"Cleft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in a mortar until it was in coarse bits, he mixed with it a little water, and baked this horrible mess before the fire, in the hot ashes. Then he asked for a slice of bacon, as venison was not at hand, frizzled the out side slightly by holding it up on a cleft stick before the fire, burning his ten fingers several times in the process, and bearing it with heroic fortitude. Finally, he served up these atrocious specimens of cookery on pieces of board instead of dishes, as the proper diet for children ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... towards the left, Where Perkin's quarry made the cleft; The path turned next towards the right, Because ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... blind side should be towards the monster, the cavalryman swept by at a run, handling his steed with such daring skill that he just cleared the blow of the dreaded fore-paw, while with one mighty sabre stroke he cleft the bear's skull, slaying the grinning beast ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And tho a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only. Hence appear the many mistakes which have made learning ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... the cleft rock, and chiming as they fall Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length In matted grass, that with a livelier green Betrays the secret of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... the great stone in the corner of the State of Maryland, and, breaking camp, vanished westward through the cleft of light opened by their pioneers, pursued yet for many miles by a ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... They bothered him. He wanted to think about the aeropile, to recall every item of his previous experience. He waved the people from him, saw the man in yellow dropping off through the ribs, saw the crowd cleft down the line of the girders ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... I dared not venture, as long as his tall form passed like a shadow against the white light that the stars let in through the forest cleft, where ran the noisy stream. But presently he turned off, and for a moment I thought to lose him in the utter blackness of the primeval trees. And surely would have had I not seen close to me a vast and smoothly slanting ledge of rock which the stars shining on ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... and cast a gloomy, and almost a frightened glance around him. A huge rock rose in front, from a cleft of which grew a wild holly-tree, whose dark green branches rustled over the spring which arose beneath. The banks on either hand rose so high, and approached each other so closely, that it was only when the sun was at its meridian height, and during the summer solstice, that its rays ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... telephones across the abyss that separates the ascended Christ and us. One of them is contained in His words, 'If ye ask anything in My name I will do it'; the other is contained in these words, 'If ye keep My commandments I will ask.' Love on this side of the great cleft sets love on the other side of it in motion in a twofold fashion. If we ask, He does; if we do, He asks. His action is the answer to our prayers, and His prayers are the answer to our obedient action. So we have here these points—the praying ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... Alarm all the while it has been ringing. But there is nothing which delights and terrifies our 'English' Theatre so much as a Ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody Shirt. A Spectre has very often saved a Play, though he has done nothing but stalked across the Stage, or rose through a Cleft of it, and sunk again without speaking one Word. There may be a proper Season for these several Terrors; and when they only come in as Aids and Assistances to the Poet, they are not only to be excused, but to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... be the full mystery of the night and the spaces, and whence the shore should be swallowed up in the darkness. His sense of the world passed into a large vagueness; the blood pulsed through his veins exquisitely; the kiss of the water was warm and sweet. Steadily, steadily his hands cleft it, the activity of his brain dwindling and dwindling and lapsing at length into a mere self-abandonment to the sensuousness of the motion. He was scarcely conscious of controlling his muscles; his arms seemed to work of themselves in rhythmical sweep. Onward, onward! with only a fused feeling ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... their rods half dry; these also were set apart, Others gave in their rods half dry and cleft; these too were set by themselves. Others brought in their rods half dry and half green, and these were in ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... approach to the sacred spot was marked by tombs cut in the rock. A sharp angle of the mountain was passed; and then, all at once, the enormous walls, buttressing the upper region of Parnassus, stood sublimely against the sky, cleft right through the middle by a terrible split, dividing the twin peaks which gave a name to the place. At the bottom of this chasm issue forth the waters of Castaly, and fill a stone trough by the road-side. On a long, sloping mountain-terrace, facing the east, stood once the town ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... the situation, and decided to go to the left because higher ground was to be seen that way. Abandoning the ridge, she pressed on, keeping as close to the gorge as she dared, and came presently to a fallen tree lying across the dark cleft. Without a second's hesitation, for she knew such would be fatal, she stepped upon the tree and started across, looking at nothing but the log under her feet, while she tried to imagine herself walking across the ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... of all other anatomical anomalies, except cleft palate, is reported among males. Manley reports that of 33 cases of harelip treated by him only 6 were females.[51] It appears also that supernumerary digits are more frequent in males. Wilder[52] has recorded 152 cases of individuals with supernumerary digits, of whom 86 were males, 39 females, ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... important part in the ceremonies of consecration and absolution, and by means of fire a man may break through a taboo, or permantang. Should a man have a fruit-tree, for instance, which he wishes to protect, he places about it several cleft sticks with stones thrust in the clefts, and the stones are told to guard the tree and afflict with dire diseases any pilferer of the fruit. Now, should a friend of the owner see this sign of permantang and yet wish ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... side rivulets descended that filled all the valley with verdure and fertility, and formed a lake in the middle, inhabited by fish of every species, and frequented by every fowl whom nature has taught to dip the wing in water. This lake discharged its superfluities by a stream, which entered a dark cleft of the mountain on the northern side, and fell with dreadful noise from precipice to precipice till it was heard ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... in their path. Every delicate plant and creeping thing was poisoned by their breath, and the larger animals were devoured in the flap of a bird's wing. With them came terrific lightnings that rent the trees and cleft the solid rock, and thunders which caused the earth to reel like a man who had drank many times of fire-water. Nearer and nearer they approached, and now the chosen residents of this fair plain were filled with alarm for their lives, and at once began to build ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... turn at once," said Dave in a very low tone, "but, behind you, through the fork in the cleft rock, the Man with the Haunting Face is staring this way. Be ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... heads grew up against the moon, and withheld the comfort of her radiance; and it was not until the whimper of the torrent had quickened about me to a plunging roar, and my foot was on the striding bridge that took its waters at a step, that her light broke through a topmost cleft in the hills, and made glory of the leaping thunder that crashed beneath ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... was lit brightly, for they had approached it from the daylight side. Below them, they could see wide, green plains and gently rolling mountains, and in a great cleft in one of the mountain ranges was a ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... about a quarter of a mile up from the village she crossed a little bridge which spanned a deep and narrow crevasse, a gash which cleft the great mountain to its foundation. Pearl lingered here a moment to rest, and, leaning her arms on the railing, looked down curiously into the ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... blue zenith. From the other end of the ship, they could hear the plaudits that accompanied an impromptu athletic tournament; but the inhabitants of the nearest chairs were reading or dozing, and the deck about them was very still. Only the throbbing of the mighty screw and the hiss of the cleft waves broke the hush. ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... intermarries with the essences of the hills and of the regions under the earth; and according to the course and form the steam takes then, it begets metals or stones, it quickens into silver or gold, or runs along as iron and copper branching out or cleft asunder in veins ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... desire to exclude the nobility from all office and all dignity was obvious, at half a glance. My spirit was ulcerated at this; I saw approaching the complete re-establishment of the bastards; my heart was cleft in twain, to see the Regent at the heels of his unworthy minister. He was a prey to the interest, the avarice, the folly, of this miserable wretch, and no remedy possible. Whatever experience I might have had of the astonishing weakness of M. le ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... as yet— Not even the way that old Ridley was gone: Or with those securities what he had done: Or whether they had been already call'd out: If they are not, their fate is, I fear, past a doubt. Twenty families ruin'd, they say: what was left,— Unable to find any clew to the cleft The old fox ran to earth in,—but join you as fast As I could, my ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... and small, droop-limbed trees, their branches not clothed with leaves from proper twigs but with a reddish bristly growth protruding directly from their surfaces, made a partial wall for the pocket-sized meadow. That screen reached a rocky cleft where the mist curled in a long tongue through a wall twice Travis' height. If the browsers could be maneuvered into taking the ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... Curling Smoke settled again into a cleft from whence he could watch the entire Plain of Ash. No one could approach him from thence without being ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... and bell and consecrated taper, and still deeper dogmas or doctrines, wandered from the East into the Church, came also heresies, terrible as Knights Templars', which in due time warred against the Church, and cleft it in twain. The doctrines of wild sects, more or less Manichaean, which came forth strangely to upper life during the fever of the Crusades, all seem to tend obscurely from a Slavonic source. The vices with their adepti were reproached by the Church, gave ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bluer tint as it comes to reflect more of the cloudless heavens, and at length its tiny waves die away on a bed of violets, as closely netted together as the sand upon the shore. If you disembark from the boat, you find in the cleft of a neighbouring ravine a fountain of living water, which gushes beneath a narrow path formed by the goats, which leads up from this sequestered solitude, amidst overshadowing fig-trees and oleanders, to the cultivated abodes of man. Few scenes struck ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... but it will be a troublesome one; it is a sabre cut, and has cleft right through your shoulder bone. ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... cliff about the height of a man above the level of the ground, and vanished so quickly that Zinti, who as watching, rubbed his eyes in wonder. After waiting a while, however, he followed in their steps to find that behind the shrub was a narrow cleft or crack such as are often to be seen in cliffs, and that down this cleft ran a pathway which twisted and turned in the rock, growing broader as it went, till at last it ended in the hidden krantz. This krantz was a very ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... his bosom. He saith unto himself, "I will sip the nectar of the blind deity but I will not become drunken, for verily I know when to ring myself down." He calleth upon the innocent damosel with soft eyes and lips like unto a cleft cherry when purple with its own sweetness, and she singeth unto him with a voice that hath the low sweet melody of an aeolian harp, and squozeth his hand in the gloaming, sigheth just a wee sigh that endeth in a blush. And behold it cometh to pass that when the gay young man doth ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... see the whitecaps, the dancing glimmer of the sun, and the gray sea gulls that whirled and hovered and dipped before his longing gaze. He would lift his head to sniff the salt breeze that swept through the cleft in the hills, and to listen for that far-off thunder that could sometimes be heard as the great waves broke on the beach. At last, one day when he had sat so long with his friend that dusk was falling and the stars ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... miles of hills which sweep in an arc round the town, is the noble Montagne Pelee lying several miles to the north of the city, a mass of dark rock some four thousand feet high, with jagged outline, and cleft with gorges and ravines, down which flow numerous streams, gushing from the crater ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... long period we paddle by the south bank, and pass a vertical cleft-like valley, the upper end of which seems blocked by a finely shaped mountain, almost as conical as Kangwe. The name of this mountain is Njoko, and the name of the clear small river, that apparently monopolises the valley floor, is the Ovata. Our peace was not of long duration, and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... tribes in the waves of the sea, He called upon Moses, and said: "My beloved are in danger of drowning, and thou standest by and prayest. Bid Israel go forward, and thou lift up thy rod over the sea, and divide it." Thus it happened, and Israel passed through the sea with its water cleft in twain. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... no doubt that the fight was going against T'ung-t'ien Chiao-chu; to complete his discomfiture Jan-teng Tao-jen cleft the air and fell upon him unexpectedly. With a violent blow of his 'Fix-sea' staff he cast him down and compelled him to ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... tree he girdled; Just beneath its lowest branches, Just above the roots, he cut it, Till the sap came oozing outward: Down the trunk, from top to bottom, Sheer he cleft the bark asunder, With a wooden wedge he raised it, Stripped ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... only for its beauty (and who would insist on that?) rise all close together on the skirts of Plinlimmon, and the smallest of them has the most wonderful rising, for it falls through the gorge of Llygnant, which looks like, and perhaps is, the deepest cleft in this island, or, at any rate, the most unexpected. And a fourth source on the mountain, a tarn below its summit, is the source of Rheidol, which has a short but adventurous life ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... put up a "guide-board" of some sort, for his accommodation in following us. We therefore, upon several occasions, carried with us from the woods a few pieces, of three or four feet in length, which we planted at certain points, with a transverse stick through a cleft in the top, thus marking the direction he and his ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... might continue: "Death is our best friend—he strengthens our eyes to behold the glory which in the flesh it would blind us to see. Once I was afraid to behold the glory of God. I stood in a cleft of the rock, covered, as He passed by—but now, now, I can bear to stand and gaze in the presence ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... with turf.[*] The English arrived in sight on the evening, and a bloody conflict immediately ensued between two bodies of cavalry; where Robert, who was at the head of the Scots, engaged in single combat with Henry de Bohun, a gentleman of the family of Hereford; and at one stroke cleft his adversary to the chin with a battle-axe, in sight of the two armies. The English horse fled with precipitation to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... in which the castle of Watho lay, was a cleft in a plain rather than a valley among hills, for at the top of its steep sides, both north and south, was a table-land, large and wide. It was covered with rich grass and flowers, with here and there a wood, the outlying colony of a great forest. These grassy ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... Alders and bay grew thick, sun spots glancing through their leaves, boughs slapping and slashing back from the passage of the rushing bodies, stones rolling under the flying feet. The heat was suffocating, the narrow cleft holding it, the matted foliage keeping out all air. The men's faces were empurpled, the gunny sacks about their necks were soaked with sweat. They spoke little—a grunt, a muttered oath as a stone turned. Doubled under the branches, crashing ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... feet of those things which relate to justice, which they supplant and trample under foot, in case they are unfavorable to the interests of their friend. But of what quality they appear to us from heaven, you shall presently see; for their end is at hand." And lo! at that instant the ground was cleft asunder, and the tables fell one upon another, and they were swallowed up, together with the whole amphitheatre, and were cast into caverns, and imprisoned. It was then said to me, "Do you wish to see them where they now are?" And lo! their faces appeared ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... said. "There seems to be a path here." He pointed to a narrow cleft in the black rock. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... conscious of peril the provident bird Takes refuge unseen in a cleft of the well; Deposits his prize, and perceiving he's heard, Flies back in the shelter of silence ...
— Ballads - Founded On Anecdotes Relating To Animals • William Hayley
... to Iouenn. After swimming for some time he came upon a barren rock in the middle of the ocean, and here, though beaten upon by tempests and without any manner of shelter save that afforded by a cleft in the rock, he succeeded in living for three years upon the shell-fish which he gathered on the shores of his little domain. In that time he had grown almost like a savage. His clothes had fallen off him and he was thickly covered with matted hair. The only mark of civilization he bore was a chain ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... we learn[130] that she had a precinct within the enclosure of the later Olympieum. Pausanias by his mention of the cleft in the earth through which the waters of the flood disappeared and of the yearly offerings of the honey-cake in connection with this, shows the high antiquity of certain rites here celebrated. It is indeed most probable that these ceremonies formed ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... verry warm morning, passed a butifull Prarie on the right Side which extends back, those Praries has much the appearance from the river of farms, Divided by narrow Strips of woods those Strips of timber grows along the runs which rise on the hill & pass to the river a Cleft above, one man sick (Frasure) Struck with the Sun, Saw a large rat on the Side of the bank, Killed a wolf on the Bank passed (2) a verry narrow part of the river, all confined within 200 yards, a yellow bank ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... In a cleft on the skerry was a patch of green grass. There they sat them down, and they were ministered to in wondrous wise, how he knew not nor cared to know, so ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... "Tell us what Indian warned you and betrayed his tribe, or you shall see husband and children bleed before your eyes." The woman answered never a word, but after a little Naoman arose and said, "'Twas I;" then drew his blanket about him and knelt for execution. An axe cleft his skull. Drunk with the sight of blood, the Indians rushed upon the captives and slew them, one by one. The prisoners neither shrank nor cried for mercy, but met their end with hymns upon their lips, and, seeing that they could so meet death, one member of the band let fall his ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... the two had been standing there, wrapped in their long military overcoats, while Nissr had swooped on her appointed ways, with hurtling trajectory that had cleft the dark. Somewhat warmed by piped exhaust-gases though the glass-enclosed gallery had been, still the cold had been marked; for without, in the stupendous gulf of emptiness that had been rushing away beneath ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the ground fell away as if cut with a knife, leaving a precipice of over a hundred feet sheer down; but close by where I was standing was the head of a water course, which in time had gradually worn a sort of cleft in the wall, up or down which it was not difficult to make one's way. Further down this little gorge widened out and became a deep ravine, and further still a wide valley, where it opened upon the flats far below us. About half a mile down, where the ravine was deepest and ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... it is in full durbar To cry to a ruler of gathering war! Slowly he led to a peach-tree small, That grew by a cleft of the ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... indeed!—the Valley of the Housatonic, locked in by walls of every shape and size, from grassy knolls to bold basaltic cliffs. A beautiful little river wanders singing from side to side in this secluded Paradise, and from every mountain cleft come running crystal springs to join it; it looks only fit for people to be baptized in (though I believe the water is used for cooking and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... such thoughts came to me, like The sound of cleft-dropped waters to the ear Of the hot mower, who thereat stops the oftener To whet his glittering scythe, and, while he smiles, With the harsh, sharpening hone beats their fall's time, And dancing to it in his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... smooth and deep and about six hundred to eight hundred feet wide. At the very foot of the valley we made a camp under the shadow of that magnificent and unrivalled portal, the Gate of Lodore, which had been visible to us for many miles; the dark cleft two thousand feet high, through which the river cuts into the heart of the mountains, appearing as solemn and mysterious as the pathway to another world. From an eminence we could peer into its depths for some distance, and there was no sign of a rapid, but we ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... was situated an immense mountain, cleft open as if by the hand of some giant, the sides of which were clad with a carpet of verdure of a thousand different shades. At the bottom, as if for the purpose of stopping up the immense fissure, there ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... cleft where Mel Gray worked, across the flat plain of rock stripped naked by the wind that raved across it, lay the deep valley that sheltered the heart ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... trusting to the steepness of the precipice. There was, however, on this point, a certain window belonging to a certain pantry, and communicating with a certain yew-tree, which grew out of a steep cleft of the rock, being the very pass through which Goose Gibbie was smuggled out of the Castle in order to carry Edith's express to Charnwood, and which had probably, in its day, been used for other contraband purposes. ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... from her shoulders, and laughed as she beat her with it about the ears while Diana wriggled and writhed under her blows. Her swift arrows were shed upon the ground, and she fled weeping from under Juno's hand as a dove that flies before a falcon to the cleft of some hollow rock, when it is her good fortune to escape. Even so did she fly weeping away, leaving her bow and ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... at the edge of the level plain, and for a few moments Jolly Roger paused, while he looked off through the eastward gloom. A mile in that direction, beyond the cleft that ran like a great furrow through the Ridge, was Jed Hawkins' cabin, still and dark under the faint glow of the stars. And in that cabin was Nada. He felt that she was sitting at her little window, looking ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... taken and spread under their feet. Thorgils held his brother's shield, and Thord Arndisarson that of Bersi. Bersi struck the first blow, and cleft Cormac's shield; Cormac struck at Bersi to the like peril. Each of them cut up and spoilt three shields of the other's. Then it was Cormac's turn. He struck at Bersi, who parried with Whitting. Skofnung cut the point ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... as she saw it winding through the moon-lit landscape like a black, shining snake. In this way she came way down to Djupafors—where the river first hides itself in an underground channel—and then clear and transparent, as though it were made of glass, rushes down in a narrow cleft, and breaks into bits against its bottom in glittering drops and flying foam. Below the white falls lay a few stones, between which the water rushed away in a wild torrent cataract. Here mother Akka alighted. This was another good sleeping-place—especially this late in the evening, when ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... any further movement. As for the troop of gazelle, no sooner was the lion down than, throwing up their heads with one accord, they wheeled sharply round to the left and dashed off across the little plain, vanishing a minute later through a cleft of ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... her glance commanded less respect than that of the noblest Agrippina that ever trod the French stage since the days of Racine: on the contrary, it evoked a vulgar joy. In 1816 the Rabouilleuse saw Maxence Gilet, and fell in love with him at first sight. Her heart was cleft by the mythological arrow,—admirable description of an effect of nature which the Greeks, unable to conceive the chivalric, ideal, and melancholy love begotten of Christianity, could represent in no other ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... THOU?' Then I heard a great rushing sound as of a strong wind beaten through with wings, and a Voice, grand and sweet as a golden trumpet blown suddenly in the silence of night, answered: 'HERE! ... AND EVERYWHERE!' With that, a slanting stream of opaline radiance cleft the gloom with the sweep of a sword-blade, and I was caught up quickly ... I know not how ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... in their chariots, and daughters of joy looking out from their windows, all intoxicated with the mere delight of living and the gladness of a new day. The pagan populace of Antioch—reckless, pleasure-loving, spendthrift—were preparing for the Saturnalia. But all this Hermas had renounced. He cleft his way through the crowd slowly, like a reluctant swimmer weary of ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... ghost! it fades, it flies. Some funeral shall pass this way: the meteor marks the path. The distant dog is howling from the hut of the hill. The stag lies on the mountain moss: the hind is at his side. She hears the wind in his branchy horns. She starts, but lies again. The roe is in the cleft of the rock; the heath-cock's head is beneath his wing. No beast nor bird is abroad, but the owl and the howling fox. She on a leafless tree; he in a cloud on the hill. Dark, panting, trembling, sad, the traveller ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... Wild forms of danger; as he onward creeps If, chance, his anxious eye at distance sees The mountain-shepherd's solitary home, Peeping from forth the moon-illumin'd trees, What sudden transports to his bosom come! But, if between some hideous chasm yawn, Where the cleft pine a doubtful bridge displays, In dreadful silence, on the brink, forlorn He stands, and views in the faint rays Far, far below, the torrent's rising surge, And listens to the wild impetuous roar; Still eyes the depth, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... almost up to the eave of the roof stuck into a heap of stones, so that it had the appearance of bending forward to let the storm sweep over it. The low entrance-door opened to the land, and two small windows looked out upon the sea, and upon the boat, which was usually drawn up in a cleft above the ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... mounted on a gilt staff (un glaive tout dor['e] o['u] est attach['e] une bani['e]re vermeille). The loose end is cut into three wavy vandykes, to represent tongues of flame, and a silk tassel is hung at each cleft. In war the display of this standard indicates that no quarter will be given. The English standard of no quarter was ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... The bowsprit, when I looked through Roxton's telescope, was shapeless as with a swarm of bees. Now and then a single shriek rose upon the wild air. But now my attention was fixed on the life-boat. She had got into the wildest of the broken water; at one moment she was down in a huge cleft, the next balanced like a beam on the knife-edge of a wave, tossed about hither and thither, as if the waves delighted in mocking the rudder; but hitherto she had shipped no water. I am here drawing upon the information I have since received; but I did see how a huge wave, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... where the quick Rhone thus hath cleft his way, The mightiest of the storms hath ta'en his stand; For here, not one, but many, make their play, And fling their thunderbolts from hand to hand, Flashing and cast around: of all the band, The brightest through these parted hills hath forked His lightnings, as if he did ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... the islands that we saw. At 2 o'clock I went and looked over the fore-yard, and saw 2 islands at much greater distance than the Turtle Islands are laid down in my charts; one of them was a very high peaked mountain, cleft at top, and much like the burning island that we passed by, but bigger and higher; the other was a pretty long high flat island. Now I was certain that these were not the Turtle Islands, and that they could be no other than the Banda Isles; yet we steered in to make them plainer. ...
— A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... where he had sat in the morning, was a projection of rock, with a narrow cleft between it and the wall of the cavern, visible only from the very back of the cave, where the roof came down low. But when he thought of it, he saw that even here he could not have been hidden in the full ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... onward the chariot flies, The small flashes large to my dizzy eyes. What is cleft in twain, seems to blur and mate; What is crooked in nature, seems to be straight. Things at my side in an instant appear Distant, and things in the ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... a summer sun, ending one of his longest careers, were tipping a mountain peak with an ineffable rosy purple, contrasting with the deep shades of narrow ravines that cleft the rugged sides, and gradually expanded into valleys, sloping with green pasture, or clothed with wood. The whole picture, with its clear, soft sky, was retraced on the waters of the little lake set in emerald meadows, which lay before ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... will find enough more down below. Come along!" Whereupon he gave a loud whistle, and the whole flock started away, the liveliest always ahead, and first of all light-footed Swallow, who was to meet something unexpected to-day. She sprang down from stone to stone and across many a cleft in the rocks, but all at once she could go no farther—directly in front of her suddenly stood a chamois and gazed with curiosity into her face. This had never happened to Swallow before! She stood still, looked questioningly ...
— Moni the Goat-Boy • Johanna Spyri et al
... not have been so easy to see how France and England were to become once again enemies. This Cyprus wedge has cleft open a little farther the ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... Slovak version of this story, a murderous mother sends her son to two mountains, each of which is cleft open once in every twenty-four hours—the one opening at midday and the other at midnight; the former disclosing the Water of Life, the latter the Water of Death.[310] In a similar story from the Ukraine, mention is made of two springs ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... till death. It seemed to Jeanne that she was casting a little of her heart into every fold of these valleys. She became infatuated with sea bathing. When she was well out from shore, she would float on her back, her arms crossed, her eyes lost in the profound blue of the sky which was cleft by the flight of a swallow, or the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... wherewith to beguile us o' winter nights. She used to tell, too, about Eleanor Byron, who loved a fay or elf, and went to meet him at the fairies' chapel away yonder where the Spodden gushes through its rocky cleft,—'tis a fearful story,—and how she was delivered from the spell. I sometimes think on't till my very flesh creeps, and I could almost fancy that such an invisible ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... elapsed, and I am able to sit out once more in the sunshine. Just opposite me is the steep hillside, grey with shaly rock, and yonder on its flank is the dark cleft which marks the opening of the Blue John Gap. But it is no longer a source of terror. Never again through that ill-omened tunnel shall any strange shape flit out into the world of men. The educated and the scientific, the Dr. Johnsons and the like, may smile at my narrative, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a garden and paddock the view overlooked a stream, some farm buildings which lay beyond, and the opening of a wooded, rocky pass (called, in Somersetshire, a Combe), which here cleft its way through the hills that closed the prospect. A winding strip of road was visible, at no great distance, amid the undulations of the open ground; and along this strip the stalwart figure of Mr. Vanstone was now easily ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... grand support of the soft-billed birds in winter is that infinite profusion of aureliae of the lepidoptera ordo, which is fastened to the twigs of trees and their trunks; to the pales and walls of gardens and buildings; and is found in every cranny and cleft of rock or rubbish, and even in ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... triumphed. He knew that did he once again get within grip of those ghastly tentacles he would never emerge alive. He swung up his improvised mace; the creature was now within twelve yards of him. He hurled the club; with terrific force it cleft the air, the massive band of gold which constituted its head lighting full upon one of the demon's eyes. For one moment the horror contracted into a heaving, writhing heap, frightful to behold, then, throwing out its grisly tentacles, it spun round and round as it had done before. ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... spoke to the Lightning, and with one swift blow the Lightning cleft the Prairie to the heart. And the Prairie rocked and groaned in agony, and for many a day moaned bitterly over ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... skies. It seem'd he flew, the way so easy was; 70 And like a new-born spirit did he pass Through the green evening quiet in the sun, O'er many a heath, through many a woodland dun, Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams The summer time away. One track unseams A wooded cleft, and, far away, the blue Of ocean fades upon him; then, anew, He sinks adown a solitary glen, Where there was never sound of mortal men, Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences 80 Melting to silence, when upon the breeze Some ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... prelacy and the taunts and abuse of the sentries, standing as he did between these extremes, and pleading for a moderate Episcopacy. He was between the upper millstone of High Church and the nether one of Dissent. To use his own simile, he was like one who seeks to fill with his hand a cleft in a log, and feels both sides close upon him with pain. All parties and sects had, as they thought, grounds of complaint against him. There was in him an almost childish simplicity of purpose, a headlong earnestness and eagerness, which did not allow him to consider how far ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... death she was bed-ridden. She was afflicted with most frightful ailments, her wounds festered, and worms bred in her putrefying flesh. Erysipelas, that terrible malady of the Middle Ages, consumed her. Her right arm was eaten away, a single muscle held it to the body, her brow was cleft in two, one of her eyes became blind, and the other so weak that it could ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... forest close to us looked dark and sombre, whilst the valley further off was bathed in sunlight, and in the dim distance the mountains over which we had passed early in the day faded into a delicious pale blue chiaroscuro. The banks beneath or above us were cleft by little gullies, with struggling rivulets, edged by delicate ferns and strange plants. The railway stations even seemed prettier and more homelike than any we have yet seen in Australia. They were surrounded by gardens, and quite overgrown with creepers. ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... less than a rabbit, generally inhabits forest districts; and as it is there a nocturnal animal, it spends the chief part of the day in its hiding-place—usually the cleft of a rock or the hollow of a decaying tree—twenty or thirty creatures congregating together. Here their nests are formed of soft leaves, where the young are placed till they are able to accompany their parents on their ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... went by and the wings grew strong, And the crag-built home was at last deserted; But, close to the nest that her love had left, The daisy clung to the rocky cleft, Half broken-hearted. ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... For, from a broad cleft in the rocks, the water hurled itself out of its hiding-place, and, dashing down over its rocky bed, rushed impetuous over the sloping country, till, its force being spent, it waded tediously through the slushing reeds of the hill-land ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... And the cormorants resort, Flapping slowly from their sport With the fat Atlantic shoal, Homeward to Tregeagle's Hole— Walking there, the other day, In a bight within a bay, I espied amid the rocks, Bruis'd and jamm'd, the daintiest box, That the waves had flung and left High upon an ivied cleft. Striped it was with white and red, Satin-lined and carpeted, Hung with bells, and shaped withal Like the queer, fantastical Chinese temples you'll have seen Pictured upon white Nankin, Where, assembled in effective Head-dresses and odd perspective, Tiny dames and mandarins Expiate their ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sickening horror came over her." Yes, she had heard of such things. If she could only get home in safety! Why had she tempted Providence thus? She backed softly and prayed only to escape. What, and never even deliver the Bible? "It would be wicked to return with it!" In a cleft of the rock she placed it, and then, to prevent the wind blowing off loose leaves, she placed a stone on top, and fled from the ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... furiously while we were scrambling on the rocks, and the latter were warm to the touch, although, thousands of feet below, the immense cleft in the mountain side was choked ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... purpose of calling those who remained there to account for not obeying him. He found Lord Wenlock, one of the leaders, sitting upon his horse idle, as he said, in the town. He immediately denounced him as a traitor, and, riding up to him, cut him down with a blow from his battle-axe, which cleft his skull. ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... fool," she announced, half-aloud. "I'm shore a plumb fool." Then she turned and disappeared in the deep cleft between the gigantic bowlder upon which she had been sitting and another—small only by comparison. There, ten feet down, in a narrow alley littered with ragged stones, lay the crumpled body of a man. It ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... kind, was perfect. It was not a fleshy one exactly, but she was large and full. Her skin was clear, fine-grained and transparent; her temples and forehead perfectly rounded and polished, and her lips and chin swelling into a ripe and tempting pout, like the cleft of a bursted apricot. And then her eyes—large, liquid and sleepy—they languished beneath their long black fringes as if they had no business with daylight—like two magnificent dreams, surprised in their jet embryos ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... her personality was uppermost as she sought in the trunk for something to wear, and a smile curved the corners of her straight lips and brought out a faint cleft in her square chin, as she ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... lake. They proved to be of fossiliferous limestone, the strata of which were much disturbed: the strike appeared in one part north-west, and the dip north-east 45 degrees: a large fault passed east by north through the cliff, and it was further cleft by joints running northwards. The cliff was not 100 yards long, and was about 70 thick; its surface was shivered by frost into cubical masses, and glacial boulders of gneiss lay on the top. The limestone rock was chiefly a blue pisolite conglomerate, with veins and crystals ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... lashing the cable to a stunted pine that grew in a cleft of the rock, "come up to the house, we shall find a fire there and a glass of brandy. The old man will send some of ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... internal division of the cells, the contents of each forming as many parts as there are cells in the whole colony. The young cells now escape through a cleft in the wall of the mother cell, but are still surrounded by a delicate membrane (Fig. 11, E). Within this membrane the young cells arrange themselves in the form of the original colony, and grow together, forming a ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell
... a little later, once more the hushed desert night was cleft by a furious bellow of sound. It came, this time, from a narrow canyon. The steep sides threw the roar back and back again, and the echoes swelled to an earth-shaking blast of sound. The oblong hut from which it came rocked and almost fell; then, as the noise began to lessen, teetered ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... still, with the rain on his face and his battered hat in his hand. Verneille lay in a cleft of the rocks, where it seemed he had crawled when he broke down on his last weary march, but the sun and the rain had worked their will, and there was very little left of him. Indeed, part of the bony structure had rolled clear of the shreds ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... 7.18 went half a mile north-north-west to a cleft hill on the left bank of the river; at 7.35 went three-quarters of a mile north; at 7.52 went half a mile north-east; at 8 went quarter of a mile east-north-east to where we got any quantity of figs from trees like the Moreton Bay fig but another variety. At 8.20 made half a mile north-east. ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... thousand people, and farther on the cliffs are of softly-tinted marble lustrously polished by the waves. At one place Major Powell walked for more than a mile on a marble pavement fretted with strange devices and embossed with a thousand different patterns. Through a cleft in the wall the sun shone on this floor, which gleamed with iridescent beauty. Exploring the cleft, Major Powell found a succession of pools one above another, and each cold and clear, though the water of the river was a dull red. Then a bend in the canon disclosed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, and dies ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... classical profiles, and glittering dresses, Their large black eyes, and soft seraphic cheeks, Crimson as cleft pomegranates, their long tresses, The gesture which enchants, the eye that speaks, The innocence which happy childhood blesses, Made quite a picture of these little Greeks; So that the philosophical beholder Sigh'd for their sakes—that they should ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... infirmities, our failures; and if he succeeds in this, gloom will fill us, doubts and fears will spring up within us, and we shall soon fail and fall. We must be wise as the conies, and build our nest in the cleft of the Rock of ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... cast the rope, and shoved the keel Free of the gravel; jumped, and dropped beside Her; took the oars, and they began to steal Under the overhanging trees. A wide Gash of red lantern-light cleft like a blade Into the gloom, and struck on Eunice sitting Rigid and stark upon the after thwart. It blazed upon their flitting In merciless light. A moment so it stayed, Then was extinguished, and Sir Everard made One leap, and landed just ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... dagger into his back:—Absenpresentini fell without a groan, and Phosphorini, withdrawing his dagger, exclaimed, 'Who is now to tell the secret but me?' 'Not you,' cried Vortiskini, raising up his sword and striking at where the voice proceeded. The trusty steel cleft the head of the abandoned Phosphorini, who fell without a groan. 'Now will I retain the secret of blood and gold,' said Vortiskini, as he sheathed his sword. 'Thou shalt,' exclaimed the wily Jesuit, as he struck ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... he was pursuing was perfectly at home in the lonely chasm. As straight as a drawn whip-lash his trail led from one break in the rocky chaos to another. Never did he err. Once the tracks seemed to end squarely against a broad face of rock, but there the young hunter found a cleft in the granite wall scarcely wider than his body, through which he cautiously wormed his way. Where this cleft opened into the chasm again the fugitive had rested for a few moments, and had placed some burden upon the snow at his feet. A single glance disclosed what this burden had been, for in ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... almost as far as and somewhat to the left of Charasiah, dividing the valley of Charasiah from the outer plain of Chardeh. To the right front of Charasiah, distant from it about three miles, the range is cleft by the rugged and narrow Sung-i-Nawishta Pass, through which run the Logur river and the direct road to Cabul by Beni Hissar. Information had been received that the Afghans were determined on a resolute ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... of these I have already spoken of. It lay considerably to the north of west, and was where the setting sun made its way, as I have before described, into the amphitheatre, through a cleanly cut natural cleft in the granite embankment; this fissure might have been ten yards wide at its widest point, so far as the eye could trace it. It seemed to lead up, up like a natural causeway, into the recesses of unexplored mountains and forests. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... walked far. A squatter's old log-house stood by the green roadside; the wood of the roof and walls was weathered and silver-gray. Before it a clothes-line was stretched, heaved tent-like by a cleft pole, and a few garments were flapping in the wind, chiefly white, but one was vivid pink and ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... had quite fifty thousand inhabitants, continued Shadrach, commanded the mouth of the pass or cleft by which we must approach Mur, having probably been first built there for ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... and he traced it to a small, barren ravine that was strewn over with skeletons and dark objects, and Wahb, as he passed, smelled a smell of many different animals, and knew by its quality that they were lying dead in this treeless, grassless hollow. For there was a cleft in the rocks at the upper end, whence poured a deadly gas; invisible but heavy, it filled the little gulch like a brimming poison bowl, and at the lower end there was a steady overflow. But Wahb knew only that the air that poured from it as he passed made him dizzy and sleepy, ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Thompson Seton
... forgot to move; Some demon calm'd the air and smooth'd the deep, Hush'd the loud winds, and charm'd the waves to sleep. Now every sail we furl, each oar we ply; Lash'd by the stroke, the frothy waters fly. The ductile wax with busy hands I mould, And cleft in fragments, and the fragments roll'd; The aerial region now grew warm with day, The wax dissolved beneath the burning ray; Then every ear I barr'd against the strain, And from access of frenzy lock'd the brain. Now round the masts my mates the fetters roll'd, And bound me limb by limb with ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... revealed self. We are informed what it is in Exodus. Moses was in the mount with God, and He had shown him wonderful things of kindness and of love. And Moses said, "O God, show me thy glory!" And He said, "I will make all my goodness pass before thee." So He put Moses in the cleft of the rock, and proclaimed the name of the Lord: "The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin"—there it is, root and branch ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... mound of skeletons wonderfully complete,' all radiating from a centre, faces upwards, feet inwards; a 'radiation' not of Light, but of the Nether Darkness rather; and evidently the fruit of battle; for 'many of the heads were cleft, or had arrow-holes in them,' The Battle of Fornham, therefore, is a fact, though a forgotten one; no less obscure than undeniable,—like so ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... an electric torch as he spoke, and guided Myra over rocky ground to what seemed a mere cleft in a wall ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... river issuing from the cleft is called the Seille, and very lovely is the deep, narrow valley of emerald green through which it murmurs so musically. The mountain gorge opens by little and little as we proceed, showing velvety pastures where ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... by the lameness of such a horse at such a time, that he hardly knew what he saw or what he did not see. At any rate then in his confusion he found no cause of lameness, but the horse was led into the stable as lame as a tree. Here Tifto found the nail inserted into the very cleft of the frog of the near fore-foot, and so inserted that he could not extract it till the farrier came. That the farrier had extracted the nail from the part of the foot indicated ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... now, getting in front of it, threw the axe with so sure an aim, that the bird, its head almost cleft in two, fell ...
— Adventures in Australia • W.H.G. Kingston
... headless arrows at the hearts, Whence follows many a vacant pang; but O With me, Sir, entered in the bigger boy, The Head of all the golden-shafted firm, The long-limbed lad that had a Psyche too; He cleft me through the stomacher; and now What think you of it, Florian? do I chase The substance or the shadow? will it hold? I have no sorcerer's malison on me, No ghostly hauntings like his Highness. ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... made all the towne to shake, and made the wall to open from aboue to beneath vnto the plaine ground; howbeit, it fell not, for the mine had vent or breath in two places, by one of the countermines, and by a rocke vnder the Barbican, the which did cleaue, and by that cleft the fury and might of the mine had issue. And if the sayd two vents had not bene, the wall had bene turned vpside downe. And for truth, as it was reported to vs out of the campe, the enemies had great hope in the sayd mine, thinking that the wall should haue ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... dislodge the boat from its position between the cleft branches of shrubbery which also held other debris, and furthermore the boat was full of all sorts of ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... other alternately, from hold to hold, with frightful precipices beneath them. As soon as Ormond had warmed to the business, he was delighted with the dangerous pursuit; but suddenly, just as he had laid his hand on the egg, and that King Corny shouted in triumph, Harry, leaping back across the cleft in the rock, missed his footing and fell, and must have been dashed to pieces, but for a sort of projecting landing-place, on which he was caught, where he lay for some minutes stunned. The terror of poor Corny was such that he could neither move nor look up, till Moriarty called out to ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... but she had not taken her powers into account; she had chosen a part to which she was quite unequal. Lucien read on through a pile of penny-a-lining, put together on the same system as his attack upon Nathan. Milo of Crotona, when he found his hands fast in the oak which he himself had cleft, was not more furious than Lucien. He grew haggard with rage. His friends gave Coralie the most treacherous advice, in the language of kindly counsel and friendly interest. She should play (according to these authorities) all kind of roles, which the treacherous ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... beacons lighted upon every hill. They were forced to betake themselves to the forests, and about half-way, Prince Ernst's captors, not daring to go any father, hid themselves and him in a cavern called the Devil's Cleft on the right bank of the ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... no further. Many a hundred yards had Moro swum with his rider on his back—many a current had he cleft with his proud breast ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... exclaimed his wife, covering her face with her apron. But, whether from devotion to his art or from affection for his brother, Pierre persisted in carrying out his treatment. He laid the animal, cleft and pungently odorous, upon the patient. Needless to say, I ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... a narrow cleft in the rocks which he calls the Fat Woman's Misery. It received its name several years ago from a circumstance that happened while he was conducting a party of tourists along the rim trail. To obtain a better view the party essayed to squeeze through the opening, in which attempt ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... ridge will wear away the supports of the more egregious and unstable blocks, and one by one they will topple into the abyss on this side or on that. It will probably never again be the smooth, homogeneous slope it has been; "the gable" will probably always present a wide cleft, but the slopes beyond it, stripped now of their accumulated ice so as to be unclimbable, may build up again and give ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... concerning whom Pia was troubled. She could only take refuge in generalities, which, with a definite case before her, she felt to be a peculiarly unsatisfactory proceeding. Yet there was nothing else to be done. It was more than probable that Pia was in the same kind of cleft stick as herself, and that therefore direct discussion of the matter was out of ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... lake, the reflection of the scene above, received into the bosom of the lake below! See that crag projecting, the wild flowers that, hang out from it, and bend as if to gaze at their own forms in the water beneath. Observe that plot of green grass above, that tree springing from the cleft, and over all, the quiet sky reflected in all its softness and depth from the lake's steady surface. Does it not seem as if there were two heavens. How perfect the reflection! And just as perfect and clear, and free from confusion and perplexity, is the reflection of God's ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... perfectly dormant. Placed in sand in a cool cellar so they will not shrivel, they are kept until grafting time, which is early spring, usually before the leaves start on the stock. The cions may be placed on the tree by several methods, but only two are commonly employed,—the whip-graft and the cleft-graft. The former is adapted to small stocks, the size of one's finger or smaller; it is the method employed in root-grafting in the nursery, ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... of Bern call Llamas, the Chilese, Chilihneque, and the Spaniards, Carneros de la tierra, or native sheep. The heads of these animals are small in proportion to their bodies, and are somewhat in shape between the head of a horse and that of a sheep, the upper lips being cleft like that of a hare, through which they can spit to the distance of ten paces against any one who offends them, and if the spittle happens to fall on the face of a person, it causes a red itchy spot. Their necks are long, and concavely bent downwards, like that of a camel, which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... occupeed by Leddy Carline's fush the day afore. 'Noo for the fun!' thinks I, as I sat still an' smokit calmly. She was certently a perseverin' wummun, that dowager—there was nae device she didna try wi' that saumon tae force him oot o' the cleft. Aifter aboot ten meenits mair o' this wark, she shot at me ower her shouther the obsairve, 'Isn't it an obstinate wretch?' 'Aye,' says I pawkily, 'he's gey dour; but he's only a Spey fush, an' of coorse ye'll maister him ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... fly from the Pasha's troops, or from their enemies in the desert. The Szaffa has no springs; the rain water is collected in cisterns. The only entrance is through a narrow pass, called Bab el Szaffa, a cleft, between high perpendicular rocks, not more than two yards in breadth, which one ever dared to enter as an enemy. If a tribe of Arabs intend to remain a whole year in the Szaffa, they sow wheat and barley on the spots fit for cultivation on its precincts. On its E. limits ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... the earthly paradise we ploughed the long grass of the prairies; like a fiery snake our train trailed over the flowering land; its long undulations were no impediment; the grassy billows parted before us; we cleft the young forests that have here and there sprung up at the call of patient husbandry; myriads of wild-fowl wheeled over the fragrant and boundless fields; every flower in the floral calendar seemed at home in those meadow-lands of the world: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... would have it—Satanas watching at the gates of hell, thought to himself, "If I spoil not his work, earth will be Eden in Italy." So he drew his bow in envy, and sped a poisoned arrow; and the arrow cleft the rose of paradise, and broke the silver string of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Odyssey they had gone to Spain—that brown un-European land of "lyrio" flowers, and cries of "Agua!" in the streets, where the men seem cleft to the waist when they are astride of horses, under their wide black hats, and the black-clothed women with wonderful eyes still look as if they missed their Eastern veils. It had been a month of gaiety and glamour, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... occurred, no change of level took place in the two parts of the bed of the river thus rent asunder, consequently, in coming down the river to Garden Island, the water suddenly disappears, and we see the opposite side of the cleft, with grass and trees growing where once the river ran, on the same level as that part of its bed on which we sail. The first crack is, in length, a few yards more than the breadth of the Zambesi, which by measurement ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... fine looking old man he was. His face, with its predominant nose, long white moustache and firm cleft chin, was of that resolute and obstinate type which seems a legacy of the Roman Empire, whose legionaries left much more behind them in Gaul and Britain than Trajan arches and Roman roads. He was dressed in light grey tweeds, his linen was immaculate—youthful and still a beau ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... with green moss and golden stone-crop. And there is a profound, yet evident, reason for this feeling. The very soul of the cottage—the essence and meaning of it—are in its roof; it is that, mainly, wherein consists its shelter; that, wherein it differs most completely from a cleft in rocks or bower in woods. It is in its thick impenetrable coverlet of close thatch that its whole heart and hospitality are concentrated. Consider the difference, in sound, of the expressions "beneath my roof" and "within my walls,"—consider whether you would ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... made you valiant, strong and swift And maimed you with a bullet long ago, And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift, And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow, Gave back your youth to you, And packed in moments rare and few Achievements manifold And happiness untold, And bade you spring to Death as to a bride, In manhood's ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... enjoy a second visit to it more than the first, and this was specially so in the present instance; for in my visit from Grund, I took the most difficult and least profitable course, by climbing laterally to the level of the Ross Treppe, instead of going along the stream, and seeing the variety of cleft granite, unexampled, I think, elsewhere in that class ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... issuing from a yawning cavern in the farther wall, was quickly engulfed again by that lower archway we had just traversed. In some upheaval of the earthquake age a huge slice of the mountain's face had split off and settled away from the parent cliff to leave a deep cleft open to the sky. One end of this crevice chasm—that toward the upland valley—was choked and filled by the debris of later landslides; but ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... a neck or saddle of drifted snow lying in a gap of the mountain rampart which flanked the last curve of the glacier. Under the cliffs on either hand, like a moat beneath the ramparts, lay a yawning ice-cleft or bergschrund, formed by the drawing away of the steadily moving Barrier ice from the rocks. Across this moat and leading up to the gap in the ramparts, the Gateway provided a solid causeway. To climb this and descend ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... to the butt of the automatic as he drew back from the cleft in the wall, and, staring, whirled about, ready ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... before the door of the cottage. The wayfarer with no companion but his staff paused here to exchange a word, that the sense of loneliness might not utterly overcome him ere he could pass through the cleft of the mountain or reach the first house in the valley. And here the teamster on his way to Portland market would put up for the night, and, if a bachelor, might sit an hour beyond the usual bedtime and steal a kiss from the mountain-maid at parting. ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... follows the game-trail of deer and goat and cougar and bear across the slope to the watering-places where springs gush out from the rocks. One has only to look close enough {29} to see the little cleft footprint of the deer round these springs. To the miners, penetrating the wilds north of the Fraser, the caribou proved a godsend during that lean first winter. The miners spelled it 'cariboo,' and thus gave the great gold ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... stern Experience cleft, When life's romance is turn'd to sport; If man hath consolation left On this side ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... harbour was quite still, in the pause of the evening; and the smooth undulations were caressed by a hundred opalescent hues, growing deeper toward the west, where the river came in. Converging lines of trees stood dark against the sky; a cleft in the woods marked the course of the stream, above which the reluctant splendours of an autumnal day were dying in ashes of roses, while three tiny clouds, poised high in air, burned red with the last glimpse of ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... well, my love! Suppose me come from the Phlegraean plains, Where gasping giants lay, cleft by my sword, And mountain tops pared off each other blow, To bury those I slew. Receive me, goddess! Let Caesar spread his subtile nets; like Vulcan, In thy embraces I would be beheld By heaven and earth at ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... restfulness, their smile Of far-off meanings; and the people come In tributary hosts for many a mile, Drawn by an eloquence More solemn and intense Than that wherewith he shook The Senate, while his look Of sober lightning cleft the knotty growth Of error, that within the riven root Uplifted, lit with peace, truth's buds might shoot, And blow sweet breath o'er all, ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop |
