other, because our trouble, as in all affairs where two men and a maid are concerned, was how to begin, more particularly as we had no idea what would be the end. The Black Colonel had said as much when he spoke the name Forbes, the third of our Aberdeenshire ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... little calmer, Mrs. Gray tried again to bridge the chasm. "Now, I just believe if you would ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... it is true, is more difficult than the problem itself. There are no facts to sustain it, and even if he were not able to see how man's mind could be developed by natural selection, it is a sort of reductio ad absurdum to call in the angels to bridge the chasm. ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... time, she now fixed her large eyes upon him with surprise. The next moment she had crossed lightly once more the widening chasm. ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... again in the city; Augustine, with the restlessness of grief, longing for another scene, to change the current of his thoughts. So they left the house and garden, with its little grave, and came back to New Orleans; and St. Clare walked the streets busily, and strove to fill up the chasm in his heart with hurry and bustle, and change of place; and people who saw him in the street, or met him at the cafe, knew of his loss only by the weed on his hat; for there he was, smiling and talking, and reading ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... opportunity of ascertaining the height of the Sugar-loaf, as it is called from its conical appearance. It is, he says, 680 feet high, above the surface out of which it rises, and is a solid mass of hard sparkling granite. On the eastern side of the chasm which forms the entrance into the bay, there is a mountain of the same material, but so far different in form, that it slopes easily and gradually from the water's edge to the summit, which however is about as high as the cone. This side is well ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... mouths, which they stick upon the breach with wonderful facility and quickness; and although thousands and millions are employed, yet they never embarrass the proceedings of each other, but gradually fill up the chasm. While the labourers are thus employed, the greatest part of the soldiers retire, a few only being discernible, who evidently act as overseers, and at intervals of about a minute, make the vibrating noise before described, which is immediately answered by an universal ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... who have in no age succeeded in scaling them; and who in their steps to those mighty thrones have heard nothing but dread crashes of sound—again to fade or vanish, the colossal form, never the mighty idea of 'The Truth.'[32] Where there had been nothing, a blank, a chasm, there stood in solemn proportions a new object for man, called The Truth. Why was it called The Truth? How could such an idea arise? Many persons will be weak enough to fancy that, as [Greek: hopoetes] was sometimes ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... renunciation, are changed to bitterness and disgust. He remembers the old oracle: "In the Bacchic procession many carry the thyrsus, but few are inspired." The possibility of ultimate failure threatens him more and more while he reflects; as the chasm which you wish to leap grows impassable, if you measure and deliberate. But the vivacity of youth preserves him from any permanent misanthropy or doubt. Nature makes us blind where we should be injured by seeing. We partake of the lead of Saturn, the activity of fire, the forgetfulness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... utter amazement, a few feet from him, it seemed as if the very earth sank in his garden, leaving a yawning chasm. ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... daylight came, it brought the possibility of action, but with it little of consolation. With the first visible increase of light, I gazed into the chasm, but could not, for more than an hour, see sufficiently well to discover its nature. At last I saw it was almost a perpendicular opening, like a roughly excavated well, only very large. I could perceive no bottom; and it was not till the ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... and provided with a ram. The Merrimac steamed up to the Congress, delivering her fire with awful effect, and then proceeding towards the Cumberland, ran into her near the bow, ripping an enormous rent in her side, and hung on by her own sharp prow while she fired into the fractured chasm. She then backed out and repeated her tremendous onslaught, suffering little from the fire of her enemy, till the latter went down. She next attacked the Congress with shells, which killed the greater number of the Federal crew, and in half-an-hour the few ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... of its Greek original in shifting the scene of its social life. The Attic Athens of to-day occupies a different site from that of the city of Pericles. New Edinburgh {85} has reared itself on the other bank of that chasm where once the North River flowed, and where now the trains run. Edinburgh, however, more fortunate than the city of Cecrops, while founding a new town has not lost the old. But at the time of the Hanoverian accession, and for generations later, not a house ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... exist. In a recent Symposium, where the question as to "The influence upon Morality of a decline in Religious Belief," was discussed at length by writers of whom this century is justly proud, there appears scarcely so much as a recognition of the fathomless chasm separating the leading ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... again and again, were it for the twentieth repetition, some old tragic event that gathered a deeper interest from every recital, as if on each we became better acquainted with the characters of those to whom it had befallen, till the chasm that time had dug between them and us disappeared, and we felt for the while that their happiness or misery and ours were essentially interdependent. At first she used, we well remember, to fix her solemn spirit-like eyes on our faces, to mark the different effects her story produced ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson |
