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More "Rift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sky, The argosies of cloudland lie, Whose shores, with many a shining rift, Far off their pearl-white ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... hardest of metals, and even the marble palaces of the Egyptian nobles afforded no protection against them. If a frog came close to them, the walls split asunder immediately. "Make way," the frogs would call out to the stone, "that I may do the will of my Creator," and at once the marble showed a rift, through which the frogs entered, and then they attacked the Egyptians bodily, and mutilated and overwhelmed them. In their ardor to fulfil the behest of God, the frogs cast themselves into the red-hot flames ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... clouds shutting out, for months together, the sunshine and warmth from his life, that life itself, taken as a whole, was by no means destitute of happiness. The musical temperament is one which cannot be cast down for long; let the cloud-rift be ever so small, it suffices to let in a flood of sunshine to such a nature as that which Schubert possessed. But how much happier might his life have been if, in the absence of the ability to manage his own affairs to ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... borne to the ears of the girl. Bearded men looked, listened, and turned away, shuddering. The sun burst suddenly through a rift in the flying clouds, and his golden radiance ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... history of Prague crossed the Charles Bridge. One day, to the beating of drums, a bevy of priests came from afar; they made for the market-place and there sold indulgences. The Pragers, distracted by the dissensions that rent the country, took to arms repeatedly. Now and then a rift in the clouds would hold out promise of a serener atmosphere; after two Habsburgs, Albert and his posthumous son, Ladislaus, came a King of their own choosing, of their own race and faith, George Podiebrad. But much as the Pragers venerated this native King of ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... overgrazing; soil erosion; desertification; famine natural hazards: geologically active Great Rift Valley susceptible to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions; frequent droughts international agreements: party to - Biodiversity, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Ozone Layer Protection; signed, but not ratified ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... cavelike refuge, just under the shelving mass overhead, heaped in a regular semicircle, a rude parapet of rocks gave shelter to the troopers guarding the approaches. Little loopholes had been left, three looking down and two northward up the dark and tortuous rift. In each of these a loaded carbine lay in readiness. So well chosen was the spot that for one hundred yards southeastward—down stream—the narrow gorge was commanded by the fire of the defense, while above, for nearly eighty, from ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... influences, That purify and heal and are not seen, Shall man say whence your virtue is, or how 350 Ye make medicinal the wayside weed? I know that sunshine, through whatever rift, How shaped it matters not, upon my walls Paints discs as perfect-rounded as its source, And, like its antitype, the ray divine, However finding entrance, perfect still, Repeats the image unimpaired ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... itself, and they slashed and trampled down and hauled and lowered till the whole party found themselves upon a broad stony shelf at the very edge of a sharply-cut rift, whose sides showed that it must have been split from the opposite side by some convulsion of Nature, so exactly was ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... comforted her to feel the faithful heart beating against her own. That Lon disliked to have her and Flukey about him, she knew; but she had not known until today that he hated her. He had never before told her so. Flea caught her breath in a gasp, and turned her eyes to a rift in a rock where the scow lay. Only a dark line distinguished it in the shadows. At the thought that it was to be forced upon her for a home, she cried again, and Snatchet, from his haven of rest, lifted his pointed yellow nose ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... stately house one instant showed, Through a rift, on the vessel's lee; What manner of creatures may be those ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... waves so small that it seemed as if the sea, tired of its endless task, were doing dispiritedly as little as it dared, and murmuring at that. The curving cliffs on the left looked like white curtains, closely drawn. The low grey sky was unbroken by cloud or rift except low down on the horizon, where it had risen like a blind drawn up a little to admit the light. It was a melancholy prospect, and Beth shivered and sighed in sympathy. Then a sparrow cheeped somewhere ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... miles away as the crow flies. We had often looked at this spot, with a telescope, from the veranda of our studio, watching the hunting and sight-seeing parties ride up the bed of the stream. We rather feared the drifting clouds and mists would hide the fire from view, but now and then a rift appeared, and we knew if they were looking they could see its light. Camp No. 51 was made close to Bright Angel Creek, that evening, Thursday, October the 16th, two months and eight days from the time we had ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... of rippling here and there among the yellow grain; the green thick alfalfa grass waved almost, it seemed, of its own accord, for the wind never blew; and when at evening the sun lay against the plain, the rift of the canyon was filled with a violet light, and the Bow Leg Mountains became transfigured with hues of floating and unimaginable color. The sun shone in a sky where never a cloud came, and noon was not too warm nor the dark too cool. And so for two months I went through these ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... character was "as black as Hell," and upon Rachel's complaint to the session, he was "churched" for "breach of the Ninth Commandment and also for a violation of his covenant agreement." This incident caused a rift which gradually developed into something very like a schism in the local congregation, and this internal disagreement finally produced a split between Eleazar's son, Dr. John Wheelock, who was now president of Dartmouth ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... cloudlets drifted across the rift of blue above, and a cool breadth of shadow darkened the pine on the great rocks. Something suggested a fringe of smaller firs along the edge of a moor in Lancashire, and for a moment my thoughts sped ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... stealing westward silently over the still canopy of leaves, both combatants were still there; and they were still here, too, when the sun, silting in through a rift in the foliage, found and bathed them. The owl was crouched as she had been when the moon left her—crouched, and with her wings just a little open, like a bird about to take flight; but she had already taken wing on the longest flight of all. The hedgehog was, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... 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 ripeness, power and pride, And on your sandals the strong wings ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... are without end; and romance knows no limits when dealing with the subject. The lives of the Man and the Dog are found to be ever intertwined. Yet is there always this besides—the rift in the lute and the familiar refrain, that the life of the dog shall be short, and that Man shall go on his way with his head bent, till such time as he shall become rich once more in the love of a new-found friend—if that be ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... arm, "I'll get you home." Before she had time to say anything he had her in the car, and they were driving toward the Roth house. By the time they had reached it the first strength of the shower was spent, and there was only a light scattering rain with a rift showing in the clouds over ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... ceased; behind the Col du Pigeonnier sunshine fell through a rift in the watery clouds. It touched the rushing river, shining on foaming fords where our cavalry pickets were ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... The extraordinary concentration and richness of this description reminds us of Keats's advice to Shelley—'Load every rift of your subject with ore.' The whole poem seems to be painted in tints ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... affection and by her dogged determination to be sufficient to him as a companion and a helper; and a little ashamed at his middle-aged—he was forty-seven—infatuation for a woman who was herself well on in the thirties. There were times when a rift came in the cloud of his passion for Vivie, when he looked out dispassionately on the prospect of the rest of his life—he could hope at most for twenty more years of mental and bodily activity and energy. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... the window. A mild fresh air which seemed to be pouring over the earth through that rift in heaven which the sunset had made, breathed freshly on her face and the yellow light shone on her amber hair, which lay on her shoulders about the length of the hair of an angel in some ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... come to betwixt the kings at the time of this mustering, & peace ensued in the lands. King Magnus was afterwards stricken with a sickness, the rift-worm sickness, and when he had lain abed for some time died he at Nidaros, and there was buried. He was a King right ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... loghe to e lyfte rered The much (great) flowing deep (loch) to the loft (sky) reared. Mony clustered clowde clef alle in clowte[gh] Many a clustering cloud cleft all in clouts (pieces), To-rent vch a rayn-ryfte & rusched to e vre Rent was each a rain-rift and rushed to the earth; Fon neuer in forty daye[gh], & en e flod ryses Failed never in forty days, and then the flood rises, Ouer-walte[gh] vche a wod and e wyde felde[gh] Over-flows each wood and the wide ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands, Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, By help of her more potent ministers, 275 And in her most unmitigable rage, Into a cloven pine; within which rift Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain A dozen years; within which space she died, And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans 280 As fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island— Save for the son that she did ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... Marjorie, when, breathless and somewhat tired, the three explorers had reached a small turret room into which was shining a ray of sunshine from a rift in the clouds—'I wonder if you would laugh if I told ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... wi' him at his wark," thought Jack, and they walked along, only now and then giving utterance to some common place remark. Dick's conscience accused him. He felt that he possessed a secret that Jack could not share. There was a rift in the lute. Perfect confidence had ceased to exist between them. Why should it be so? he asked himself. Jack has committed no fault. Had the case been reversed he felt sure that Jack would have confided in him. Ah, but Jack could never love her ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... same sons of Sagara, accepted this command of their father, and once more began to search through the entire world. Now these heroes saw a rift on the surface of the earth. And having reached this pit, the sons of Sagara began to excavate it. And with spades and pickaxes they went on digging the sea, making the utmost efforts. And that same abode of Varuna (namely the ocean), being thus, excavated by the united sons ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... there was a rift between the two friends. Paul did not tell Stanley what had happened at the meeting, but left him to find out. He heard all about it from Waterman—the ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... saw Father Letheby buoyant, enthusiastic, not merely hopeful, but certain of the success of his enterprise. I saw these two business people chatting and consulting together, and I knew by their looks that they were not quite so sanguine. It was "the little rift within ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... deep in slush and mire, and the water soaked through his leggings and moccasins again, but he paid no attention to it now. His new courage and strength lasted. Glancing up at the heavens he beheld a little rift in the western clouds. A bar of light was let through, and his mind, so imaginative, so susceptible to the influences of earth and air, at once saw it as an omen. It was a pillar of fire to him, ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... cavalryman and a particular indisposition to the discharge of firearms, he drew his saber. The man on foot made no movement in answer to the challenge. The situation was tense and a bit dramatic. Suddenly the moon burst through a rift in the clouds and, himself in the shadow of a group of great oaks, the horseman saw the footman clearly, in a patch of white light. It was Trooper Dunning, unarmed and bareheaded. The object at his feet resolved itself into a dead horse, ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... I knew not,) help me as when life begun,— Rift the hills and roll the waters, flash ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... voice from within, "plain drunk." The police arrived just then, and cleared a way; through the rift they made, she saw ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... dismounting, to prepare to follow them. A few moments' scrambling brought them to the top of the ledge; the path then passed between a narrow defile, where only one could walk at a time, till suddenly they came to a rift or chasm more than a yard in breadth, and beyond which lay a pile of rocks, separate from the rest of the ledge, standing full thirty feet high, with its sides steep and perpendicular as those of ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... been calculated before a position well upon the slope of the giant peak was reached—a grand shelf, covered with verdure close to where a sparkling stream gushed out of a patch of rocks and made a leap of fully a hundred feet down into a rift, along which it gurgled musically beneath a rainbow-like arch of ever-changing beauty on its way to the ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... First we lay still in the fog because we could not see which way to go; now it is clear, and we know just as little about it. It looks as if we were at the northern boundary of the open water. To the west the ice appears to extend south again. To the north it is compact and white—only a small open rift or pool every here and there; and the sky is whitish-blue everywhere on the horizon. It is from the east we have just come, but there we could see very little; and for want of anything better to do we shall make a short excursion in that direction, on the possibility of ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... which they mounted, and descended into another valley. Here they came upon Pendle Water, and while skirting its banks, could see at a great depth below, the river rushing over its rocky bed like an Alpine torrent. The scenery had now begun to assume a savage and sombre character. The deep rift through which the river ran was evidently the result of some terrible convulsion of the earth, and the rocky strata were strangely and fantastically displayed. On the further side the banks rose up precipitously, consisting for ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... The Child and the Sage Mismet An Autumn Rain-scene Meditations on a Holiday An Experience The Beauty The Collector Cleans his Picture The Wood Fire Saying Good-bye On the tune called The Old-hundred-and-fourth The Opportunity Evelyn G. Of Christminster The Rift Voices from things growing in a Churchyard On the Way "She did not turn" Growth in May The Children and Sir Nameless At the Royal Academy Her Temple A Two-years' Idyll By Henstridge Cross at the year's end Penance "I look in her ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... They forward press, and only wait my on-cry. Thither would I—but hear the strange adventure Which stopp'd my flight upon these rocks. Envelop'd In a black, tempest, I a Finman follow'd, Who boldly climb'd the mountain summits, And sprang o'er every yawning rift undaunted: Then saw I Hothbrod's valiant son. I saw him As in the brook he cleans from dust his armour, And sharp'd laboriously his rusty dagger, And prov'd upon the pine's thick stem his falchion; Then brandish'd ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... for morning. Then he returned to the merciful darkness of night, and paced the driveway until light came peeping over the tree tops. He prepared breakfast and an hour later put the Girl on the train, and stood watching it until the last rift of smoke curled above the ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... rift in the fog that gave a moment's hope, but it closed down again. A minute afterwards, with a suddenness that was strange, the whole blue ocean lay before us. Then full steam ahead. The fog still was thick ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... the sun, shone the great word Amen. As the last letter reached its bright perfection, a long waft of wind broke over me like a universal sigh of hope from human hearts. For far away on the horizon's edge all saw a line of light that widened as they looked, and through that rift, between the dark earth and the darker sky, rolled in a softly flowing sea. Wave after wave came on, so wide, so cool, so still. None trembled at their approach, none shrunk from their embrace, but all turned toward that ocean with a mighty rush, all faces glowed in its splendor, ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... A rift in the clouds showed our friends of the midnight watch—the Great Bear and Cassiopeia—twinkling merrily as though it had never rained for ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... knowledge of the First Consul, a peace treaty with the Portuguese, which he cunningly had ratified by the French ambassador, Lucien Bonaparte. This greatly annoyed the First Consul, and caused, from that day, a rift between the two brothers. ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... coloured stones and sprouting trees. The long fine strands of the ice grass trailed far over the water, motionless. Huge bunches of maidenhair, delicate as green lace, clung to the steep bluffs on the opposite side. Forests of ferns grew close to the water's edge. Down through a rift in the cliffs tumbled a mountain stream over ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... was just as I said. We were self-curbed. It was a case of auto-suppression. There was a rift within the loot, ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... same evening. Sheep and goats, as it were, one dinner to the Allied representatives, the next to the representatives of the Central powers. Much nice sorting is required, and they tell us that in consequence of the war Peking society is rift in twain. This is all very well when it happens in a big community, but when it happens in such a limited little society as Peking, all walled in together within the narrow inclosure of the legation quarter,—walled in literally, also, in the fullest sense, with ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... unpromising, and is clouded all over. The desert is as level as a floor; not a mound as high as a kneeling camel. The sun sinks in the west. Like a red-hot cannon-ball it shines through a rift between dark clouds, and a shaft of dazzling red rays streams over the desert, the surface of which shines like a purple sea. To the north the sky is of a dark violet colour, and against this background ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... scrambling Sundown managed to keep within sight of Chance, who had picked up Fernando's tracks leading from the cottonwoods. The dog leaped over rocks and trotted along the levels, sniffing until he came to the rift in the canon wall down which the herder had toiled on his grewsome errand. Chance climbed the sharp ascent with clawing reaches of his powerful forelegs and quick thrusts of his muscular haunches. Sundown followed ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... out of my head by people coming here. And then I had a sort of unreasonable notion that I should see you at the Linnean Council to-day and hear that all was right again. God knows, I feel for you and your poor wife. Knowing what a great rift the loss of a mere undeveloped child will leave in one's life, I can faintly picture to myself the great and irreparable vacuity in a family circle caused by the vanishing out of it of such a man as Henslow, with great acquirements, and that great calm ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... day the flowers have spread A pall of petals over her head; And the little grey hawk hangs aloft in the air, And the sly coyote trots here and there, And the black snake glides and glitters and slides Into the rift of a cottonwood tree; And the buzzard sails on, And comes and is gone, Stately and still, like a ship at sea. And I wonder why I do not care For the things that are, like the things that were. Does half my heart ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... dreadful light came into his eyes that never shone in the eyes of any other man. Then I grew sick at heart, my father—ay, though I loved my people little, and they had driven me away, I grew sick at heart. Now we had come to a spot where there is a great rift of black rock, and the name of that rift is U'Donga-lu-ka-Tatiyana. On either side of this donga the ground slopes steeply down towards its yawning lips, and from its end a man may see the open country. Here Chaka sat down at the end of the rift, pondering. Presently he looked ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... was dim, and soon they mounted into total darkness, so that the Wizard was obliged to get out his lanterns to light the way. But this enabled them to proceed steadily until they came to a landing where there was a rift in the side of the mountain that let in both light and air. Looking through this opening they could see the Valley of Voe lying far below them, the cottages seeming like toy houses from ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... that won the day for Tessie, and once more the black clouds of anxiety rolled away to disclose a rift of new interest, and a gleam of new-found joy. No one could touch the life of Jacqueline Douglass without sharing its delight. The child, temporarily disabled through an acute ailment, had been enjoying every delight her handsome big brother could procure ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... wrought their will upon man. They are to be cherished as the mariner cherishes the guiding star that stands upon the horizon; they are to be cherished as some traveler, lost in a close, dark forest, cherishes the moment when the sun breaks through a rift in the clouds and he takes his bearings out of the swamp and toward his home. Visions are God within the soul. They come to lead man away from sin and sorrow. They come to guide him to his ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... how near were the enemy. To him, escape seemed impossible; and he now regretted having abandoned the defences of his late residence. The river was sluggish for more than a mile at that spot, and then occurred a rift, which could not be passed without partly unloading the canoes, and where there must necessarily be a detention of more than an hour. Thus, it was scarcely possible for canoes descending that stream to escape from so large ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... awake to the fact that this balance in his favor could not be maintained long. As it was, he ascribed it more to luck than skill on his part. This wild beast in human semblance must possess all the wild beast's cunning; there would be a rift left open in this straining game of hide and seek which his keen eyes would be sure to see ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... Holmes, "it is the brightest rift which I can at present see in the clouds. However innocent he might be, he could not be such an absolute imbecile as not to see that the circumstances were very black against him. Had he appeared surprised at his own arrest, or feigned indignation at it, I should have looked upon it as highly ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... one way and his wooden hatch the other, till finally his troubles were behind him. Then the Fritz began to stir. Her commander went overboard and released her, then leaped astride her deck and paddled cautiously down the rift and slowly down the quieter water below, howling through the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... filigreed, silver twilight beside Lhar, I had a concept of teeming universes of space-time, of an immense spiral of lives and civilizations, races and cultures, covering an infinite cosmos. And yet—what had happened? Very little, in that inconceivable infinity. A rift in time, a dimensional slip—and a sector of land and three beings on it had been wrenched from their place in time and ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... Indians track it through the snow, following it upon snow-shoes. These give them the advantage of skimming along the surface, while the moose plunges through the deep rift, and is therefore impeded in its flight. Notwithstanding, it will frequently escape from the hunter, after a chase of several days' duration! Sometimes, in deep snow, a dozen or more of these animals will be found in one place, where they have got accidentally ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... said Henry, as he hastily scanned the note; "a rift in these gloomy clouds. Break we our camp, my lord Westmoreland, and back to Hereford town. We do but spend our strength to little use awaiting a wily foe in these flooded plains. This billet tells me that Sir Harry Percy and my lord of Worcester, with our son the Prince, ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... President. Yet he seems not to have realized this necessity. Boldly, firmly, dogmatically, he gave his whole thought and his entire energy to organizing the Government in such a way that it could do its work efficiently. And therein may have been the proverbial rift within the lute. To Davis statecraft was too much a thing of methods and measures, too little a ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... before. She watched tenderly by the bedside of her son, and when he was recovered, and went to St. Paul's to return thanks, she sat by his side, and wore a white flower in her bonnet, and her grateful smile showed that there was a rift in the cloud of her mourning, and that ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... pussy has crept is small and barely furnished; it would be perfectly dark too, but that the holes in the roof and the rift in the door admit light into this most squalid room. There is nothing standing against its rough gray walls but a wooden chest, near this a few earthen bowls stand on the ground with a wooden cup and a gracefully wrought jug of pure and shining ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... anchor-chain caused him to waken sharply, stiff with cold. The motor was silent. The launch rocked lazily. Through a rift in the fog he saw a rocky beach only a stone's throw away. They were anchored close by ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... more than a sort of mist, a very fine drizzling rain. The arch of the clouds seemed to get higher and lighter; and suddenly a long oblique sunbeam fell on the fields. Through the break in the clouds a streak of blue sky could be seen, and then the rift got bigger as though a veil were being drawn back, and a beautiful sky of a pure deep blue spread itself out over the world. There was a fresh mild breeze like a happy sigh from the earth, and from ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... was persuaded to try the bait, with the same result. Then the sturgeon, in anger, swallowed Hiawatha and canoe also; but Hiawatha smote the heart of the sturgeon with his fist, and the king of fishes swam to the shore and died. Then the sea-gulls opened a rift in the dead body, out of which ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... resumed everyday aspects. The sun concentrated its rays on my head through a rift in the jungle, and the stone, stained dull red, lay in its cell, while rootlets fringed with ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... straight, perpendicular, the other overhanging, arching out above the first. As he lay there in the semi-gloom, his first thought was that he was in a cave; a further glance, however, convinced him that the place was a gigantic fissure or rift. But how ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... made in the course of our explorations which enabled us to understand how the fate that had overtaken the drowned city had fallen upon it. Close by the northern border of the valley we saw, high up above us, a vast rift more than a thousand feet wide in the face of the cliff; and below this the ground was torn into a deep wild channel, and everywhere huge fragments of rock were scattered over the ground. Here it was, then, that the water had poured in—bursting ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... him that there had been no previous little rift to prepare the young man for the cervical operation which awaited him, and he edged a little nearer, in order to be handy to catch Sam if the shock knocked ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... anybody but a tenderfoot. I kept waiting in tense silence to hear them come back with dead or wounded, but there was not a sound. The rain had stopped. Mrs. Louderer struck a match and said it was three o'clock. Soon she was asleep. Through a rift in the clouds a star peeped out. I could smell the wet sage and the sand. A little breeze came by, bringing Tex's song ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... said the trapper, "it's the boy's own piece, and he let it off as he shot the rift the fourth bend above. Yis, the boy knows his danger and he took the vantage of the rift to signal me with his piece, for oars couldn't help him in the rift and the missin' of a single stroke wouldn't ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... peep of dawn widened into a silver rift, and the silver rift streamed into a bar of gold, and the gold broke up into long strands of blush pink and pale blue like festal banners hanging in heaven's bright pavilion, and the "White Eagle" flew on swiftly, steadily, securely, among all the glories of the dawn like a winged ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... battle. Then one vast shadow, with a gap yawning like a serpent's mouth, trailed along, and for a while hid Paris, which it seemed ready to devour. And when it had reached the far-off horizon, looking no larger than a worm, a gush of light streamed from a rift in a cloud, and fell into the void which it had left. The golden cascade could be seen descending first like a thread of fine sand, then swelling into a huge cone, and raining in a continuous shower on the Champs-Elysees ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... being shot from a cover, as he forced the canoe up a swift rift, or turned an elbow in the stream, with his eyes fastened on the eddies. Of all the risky journeys, that on an ambushed river is the most risky, in my judgment, and that ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... spoke, the clouds immediately above their heads were torn asunder by the vehemence of the wind. The gray mass was rent and scattered east and west with ominous speed, a dim uncertain light from the rift in the sky fell full upon the boat, and the travelers beheld each other's faces. All of them, the noble and the wealthy, the sailors and the poor passengers alike, were amazed for a moment by the appearance of the last comer. His golden hair, parted ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... belief that experiments, conducted by a skilful physiologist, would very probably obtain the desired production of mutually more or less infertile breeds from a common stock, in a comparatively few years; but still, as the case stands at present, this "little rift within the lute" is not to be ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... opal-colored mist. From one precipice a stream falls a thousand feet out of a cave, like a delicate silver streak, dissolved in spray before it reaches the river. The two rock faces run on unbroken, only in one part the mountain is split, and through the rift laughs the blooming landscape of an alpine valley, with a white tower in the background. It is the tower of Dubova: there ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... Enough that, ere the evening, spent in earnest conversation, closed, all the preliminaries of an early removal and reduction of expenses were settled, and, when Wilkinson retired for the night, it was in a hopeful spirit. Light had broken through a rift in the dark cloud which had so suddenly loomed up; and he saw, clearly, the way of escape from the evil ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... I had three distinct shocks in quick succession. Flashy, painted and rouged as I was I dreaded Orontides' eyes. There he was behind his counter, visible through a rift in the press of handsomely dressed customers ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... noon-tide sun, call forth the mutinous winds, And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war: to the dread, rattling thunder They could give fire, and rift even Jove's stout oak With his own bolt—graves at their command Have waked their sleepers, oped and let ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... waiting around for a few minutes and then going back the way she had come, did not strike Jack as being a tourist come to view the scenery. So far as he had been able to judge as he peeped out through a narrow rift in the ledge, she had paid very little attention to the scenery. She seemed chiefly concerned with the station, and her concern seemed mostly an impatience ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... they know (not solely through the monition of Mr. Stuart Rem) to lurk within. It has to be excluded: on certain points they must not think. The night of Tasso was darkly clouded in the minds of the pure ladies: a rift would have seized their half-slumbering sense of smell, to revive the night, perhaps disorder the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have gone straight down the bluff afoot, through a rift in the rim-rock where it was possible to climb down into the fissure and squeeze out through a narrow opening to the bowlder-piled bluff. But that took almost as much time as he would consume in riding around, and so he galloped back to the grade and went down at a pace to break his neck and that ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... Lost Island far behind, but in which direction they could not be sure. A long streak of flame to the left told them that a railroad lay there, and it could be none other than the Belt Line that ran into Watertown. Through a rift in the clouds a cluster of stars showed briefly—the Big Dipper. "See!" shouted Tod. ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... for thou wast a Spirit too delicate To act her earthy, and abhord commands, Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee By helpe of her more potent Ministers, And in her most vnmittigable rage, Into a clouen Pyne, within which rift Imprison'd, thou didst painefully remaine A dozen yeeres: within which space she di'd, And left thee there: where thou didst vent thy groanes As fast as Mill-wheeles strike: Then was this Island (Saue for the Son, that he did littour heere, A frekelld whelpe, hag-borne) ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... harsh, discordant notes of the radio signal sounded monotonously in his ears, Bell stared down and, through a rift between two clouds, saw the other plane for an instant, a thousand ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... anywhere else. Robin, too was a pronounced, even an enthusiastic, "Welsleyite," and had practically forgotten "old London," as he negligently called the greatest city in the world. They were very happy in Welsley. In fact, the Dean's widow was the only rift in Rosamund's lute, that lute which was so full ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... glowing under the little penthouses of their metal shields. Altitude now showed 2,437 feet, and still rising. Tachometers gave from 2,750 to 2,875 r.p.m. for the various propellers. Speed had gone above 190 miles per hour. No sign of man remained, save, very far below through a rift in the pale, moonlit waft of cloud, a tiny light against a coal-black plain of sea—the light of a slow, crawling steamer—a light which almost ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... last where a dozen caves a hundred feet above the bottom of the gorge could be reached by a goat-track leading to a ledge. There was a rift in the side-wall there, making a pitch-dark corner where the camels could lie unseen and grumble to one another—safe enough until daylight, unless they should see ghosts and try to stampede for the open. Grim sent ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... scarlet; he felt he had blundered. It was the first real shadow on his courtship—perhaps the little rift within the lute. He turned back to Becky for sympathy. There was no Becky. She had taken advantage of the conversation to slip away. He found her again in a moment though, at the other end of the room. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... guitar And moldering into decay; Fretted with many a rift and scar That the dull dust hides away, While the spider spins a silver star In ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... at this rift in great doubt; then I went a little way on either side of it, and found myself looking over the edge of horrible precipices on to the river, which roared some four or five thousand feet below me. I dared not think of getting down at all, unless I committed ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... that the box presented by the district attorney had not come from their store, was the only rift in the otherwise dense cloud of incriminating evidence for the State, and the prosecution closed its case with perceptible gloom hanging over every person connected with the defense, and the jury was grave of face, as men well may be who have the life of a fellow being ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... its raging storm wore away; towards morning the moon showing itself in a rift in the clouds lighted the scene. Scarcely two ships' lengths away the sea thundered on the beach; farther out the waves, mountain-high, rolled in endless succession; to the right and left extended the reef like a wall, several meters above the water, except in one place it sank down so abruptly ...
— The Shipwreck - A Story for the Young • Joseph Spillman
... afternoon, driving down the slopes from Sant' Angelo comfortably sheltered against the storm, while the generous mountain wine sped through my veins, warming my fancy. Then, at last, the sun came out in a sudden burst of light, opening a rift in the vapours and revealing the whole chain of the Apennines, together with the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... his own approached. The last empty bottle, the thin-stemmed glasses, stood in his way, and he moved them aside with his elbow. So near now was he that their breaths mingled, and as the drone of his voice ceased, the music of the orchestra, a waltz, flowed into the rift with its steady one-two-three. He was motionless; but his eyes, intense blue eyes under long lashes, ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... crows nesting in its parapets, rising blind and dumb on its green mound, with the hamlet at its feet; or like the craggy islet, severed by the raging sea from the towering headland, where the samphire sprouts in the rift, and the sea-birds roost, at whose foot the surges lap, and over whose head the landward wind blows swiftly all ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a rift in the dark clouds seemed sent as a heavenly messenger to guide them. By it the Eskimos as well as the sailor were enabled to judge of the position of land, and to steer, accordingly, in what western hunters would call "a bee-line." The great danger, ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... it all very ordinary. She was more concerned about the wind, to which they had become once more exposed as they reached the end of the rift. On they pressed, five or six steps at each attempt, stopping to rest twice the length of time they actually traveled. It was necessary now to cling to the rock with both hands, and once Cunora lost her grip, so that she would have been blown to one side, or else have ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... her water line. At most, six feet of water awaited the engineer, who stood, peering shoreward and listening intently, oblivious to the stray missiles which whizzed past. Presently, from out of the fog, he heard a grinding, metallic sound and through a sudden rift in the fog caught a brief glimpse of blue flame with sparks radiating faintly ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... spoke the light mist swept past him, blotting out everything but the boulder he stood on and a rift of the dashing ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... of our country, and claptrap the springboard to send us diving into it. I like my comrades-in-arms, I like the character of British officers, and the men too—I get on well with them. I declare to you, Patrice, I burn to live in brotherhood with them, not a rift of division at heart! I never show them that there is one. But our early training has us; it comes on us again; three or four days with Con have stirred me; I don't let him see it, but they always do: these tales of starvations ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it," deprecated Susan. "We have not had much to rejoice over of late and yet men were being killed just the same. Do not let yourself slump like poor Cousin Sophia. She said, when the word came, 'Ah, it is nothing but a rift in the clouds. We are up this week but we will be down the next.' 'Well, Sophia Crawford,' said I,—for I will never give in to her, Mrs. Dr. dear—'God himself cannot make two hills without a hollow between them, as I have heard it said, but that is no reason why we should not take the good of the ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The rift between the creeds and races, just beginning to heal three generations after the era of confiscation, but reopened under the operations of economic forces connected with race and religion, yet perfectly capable of ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... netted in the rift, Leaning over Maori Hill, dreaming in the lift, Dropped her starry memories through ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... the clouds immediately above their heads were torn asunder by the vehemence of the wind. The gray mass was rent and scattered east and west with ominous speed, a dim uncertain light from the rift in the sky fell full upon the boat, and the travelers beheld each other's faces. All of them, the noble and the wealthy, the sailors and the poor passengers alike, were amazed for a moment by the appearance of the last comer. His golden hair, parted upon his calm, serene forehead, fell in thick ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... stamped with his foot as he came to this decision. The fog was clearing off the river. It was no more than a mere scum on the water. There was a rift above, ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... a pronounced, even an enthusiastic, "Welsleyite," and had practically forgotten "old London," as he negligently called the greatest city in the world. They were very happy in Welsley. In fact, the Dean's widow was the only rift in Rosamund's lute, that lute which was so full of sweet ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... when, through a rift in the clouds, I saw the daring captain clinging to one of the animal's fins, fighting the monster at close quarters, belaboring his enemy's belly with stabs of the dagger yet unable to deliver the deciding thrust, in other ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Presently through a rift in the sky an early star stole out, and she made a wish on it. That was one of the things Belle had taught her. She started to wish that Barby might be happy. But before the whispered verse had entirely passed her lips she stopped to amend it, adding Uncle Darcy's name and Belle's. ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... doubt as to the position of IBSEN as a Dramatist, or as to the order of merit and precedence to be assigned to his works. No, on such matters they are apparently at one; but in other matters they are at one another. Thus the unity appears to be only superficial, a decent plaster hiding the rift occasioned by one of their number having literally translated into English IBSEN's latest Norwegian drama, of which translation the verbal correctness is impugned ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... he at last reached the bottom of the stupendous rift, and only the tops of the cliffs were tinged with the golden light, the valley ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... headache which he supposed resulted from want of food. For all that, he scrambled after his companion down an almost impossible descent, where trees of increasing size grew up among outcropping rock and banks of stones. When he reached the bottom he found himself in a deep rift filled with densely-matted underbrush, through which a swift stream flowed. Its banks promised a slightly easier road, though now and then they had to wade through the water, which was icy cold. Noon came and they had seen no sign of life, except two or three willow-grouse ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... evening there had been a brief but violent thunderstorm, with a tropical downpour of rain, and now clouds were scudding across the blue of the sky. Through a temporary rift in the veiling the crescent of the moon looked down upon us. It had a greenish tint, and it set me thinking of the filmed, green ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the old gentleman seldom allowed us more than a peep at his personality. His was the expansive temperament, or, to employ a modern phrase, the dynamic temperament. Antiquated as were his modes of thought, he would bewilder you with an excursion into latter-day literature, and like a rift of light in a fogbank you then caught a gleam of an entirely different mentality. One day I found him reading a book by the French writer Huysmans, dealing with new art. And he confessed to me that he admired Hauptmann's Hannele, though he despised the same dramatist's ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... tree seems covered with gorgeous blossom. Leaving the road, we turned into the scrub, and drove over a sandy soil among small gum-trees and smaller scrub. When at length we quitted the carriage and had followed our guide for a short distance, we suddenly came upon what appeared to be an enormous rift in the ground, which yawned beneath our feet. Far below was an undulating mass of foliage—the tops of a forest of gum-trees, which covered the whole bed of the valley. Vast was the height from which we looked down, so that the trees ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... will upon man. They are to be cherished as the mariner cherishes the guiding star that stands upon the horizon; they are to be cherished as some traveler, lost in a close, dark forest, cherishes the moment when the sun breaks through a rift in the clouds and he takes his bearings out of the swamp and toward his home. Visions are God within the soul. They come to lead man away from sin and sorrow. They come to guide him ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... on in this strain until the clock chimed twelve. The storm still blew over the house, but the rain had ceased, and when they looked out of the window, they could see a rift in the clouds, through which ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... very unpromising, and is clouded all over. The desert is as level as a floor; not a mound as high as a kneeling camel. The sun sinks in the west. Like a red-hot cannon-ball it shines through a rift between dark clouds, and a shaft of dazzling red rays streams over the desert, the surface of which shines like a purple sea. To the north the sky is of a dark violet colour, and against this background the camels stand ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... which I lay as close as I could, there was a rift in the cloud. I looked out again. I stood alone on the point of the peak with the snow ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... we entered I had three distinct shocks in quick succession. Flashy, painted and rouged as I was I dreaded Orontides' eyes. There he was behind his counter, visible through a rift in the press of handsomely ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... trimmed with fanciful trappings, their coarse hair so trained as to stand almost erect, were two aged men, who, with wild gesticulations, and solemn chanting, were apparently paying adoration to the setting sun, the last beams streaming over them through a rift ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... without end; and romance knows no limits when dealing with the subject. The lives of the Man and the Dog are found to be ever intertwined. Yet is there always this besides—the rift in the lute and the familiar refrain, that the life of the dog shall be short, and that Man shall go on his way with his head bent, till such time as he shall become rich once more in the love of a new-found friend—if that be ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... at once established by means of a pocket-compass; then, pointing the glass as nearly at an angle of forty-one degrees of elevation as I could do it by guess, I moved it cautiously up or down, until my attention was arrested by a circular rift or opening in the foliage of a large tree that overtopped its fellows in the distance. In the centre of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... go further into the rift which began to develop almost immediately. In 1861 the split occurred. The war between the States caused hardly more suffering than the blockade which cut off the spinners of Manchester from the vegetable wool which supplied them the means of living. Cotton proved its ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... desolate spot in which we were, a mere rift in the bluffs, which seemed to overhang us, covered with a heavy growth of forest. The sun was still an hour high, although it was twilight already beside the river, when Cassion, and his men came straggling back, ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... moments throbbed away as I lay on my flea-ridden couch—moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace of Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... Rachel Murch that her character was "as black as Hell," and upon Rachel's complaint to the session, he was "churched" for "breach of the Ninth Commandment and also for a violation of his covenant agreement." This incident caused a rift which gradually developed into something very like a schism in the local congregation, and this internal disagreement finally produced a split between Eleazar's son, Dr. John Wheelock, who was now president of Dartmouth College, and the Trustees of the institution. ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... they reached the big cemetery on the edge of Lexington. Through a rift in the trees the Major pointed out the grave of Henry Clay, and told him about the big monument that was to be reared above his remains. The grave of Henry Clay! Chad knew all about him. He had heard Caleb Hazel read the great man's speeches ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... were killing their oxen for such shreds of meat as they could strip from the bones; but as every wagon left the place, climbing the divide beyond, the occupants forgot their sufferings and talked of the desert as something which they had left behind. For Furnace Creek canyon lay ahead of them, a rift in the black range which rose between ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... few sheep, and going down to the village not more than once or twice a week. There was a little spring welling up in a hollow not fifty yards away from the hut, which itself stood in a deep, natural rift among the high hills, so that men might search for it a lifetime and not ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... all about him and flower breaths filling all the air and he had thought them. A terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and he had let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through. He had forgotten and deserted his home and his duties. When he traveled about, darkness so brooded over him that the sight of him was a wrong done to other people because it was as if ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to Doble, out of the air. He looked up. Two great boulders lay edge to edge beside the path. Through a narrow rift the blue nose of a forty-five protruded. Back of it glittered a pair ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... as he spoke the light mist swept past him, blotting out everything but the boulder he stood on and a rift of the dashing ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... See the brave veins in the breccia ruddy! One would suppose that the marble bled. What matters the water? A hope I have nursed: The waterless cup will quench my thirst." —Better have knelt at the poorest stream That trickles in pain from the straitest rift! For the less or the more is all God's gift, Who blocks up or breaks wide the granite-seam. And here, is there water or not, to drink? I then, in ignorance and weakness, Taking God's help, have attained to think My heart ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... inspection I found that it ran, a tiny thread, along a crack in the lava not more than a couple of inches wide, which, on tracing it back, I found we had driven over without noticing. Apparently the water came down from the "bubble" through a rift in ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... down the rift A kind ray shot from a holy star. Then my dream did waver and break and lift — Through it, O Love, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... everyday aspects. The sun concentrated its rays on my head through a rift in the jungle, and the stone, stained dull red, lay in its cell, while rootlets fringed with tawny ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... semi-official nature of the ball, rose and drank the health of the distinguished guest in long and flowery praises. Rezanov responded in briefer but no less felicitous vein, and concluded by remarking that the only rift in the lute of his present enchanting experience was the fear that whereas he had nearly died of starvation several times during the past three years, he was now threatened with a far more ignominious end, so delicious and irresistible were the temptations that ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... moment a few gleams of sunlight struggled through a rift in the clouds, and a shower of colored light fell over the wild garden. The brown tiles of the roof glowed in the light, the mosses took bright hues, strange shadows played over the grass beneath the trees; the dead autumn tints grew vivid, bright ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... of Central Africa, the southern of the two western reservoirs of the Nile. It lies in the Albertine rift-valley between 0 deg. 8' and 0 deg. 40' S. and 29 deg. 28' and 29 deg. 52' E., at an elevation of 3004 ft. above the sea. It is roughly oval in shape and has no deep indentations. On its N.E. side it is connected by a winding channel, 25 m. long and from a quarter of a mile to a mile wide, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... puzzled and, he had to confess to himself, not a little alarmed. But as the next impatient question was on his lips he stopped short. A cool breeze had sprung up, and was wafting aside the cloud-like fog. A rift in the fog disclosed a portion of the trestle bridge. And, hanging from it, with noosed lariats around their necks, were three ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... natural convulsion awful in its intensity beyond all power of imagination. The rent was roofed in as it were by boulders which thickly hung suspended and jammed in at varying heights between the almost touching walls of the rift; and the adventurous explorers could not repress a shudder as they glanced aloft at these huge masses and thought of the consequences to themselves which would ensue should a projecting corner just then yield and suffer ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... to his world and pick up the threads again, but not with a wife at his side. Oh, yes; they would be happy at first. Then Elsa would begin to miss the things she had so gloriously thrown away. The rift in the lute; the canker in the rose. They were equally well-born, well-bred; politeness would usurp affection's hold. Could he save her from the day when she would learn Romance had come from within? No. All he could do was to ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... Norwegian painter, which had made such an impression upon me in Copenhagen. In Guldbrandsdal, we found at once what we had missed in the scenery of Ringerike—swift, foaming streams. Here they leapt from every rift of the upper crags, brightening the gloom of the fir-woods which clothed the mountain-sides, like silver braiding upon a funeral garment. This valley is the pride of Norway, nearly as much for its richness as for its beauty and grandeur. ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... nesting in its parapets, rising blind and dumb on its green mound, with the hamlet at its feet; or like the craggy islet, severed by the raging sea from the towering headland, where the samphire sprouts in the rift, and the sea-birds roost, at whose foot the surges lap, and over whose head the landward wind blows ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sorry, though it roused my anger so much that I added my injunctions to the effect that if she wished to please me she would break off all acquaintance with her cousin, Ellen Vaughan. This, however, she would not promise to do, and it was the first beginning of the rift, which afterwards widened into a chasm between us. Her cousin also was too much attached to her to be easily alienated from her, and the two girls met more frequently than either her uncle or I were aware of. There was ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... are still quite sharp, save about three feet of the edge over which the river rolls. The walls go sheer down from the lips without any projecting crag, or symptoms of stratification or dislocation. When the mighty rift 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 ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... climbing, for the rocks were uneven and full of sharp points and edges, and now there was no path at all. Clambering here and there among the boulders they kept steadily on, gradually rising higher and higher until finally they came to a great rift in a part of the mountain, where the rock seemed to have split in two and left ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... his sword to deal the deadly blow, when lo! Wotan dashed through a rift in the clouds and struck Siegmund's sword ...
— Opera Stories from Wagner • Florence Akin
... ringing flies apart, Suddenly cracks the vaulted hall; And through the rift, the wild flames start; The guests in dust are scattered all, With ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... up his head. Out of the jumble stood the word, as an unseen ship will often stand out nakedly in a fog rift. Over and over, badly spaced, the infernal rasp ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... after his triumphant homecoming, for Rimrock to wreck his own happiness. That old rift between them, regarding the law, had been opened the very first day; and it was not a difference that could be explained and adjusted, for neither would concede they were wrong. As the daughter of a judge, conservatively brought up in a community ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... body's cells absorb all of the floating matter, they will be either positively or negatively charged to such an extent that their revolutions will be rapidly accelerated. According to theory, the increased speed of the revolutions would cause a rift in the time continuum, or in other words, would change the proportion between your existence in the temporal and material realms and change your location in time, thereby propelling you into the past ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... were activity itself, and they slashed and trampled down and hauled and lowered till the whole party found themselves upon a broad stony shelf at the very edge of a sharply-cut rift, whose sides showed that it must have been split from the opposite side by some convulsion of Nature, so exactly was the ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... realms of azure drift, And on the hillside I can see The villages of Imari, Whose thronged and flaming workshops lift Their twisted columns of smoke on high, Cloud cloisters that in ruins lie, With sunshine streaming through each rift, And broken ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... him justice,—most unwillingly. His was naturally a bright, vivacious, healthy nature—but he was over- sensitively organised,—his nerves did not resemble iron so much as finely-tempered steel, which could not but suffer from the damp and rust in the world's conventionalities. And some "little rift within the lute" chanced to him, as it often chances to many, so that the subtle music of his soul jarred into discord with the things of life, making harsh sounds in place of melody. There was no adequate ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... were cousins, and had once been the closest of friends, but that was years ago, before some spiteful reports and ill-natured gossip had come between them, making only a little rift at first that soon widened into a chasm of coldness and alienation. Therefore this invitation surprised ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the rock partly bare. As we lay Dan struck it three times with a stone about the size of a putting-ball, and a great low baying sounded, and my blood ran cold, and then the grey rock moved inch by inch, and I heard a great rift of Gaelic, and Dan went crawling like a snake through the hole, and myself and McKinnon at ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... the hand; his children and their mother were to be wards of the people, for he had despaired of his own life. Many were touched; to some the tribunate of Gracchus seemed like a rift in a dark cloud of oppression which would close around them at his fall, and their hearts sank at the thought of a renewed triumph of the nobility. Others were moved chiefly by the fears and sufferings of Gracchus. Cries of sympathy and defiance were raised in answer to his tears, and a large ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... climbed the Scar Foot the western sky was toning down to grays, while beyond, and seen through an oval-shaped rift in their sombre colours, lay a distant streak of amber that, moment by moment, slowly disappeared under the closing lids of evening cloud—the eye of weary day wooed to slumber by the hush of illimitable sweeps of moor. Even so would Amanda fain have closed her eyes and sunk to rest amid ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... they can't all dine at the legation on the same evening. Sheep and goats, as it were, one dinner to the Allied representatives, the next to the representatives of the Central powers. Much nice sorting is required, and they tell us that in consequence of the war Peking society is rift in twain. This is all very well when it happens in a big community, but when it happens in such a limited little society as Peking, all walled in together within the narrow inclosure of the legation ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... a quarter of a mile from the camp he noticed a sort of rift in the mountain, where the rocks were bare and exposed, and at the end of this rift a dark aperture was visible, which at ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... death divides the pair, 'Tis well that I depart and thou remain Who wast to me as spirit is to flesh: Let the flesh perish, be perceived no more, So thou, the spirit that informed the flesh, Bend yet awhile, a very flame above The rift I drop into the darkness by— And bid remember, flesh and spirit once Worked in the world, one body, for man's sake. Never be that abominable show Of passive death without a quickening life— Admetos only, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... dry wind stirred the dust here and there; the moon shone through a rift in the clouds and lighted the spot where the man slept. So I found myself tete-a-tete with this boor, who, not suspecting my presence, was sleeping on that stone bench as peacefully as if ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and frothing, now got up into absolute mountains. A singular change, too, had come over the heavens. Around in every direction it was still as black as pitch, but nearly overhead there burst out, all at once, a circular rift of clear sky—as clear as I ever saw—and of a deep bright blue—and through it there blazed forth the full moon with a lustre that I never before knew her to wear. She lit up everything about us with the greatest ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... two fathoms deep near the mouth, and rapid. From the top of a neighboring cliff, four hundred feet high, it could be seen trending back into the mountains some thirty or thirty-five miles. The mountains, devoid of snow, were seen under favorable circumstances through a rift in the clouds, and appeared brown and naked, with smooth rounded tops. During a tramp of some miles over a muddy way, composed of argillaceous clay and black pebbles, I observed fragments of quartz and granite. Several specimens containing iron pyrites were also found. ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... Go-Murakami differed radically in their counsels, but it was finally decided that every effort should be made to widen the rift in the Ashikaga lute, and the Court commissioned Tadayoshi to attack Takauji and recover Kyoto. Thus was presented the spectacle of a father (Takauji) fighting against his son (Tadafuyu), and a brother ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... memory, and the growth of the new bonds of commerce and travel, the sense of a common country and destiny began to take root in the hearts of men, and on occasion disclosed itself with the strength and nobility of a heroic passion. True, a new rift was appearing, in the doctrine of nullification and the question of slavery, but this evoked at times a more militant and again a more appealing aspect in the sentiment of union. Jackson seemed to rise from the rough frontiersman to the guardian of the nation when he gave the word, "The ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... drawing-room and dining-room windows, led down on one side to the woods, on the other to Lady Channice's garden, and was a favourite place of theirs for quiet saunterings. Today the sunlight fell mildly on it. A rift of pale blue showed in the ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... grew rank, but above all the place was strewn with rocks, leg-twisting boulders, and great cliffs where eagles dwelt. Being a seaman, Atta had his bearings. The path to Delphi left the shore road near the Hot Springs, and went south by a rift of the mountain. If he went up the slope in a beeline he must strike it in time and find better going. Still it was an eerie place to be tramping after dark. The Hellenes had strange gods of the thicket and hillside, and he had no wish to intrude upon their sanctuaries. He told himself ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... active Great Rift Valley susceptible to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions; deforestation; overgrazing; soil erosion; desertification; frequent ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... only the inferior stars Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light In the clear presence of the full-orbed Moon, Who, from her sovereign elevation, gazed Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay 55 All meek and silent, save that through a rift— Not distant from the shore whereon we stood, A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing-place— Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice! 60 Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour, For so it seemed, felt ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... into her face. It was as though she had been walking in an arbour and suddenly, through some rift in the boughs, found herself exposed to the scorching sun. She felt dominated by a force stronger than her own nature. A little afraid, she shrank instinctively away from him, and as she dared not look up, she did not see the expression of triumph, mingled with other things, which, for a moment, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... dim, and soon they mounted into total darkness, so that the Wizard was obliged to get out his lanterns to light the way. But this enabled them to proceed steadily until they came to a landing where there was a rift in the side of the mountain that let in both light and air. Looking through this opening they could see the Valley of Voe lying far below them, the cottages seeming like toy ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... horror. I saw a wide rift open, saw the skylight shatter and break, and daylight pouring through the cracking walls, Rakhal snatched Rindy up, protecting her from the falling debris with his head and shoulders. I grabbed Miellyn round the waist and we ran for the rift ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... feet wide—appeared on the wall; widened, and as the sinking slab that made it dropped to the level of our eyes, we looked through a hundred-feet-long rift in the living rock! The stone fell steadily—and we saw that it was a Cyclopean wedge set within the slit of the passageway. It reached the level of our feet and stopped. At the far end of this ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... a little distance the dim structures of the Portico and Theatre of Pompeius could be seen, looming up to an exaggerated size in the evening haze. A grey fog was drifting up from the Tiber, and out of a rift in a heavy cloud-bank a beam of the imprisoned moon was struggling. Along the road were peasants with their carts and asses hastening home. Over on the Pincian Mount the dark green masses of the splendid gardens of Pompeius and of Lucullus were just visible. ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... along; thronging from every part of the city, they united in single column into an endless host that appeared to stretch from the rising to the setting of the sun. They seemed making for the Tiber, which they would have speedily choked; but ere they could arrive there a huge rift opened in the earth, down which they madly precipitated themselves. Their descent, it is affirmed, lasted as many hours as Vulcan occupied in falling from Heaven to Lemnos; but when the last tail was over the brink, the gulf closed as effectually as the gulf in the Forum closed ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... relapsed into nervous breakdown. But Denyer, being only a BUCKROSE villain, which is a very mild variety, packed Sophia home again; Arthur, after the usual crisis, recovered; and the symbolic dove was the only inmate of the cottage for whom the little rift remained unhappily permanent. So there you are; with the gentlest short sermon to wind up, and a blessing to all concerned. Perhaps I have read stories more briskly entertaining from Mrs. BUCKROSE'S flowing pen; one feels that her intent here was not solely laughter. But as a smiling homily, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... But no rift appeared in the artist's black sky of sorrow; she had not yet learned that, in drawing near the hand that holds the rod, the blow is lightened, and she bitterly demanded of her Maker to be released from the burden ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the sea. Before the moon was made, Moaning in vague immensity, Of its own strength afraid, Unresful and unstaid. Through every rift it foamed in vain, About its earthly prison, Seeking some unknown thing in pain, And sinking restless back again, For yet no moon had risen: Its only voice a vast dumb moan, Of utterless anguish speaking, It lay unhopefully alone, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... glimmer of its noisy waters visible through the shrubbery which profusely lined its banks. The short evening was drawing to a close. The white mists brought by the rain were crawling slowly down the hills, and settling in the hollows of the ranges on our left. A V-shaped rift in them, known as Pheasant Gap, came into view. Mr Hawden said it was well named, as it swarmed with lyrebirds. Night was falling. The skreel of a hundred curlews arose from the gullies—how I love their lonely wail!—and ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... inquire, but it was driven out of my head by people coming here. And then I had a sort of unreasonable notion that I should see you at the Linnean Council to-day and hear that all was right again. God knows, I feel for you and your poor wife. Knowing what a great rift the loss of a mere undeveloped child will leave in one's life, I can faintly picture to myself the great and irreparable vacuity in a family circle caused by the vanishing out of it of such a man as Henslow, with great acquirements, and that great calm catholic judgment and sense which ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... work for the grades. Life suddenly grew very full. There was the most excitingly interesting work for every hour, and that work was to pay high school expenses and start the college fund. There was one little rift in her joy. All of it would have been so much better if she could have told her mother, and given the money into her keeping; but the struggle to get a start had been so terrible, Elnora was afraid to take the risk. When she reached ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... his fire and waited impatiently for dawn. At four o'clock, before day had begun to dispel the gloom of night, he cooked his breakfast and prepared his pack for the homeward journey. Soon afterward a narrow rim of light broke through the rift in the chasm. Slowly it crept downward, until the young hunter could make out objects near him and the ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... distress, the countenance and advice of a fellow-creature, was enough for him at the moment. He threw himself from the pinnacle of the cliff once more into the arms of the projecting oak-tree, whose boughs waved in middle air, anchored by the roots in a huge rift or chasm of the rock. Catching at the branch which was nearest to him, he dropped himself from that height upon the ground; and such was the athletic springiness of his youthful sinews, that he pitched there as lightly, and with as little injury, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... I'd rather have you introduce me to your family than to have the colonel. As a matter of fact, I told him I couldn't get up. But I changed my mind. Come along." The first rift in the storm-packed clouds; and to meet her through the kindly offices of this amiable ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... message from Goethe transmitting a medal for Sir Walter Scott; sums generously sent for his brother John's medical education in Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new Annual Register, designed to be a literary resume of the year, make up the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... tract of land it was, with a great rift of rock running through it where the children played house, and had parties, and occasionally took their dinner out to eat in picnic fashion. Just beyond the strata of rock, on the good ground, stood two splendid apple-trees called "Jersey Sweetings," and for nearly two summer months their ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... Dawn broke—a silver rift in the purple sky—and presently stole, in pearly light, through the oriel window. Upon the Prioress's table, lay a beautifully executed copy of the Pope's mandate. Beside it, carefully pieced together, the torn fragments of ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... up. The clouds were passing rapidly over the moon, and at long intervals a rift between the clouds let enough light through to brighten the square ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... resolved itself into the first glacier—a wonderfully beautiful frozen river, rugged, wild and vast, but singularly free from the fallen stones and earth which usually rob these wonders of their beauty, and looking now in the bright sunshine dazzling in its purity of white, shaded by rift, crack and hollow, where the compressed snow was of the most ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... engineer, who stood, peering shoreward and listening intently, oblivious to the stray missiles which whizzed past. Presently, from out of the fog, he heard a grinding, metallic sound and through a sudden rift in the fog caught a brief glimpse of blue flame with ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. The rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the married and the unmarried, and I was beginning to leave my protege to a fate with which I had neither ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... stop to exchange farewells. The latter moved away rapidly toward the point where he had had the encounter with the three ruffians whom he and his female comrade had served out so well. Oscar desired to follow the leader and he arrived behind a rift of sand in time to watch them, and he was able to discern the fellow he desired to shadow. His man made a roundabout tour toward the depot and then started afoot down the track, not daring to take the train at the Manhattan station. Our hero, however, ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey
... each man's life there comes a time supreme; One day, one night, one morning, or one noon, One freighted hour, one moment opportune, One rift through which sublime fulfillments gleam, One space when fate goes tiding with the stream, One Once, in balance 'twixt Too Late, Too Soon, And ready for the passing instant's boon To tip in favor the uncertain beam. Ah, happy he who, knowing how to wait, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... that afternoon, driving down the slopes from Sant' Angelo comfortably sheltered against the storm, while the generous mountain wine sped through my veins, warming my fancy. Then, at last, the sun came out in a sudden burst of light, opening a rift in the vapours and revealing the whole chain of the Apennines, together with the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... millions of dollars. Yet it may be it is all for the best. Our national wound was too deep to be lightly healed. When the President issued his Emancipation Proclamation my heart overflowed with joy, and I said: 'This is the first bright rift in the ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... that the Professor's domestic relations were defective: they were in fact so complete that it was almost impossible to get away from them. It is the happy husbands who are really in bondage; the little rift within the lute is often a passage to freedom. Marriage had given the Professor exactly what he had sought in it; a comfortable lining to life. The impossibility of rising to sentimental crises had made him scrupulously ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... You know that on this steamer there is only a first-class and a third-class, and they only allow peasants—that is the rift-raft—to go in the third. If you have got on a reefer jacket and have the faintest resemblance to a gentleman or a bourgeois you must go first-class, if you please. You must fork out five hundred roubles if you die for it. Why, I ask, have you made such a rule? Do ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... halt at last where a dozen caves a hundred feet above the bottom of the gorge could be reached by a goat-track leading to a ledge. There was a rift in the side-wall there, making a pitch-dark corner where the camels could lie unseen and grumble to one another—safe enough until daylight, unless they should see ghosts and try to stampede for the open. Grim sent the women and Ayisha's four ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... slight rift in the clouds. Coming back one morning after a conference with the Chancellor, ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... trapper, "it's the boy's own piece, and he let it off as he shot the rift the fourth bend above. Yis, the boy knows his danger and he took the vantage of the rift to signal me with his piece, for oars couldn't help him in the rift and the missin' of a single stroke wouldn't count. I trust the boy got the pups, ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... unusually long for the Father; a fortunate circumstance of which the Prince availed himself to recover his self-possession. By the time the brethren eulogized were moving up the rift at his feet, he was able to observe them calmly. They were in long gowns of heavy gray woollen stuff, with sleeves widening from the shoulders; their cowls, besides covering head and visage, fell ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... will come a rift in the hitherto perfect lute of our friendship (the rift's name will be DARKEY), but we shall manage to bridge it over—at least TOM RUM SUMMER says so." Here EMILY broke in. He could stand it no longer. "Dash it, you know, this is wewry extwraowrdinawry, wewry extwraowrdinawry ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... until the road turned toward the range and an opening which he followed into a steeper and narrower rift beyond. Here there were no clearings in the rocky underbrush until he reached Richmond Braley's land. A long upturning sweep ended at the house, directly against the base of the mountain; and without decreasing ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Chesapeake at five o'clock in the afternoon reported that he was still near enough an hour later to see the two ships locked side by side, that a fearful explosion had happened aboard the Chesapeake, and that through a rift in the battle smoke he had beheld the British flag ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... berth once more, the terror and delight of that last glimpse is upon me. In that strange yellow rift at midnight, backing the world of dark chaos, that star of palest green, I feel a thrill of the superhuman sense which renders Turner inexplicable to Balham, and stabs the soul with demoniac ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... loth to render up My precontract, and loth by brainless war To cleave the rift of difference deeper yet; Till one of those two brothers, half aside And fingering at the hair about his lip, To prick us on to combat 'Like to like! The woman's garment hid the woman's heart.' A taunt that clenched his purpose like a blow! For fiery-short was Cyril's counter-scoff, And sharp ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... not two; Clement VIII's abdication had put an end to the schism; the great rift in the Church had been closed for thirteen years and all Christian nations recognized the Pope of Rome; even France who had become resigned to the disappearance of her Avignon popes. There was something, however, which neither the accused nor her judges knew; on that 1st of March, 1431, far ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... at the Dewley Burn Colliery, removed with his family to that place. Dewley Burn, at this day, consists of a few old-fashioned low-roofed cottages standing on either side of a babbling little stream. They are connected by a rustic wooden bridge, which spans the rift in front of the doors. In the central one-roomed cottage of this group, on the right bank, Robert Stephenson lived for a time with his family; the pit at which he worked standing in the ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... they came upon Pendle Water, and while skirting its banks, could see at a great depth below, the river rushing over its rocky bed like an Alpine torrent. The scenery had now begun to assume a savage and sombre character. The deep rift through which the river ran was evidently the result of some terrible convulsion of the earth, and the rocky strata were strangely and fantastically displayed. On the further side the banks rose up precipitously, consisting for the most part of bare cliffs, though ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... always put me here. That screen would set me dreaming—and the blue roses and the moon clock. I used to lie in that bed and send myself to sleep with more tales than are in the Arabian Nights. There's a rift in the poplars through which you can see a very bright star—Sirius, I believe. May you have pleasant dreams, Mr. Rand, in my old bed!" He glanced from Rand's flushed face to the papers strewn upon the counterpane. "You have been ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... marine objects are found there. And if the earth of our hemisphere is indeed raised by so much higher than it used to be, it must have become by so much lighter by the waters which it lost through the rift between Gibraltar and Ceuta; and all the more the higher it rose, because the weight of the waters which were thus lost would be added to the earth in the other hemisphere. And if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... and we listened as at every stroke of Esau's axe the sound flow across the river, struck the rock there and was thrown back to our side, and then over again, so that we counted five distinct echoes growing fainter as they ran up the terribly dark, jugged rift, till they died away. ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... just as they entered the door—through which another and sadder burden had been carried but a few instants before—her eyes caught sight of the south-western sky, and, without heeding, saw white sunlight shining in shaft-like lines from a rift in a slaty cloud. Emotions will attach themselves to scenes that are simultaneous—however foreign in essence these scenes may be—as chemical waters will crystallize on twigs and wires. Even after ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... of moisture gathered on the wood-work of the wharf, and on the burdock leaves that grew between gaps in the planking. High overhead the sky must have been cloudless, for we could see the moon, now and then, like a dim dinner-plate, when there was a moment's rift in the fog. ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... help but lift Their visions to the skies; They watch the clouds, but wait the rift Through which their hope ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... crevice, cranny, fissure, rift, rime, rent, cleft, interstice; rupture, breach, flaw; report, clap, pop, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... goodly purposes[*] there as they sit: And in his falsed fancy he her takes To be the fairest wight that lived yit; 265 Which to expresse he bends his gentle wit, And thinking of those braunches greene to frame A girlond for her dainty forehead fit, He pluckt a bough;[*] out of whose rift there came Small drops of gory bloud, that trickled down the ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... low standard. I saw Father Letheby buoyant, enthusiastic, not merely hopeful, but certain of the success of his enterprise. I saw these two business people chatting and consulting together, and I knew by their looks that they were not quite so sanguine. It was "the little rift within the lute." ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... was left? Was there no hope, no outlook for the future, no rift in the black curtain, no glimmer through the night? Was good to be thus overthrown? Was evil thus to be strong and to prevail? Was ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... charms, but his eyes ached with the radiance in which everything seemed drenched as with flame, and turning his gaze once more toward the sun, he saw that it had nearly disappeared. Only a blood-red rim peered spectrally above the gold and green horizon-and immediately overhead, a silver rift in the sky had widened slowly in the centre and narrowed at its end, thus taking the shape of a great outstretched sword that pointed directly downward at the busy, murmuring, glittering city beneath. It was a strange effect, and made on the mind of Theos ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... purified, spiritualised, exalted. He had become so calmly strong that he made the others feel stronger as they looked upon him. He spoke of life and of death, of the present, and their hopes of the future; and the black cloud of their misery began to show a golden rift or two. Cecil Brown shrugged his shoulders, for he could not change in an hour the convictions of his life; but the others, even Fardet, the Frenchman, were touched and strengthened. They all took off their hats when he prayed. Then the Colonel made a turban out of ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... mountaineer had in the mean time become self-possessed again, and again raised his gun to fire. Just as he pulled the trigger, however, his foot slipped, and with an exclamation of horror, Walter saw him carried rapidly toward the rift in the ice, and suddenly disappear. With the recoil of the gun the hunter had lost his balance on the slippery ice, and at the same moment that his shot struck the chamois, he was hurled into ...
— Harper's Young People, December 2, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... she had been left to herself, she would have kept him. She went out again late in the evening. The clouds had passed away to the south and east, but the lightning still fired the distant horizon far beyond Eastthorpe and towards Abchurch. The sky was clearing in the west, and suddenly in a rift Arcturus, about to set, broke through and looked at her, and in a moment was again eclipsed. What strange confusion! What inexplicable contrasts! Terror and divinest beauty; the calm of the infinite interstellar space and her own anguish; each an undoubted fact, but each to be taken ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... nature first upon the craggy clift Bewrayed this herb unto the mountain goat, That when her sides a cruel shaft hath rift, With it she shakes the reed out of her coat; This in a moment fetched the angel swift, And brought from Ida hill, though far remote, The juice whereof in a prepared bath Unseen ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... glory burst through a rift in the dull sky, whereupon our fleet, welcoming the omen, threw forth the stars and stripes from every flyer and sailed nearer the stricken fleet hungry for further victories. I counted twenty transports and half a dozen battleships. Proudly we circled over them, knowing that ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... Shelley:—"You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore." Cheeky!—but not so much amiss. Poetry, and no prophecy however, must come of that mood,—and no pulpit would have held Keats's wings,—the body and mind together were not heavy enough for a counterweight.... Did you ever ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... just the other way. And you, my dear friend, may be (or may think yourself to be) somewhat strong where he is somewhat weak; an opportunity for many subtle temptations. The days and weeks go on; and if you let "the little rift" of criticism widen, and do not continually take it to your Lord to be examined and mended, other feelings—not born from above—may steal in between you and this good man, your elder and leader in Christ. ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... having reached the abrupt Earth-rooted Threshold with its brazen stairs, He paused at one of the converging paths, Hard by the rocky basin which records The pact of Theseus and Peirithous. Betwixt that rift and the Thorician rock, The hollow pear-tree and the marble tomb, Midway he sat and loosed his beggar's weeds; Then calling to his daughters bade them fetch Of running water, both to wash withal And make libation; so they ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... left, their curves lost in opal-colored mist. From one precipice a stream falls a thousand feet out of a cave, like a delicate silver streak, dissolved in spray before it reaches the river. The two rock faces run on unbroken, only in one part the mountain is split, and through the rift laughs the blooming landscape of an alpine valley, with a white tower in the background. It is the tower ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... cause in truth presented a strange and embarrassing dilemma, as we have remarked. In the war itself, moreover, began the stern cleavage between the North and the South. At the moment the rift was not clearly discerned, but afterwards it was to widen into a chasm. Massachusetts bore more than her share of the struggle, and in the South the combination of Tory sentiment and the aristocratic social system ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... and reached such place that there, where at first there seemed to me a rift, like a cleft which divides a wall, I saw a gate, and three steps beneath for going to it of divers colors, and a gatekeeper who as yet said not a word. And as I opened my eye there more and more, I saw him sitting on the upper ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... whole scene through the rift in the door with bated breath and great amazement. When he rose to his feet, he remained for a long time, rapt in a brown study, leaning against the wall and staring blankly before him, lost in wonder that two such different beings should be slumbering together ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... never lets any one sleep, 'n' they got right in on top o' her Hottentot pillow-shams 'n' old Dr. Carter tore a sham with his toothpick. 'N', added to all that, Amelia 's furious 'cause she read in a book 't teaches how to stay married 't a husband's first night out is the first rift in the lute, 'n' she was down town buyin' a dictionary so 's to be sure what a lute is afore she accuses young Dr. Brown. 'N' there's a man over in Meadville down with a sun-stroke, 'n' they want Dr. Carter to hurry, 'n' they can't seem to make him realize nothin'. He jus' ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... between an unseen world of spirit, unconditioned by matter, and our present world of spirit, conditioned by matter. When the pull is strong enough. And what pull could be stronger than England's danger? To Kitchener?" The black-lashed, gray eyes flamed at me, unblinking the rift of light through the ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... out of tenderness to his feelings. Their friendship, then, was notorious, and, indeed, was an element in Saul's dread of David, who seemed to have some charm to steal hearts, and had bewitched both Saul's son and his daughter, thus making a painful rift in the family unity. It does not appear how David came to be so sure of Saul's designs. The incident at Ramah might have seemed to augur some improvement in his mood; and certainly there could have been no overt acts, or Jonathan could not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... much (great) flowing deep (loch) to the loft (sky) reared. Mony clustered clowde clef alle in clowte[gh] Many a clustering cloud cleft all in clouts (pieces), To-rent vch a rayn-ryfte & rusched to e vre Rent was each a rain-rift and rushed to the earth; Fon neuer in forty daye[gh], & en e flod ryses Failed never in forty days, and then the flood rises, Ouer-walte[gh] vche a wod and e wyde felde[gh] Over-flows each wood and the wide fields; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Water wylger ay wax, wone[gh] ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... drew the Queen out of her sorrow as nothing had done before. She watched tenderly by the bedside of her son, and when he was recovered, and went to St. Paul's to return thanks, she sat by his side, and wore a white flower in her bonnet, and her grateful smile showed that there was a rift in the cloud of her mourning, and that God's ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... Lake Nyasa), the southern part of which is less distinctly due to rifting and subsidence than the rest of the system. Farther north the western depression, sometimes known as the Central African trough or Albertine rift-valley, is occupied for more than half its length by water, forming the four lakes of Tanganyika, Kivu, Albert Edward and Albert, the first-named over 400 m. long and the longest freshwater lake in the world. Associated with ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... difficult and too injurious to the boats, which we must guard as our ultimate means of salvation, camp on the nearest heavy floe, scour the neighbouring pack for penguins and seals, and await the outward rift of the pack, to open and ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... of wind blew aside part of the fog, revealing through the rift a low-lying island. Within a minute the fog had closed down again, but the glimpse had been enough to give the captain his bearings. The noise from the seal-rookery had grown deafening, so that the men had to shout to one another in the boat and presently—and quite unexpectedly—the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... triumph? Would she cry? Was it a frolic, or a fight? Would the morrow find them smiling and happy as of yore, or driving off in separate cabs to take refuge in the bosoms of their separate families? Darsie opined that all would seem the same on the surface, but darkly hinted at the little rift within the lute, and somehow after that night the glamour seemed to have departed from this honeymoon pair, and the fair seeming was regarded ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... gorging, wouldst thou sleep? Look thy den is hid and deep, Lest a wrong, by thee forgot, Draw thy killer to the spot. East and West and North and South, Wash thy hide and close thy mouth. (Pit and rift and blue pool-brim, Middle-Jungle follow him!) Wood and Water, Wind and Tree, Jungle-Favour go ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day's breeze. Blue with cold a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine tree lay guzzling insatiably at a leaf-brown pool. Monotonous as a sob the waiting birch canoe ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... was come to betwixt the kings at the time of this mustering, & peace ensued in the lands. King Magnus was afterwards stricken with a sickness, the rift-worm sickness, and when he had lain abed for some time died he at Nidaros, and there was buried. He was a King right well-beloved ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... breathless and somewhat tired, the three explorers had reached a small turret room into which was shining a ray of sunshine from a rift in the clouds—'I wonder if you would laugh if I told ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... sat in silence, the gloom in the chasm thickened. The sun had passed beyond the southwestern forests, and through the narrow rift between the mountain walls there fell but the ebbing light of day, dissolving itself into the shadows of dusk as it struggled weakly in the cavernous depths. For a few minutes this swift fading of day into night gripped the adventurers in its spell. What did the lonely solitudes ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... their theories. But they are not. They admit that their remote ancestors, in other words, that they themselves in former incarnations, possessed certain marvellous powers to which in the present degenerate days they can lay no claim; and in this significant admission we may detect a rift, a real distinction of kind, between the living and the dead, which in time might widen out into an impassable gulf. In other words, we may suppose that the Central Australians, if left to themselves, might come to hold that the dead return ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... of the penumbra. The mind, too long obscured like a sun eclipsed by clouds, searches out some rift. Suddenly reason comes into the clear. God rises like an untroubled sun upon the soul's horizon. How crystalline life looks! The mind literally exhales fancies and pictures, and each stick and stone is as full of suggestions and ideas as the forest ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... grew fewer and fewer. At a little distance the dim structures of the Portico and Theatre of Pompeius could be seen, looming up to an exaggerated size in the evening haze. A grey fog was drifting up from the Tiber, and out of a rift in a heavy cloud-bank a beam of the imprisoned moon was struggling. Along the road were peasants with their carts and asses hastening home. Over on the Pincian Mount the dark green masses of the splendid gardens of Pompeius and of Lucullus were just visible. The air was filled with the croak of frogs ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... fact, for he made no concealment of his fundamental Federalism, and every one saw that, in spite of his formal neutrality, in great matters he almost always sided with Hamilton instead of with Jefferson. When he himself recognized that the rift was spreading between his two chief Cabinet officers, he warned them both to avoid exaggerating their differences and pursuing any policy which must be harmful to the country. Patriotism was the chief aim of every one, ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... added my injunctions to the effect that if she wished to please me she would break off all acquaintance with her cousin, Ellen Vaughan. This, however, she would not promise to do, and it was the first beginning of the rift, which afterwards widened into a chasm between us. Her cousin also was too much attached to her to be easily alienated from her, and the two girls met more frequently than either her uncle or I were aware of. There was another girl, too—I forget her name—but she was a sister of ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... we turned our faces for the long, dripping, splashing ride homeward. Through the gusts of driving rain we could hardly see the way. Once the rain lightened, and half a mile away the sunshine gleamed through a rift in the leaden cloud-mass. Suddenly in this rift of shimmering brightness there appeared a flock of beautiful white egrets. With strong, graceful wing-beats the birds urged their flight, their plumage flashing in the sun. They then crossed the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... answered him in a conciliatory tone. Sheridan fanned the flame; he taunted Burke with inconsistency, and pronounced a panegyric on the revolutionary leaders. Burke replied that thenceforth he and Sheridan were separated in politics. A rift in the opposition was started, and an attempt to close it by a conference two days later was ineffectual. The opinion of parliament on two other questions during the session was, seemingly, influenced ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... sons of Sagara, accepted this command of their father, and once more began to search through the entire world. Now these heroes saw a rift on the surface of the earth. And having reached this pit, the sons of Sagara began to excavate it. And with spades and pickaxes they went on digging the sea, making the utmost efforts. And that same abode of Varuna (namely the ocean), being thus, excavated by the united sons ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... seems covered with gorgeous blossom. Leaving the road, we turned into the scrub, and drove over a sandy soil among small gum-trees and smaller scrub. When at length we quitted the carriage and had followed our guide for a short distance, we suddenly came upon what appeared to be an enormous rift in the ground, which yawned beneath our feet. Far below was an undulating mass of foliage—the tops of a forest of gum-trees, which covered the whole bed of the valley. Vast was the height from which we looked down, so that the trees had the appearance of perfect stillness, forming in the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... upon the lazy, evening life of the great river. The monotonous accompaniment to their conversation, which had been so long sustained by the drip and splash outside, had grown intermittent, and now all but ceased; while a faint tinge of yellowish white upon the ripples, and a feathery rift in the gray dome of sky, announced a final effort on the ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... With the first rift of light in the east I rose from my sleepless bed under the wagon—I would not profane her couch inside by occupying it—and yoked up my cattle. Before noon I was in Cedar Falls; and from there west I found the Ridge Road growing less and less a beaten track owing to ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... driven out of my head by people coming here. And then I had a sort of unreasonable notion that I should see you at the Linnean Council to-day and hear that all was right again. God knows, I feel for you and your poor wife. Knowing what a great rift the loss of a mere undeveloped child will leave in one's life, I can faintly picture to myself the great and irreparable vacuity in a family circle caused by the vanishing out of it of such a man as Henslow, with great acquirements, and that great calm catholic judgment and sense which always seemed ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... swollen and weary, broke on the shore in waves so small that it seemed as if the sea, tired of its endless task, were doing dispiritedly as little as it dared, and murmuring at that. The curving cliffs on the left looked like white curtains, closely drawn. The low grey sky was unbroken by cloud or rift except low down on the horizon, where it had risen like a blind drawn up a little to admit the light. It was a melancholy prospect, and Beth shivered and sighed in sympathy. Then a sparrow cheeped somewhere behind her, and another bird in the hedge softly fluted a little roulade. Beth ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... here some pick out bullets from the side, Some drive old okum through each seam and rift; Their left hand does the calking-iron guide, The rattling mallet with the right ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... might shield From dews and damps of night his shelter'd head, But shelter'd slept in vain, for at his head The Tempter watch'd, and soon with ugly dreams Disturb'd his sleep; and either Tropic now 'Gan thunder, and both ends of Heav'n, the Clouds 410 From many a horrid rift abortive pour'd Fierce rain with lightning mixt, water with fire In ruine reconcil'd: nor slept the winds Within thir stony caves, but rush'd abroad From the four hinges of the world, and fell On the vext Wilderness, whose tallest Pines, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... against it, the Indians bending low, fled in a streak of broken color. In the other direction Leff's running figure sped toward the camp. From the distance a rifle shot again sundered the quiet. After silence had reclosed over the rift a puff of smoke rose in the air. They knew now it was Daddy John, fearing they had lost the way, showing them the location ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... banished duke of Milan, and father of Miranda. He was deposed by his brother, Antonio, who sent him to sea with Miranda in a "rotten carcass of a boat," which was borne to a desert island. Here Prospero practised magic. He liberated Ariel from the rift of a pine tree, where the witch Syc'orax had confined him for twelve years, and was served by that bright spirit with true gratitude. The only other inhabitant of the island was Cal[)i]ban, the witch's "welp." ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the weary crowd, Kurt felt a clearer breeze upon his face. Smoke was not flying so thickly. Over the western hill, through a rift in the clouds, peeped a star. The only other light he saw twinkled far down the lane. It was that of a lantern. Dark forms barred it now and then. Slowly Kurt recovered his breath. The men were talking and tired voices rang with assurance that the ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... We had often looked at this spot, with a telescope, from the veranda of our studio, watching the hunting and sight-seeing parties ride up the bed of the stream. We rather feared the drifting clouds and mists would hide the fire from view, but now and then a rift appeared, and we knew if they were looking they could see its light. Camp No. 51 was made close to Bright Angel Creek, that evening, Thursday, October the 16th, two months and eight days from the time we had embarked ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... rescission, abscission; laceration, dilaceration^; disruption, abruption^; avulsion^, divulsion^; section, resection, cleavage; fission; partibility^, separability. fissure, breach, rent, split, rift, crack, slit, incision. dissection anatomy; decomposition &c 49; cutting instrument &c (sharpness) 253; buzzsaw, circular saw, rip saw. separatist. V. be disjoined &c; come off, fall off, come to pieces, fall to pieces; peel off; get loose. disjoin, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... miles from the station of Port Kent. It is many years since we visited the Chasm, but its pictures are still stamped upon our mind clearly and definitely—the ledge at Birmingham Falls, the Flume, the Devil's Pulpit, and the boat ride on the swift current. Indeed, the entire rock-rift, almost two miles in length, left an impression never to be effaced. The one thing especially peculiar, on account of the trend of the rock-layers was the illusion that we were floating up stream, ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... was like the sea. Before the moon was made, Moaning in vague immensity, Of its own strength afraid, Unresful and unstaid. Through every rift it foamed in vain, About its earthly prison, Seeking some unknown thing in pain, And sinking restless back again, For yet no moon had risen: Its only voice a vast dumb moan, Of utterless anguish speaking, It lay unhopefully alone, And lived but ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... all very ordinary. She was more concerned about the wind, to which they had become once more exposed as they reached the end of the rift. On they pressed, five or six steps at each attempt, stopping to rest twice the length of time they actually traveled. It was necessary now to cling to the rock with both hands, and once Cunora lost her grip, so that she would have been blown to one side, or else have slipped backward, ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... below their feet, lay the great earth rift that made Palo Duro. It stretched before them an impenetrable black ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... began to abate. The vault of clouds seemed to rise and heighten and suddenly, through a rift, a long ray of sunshine fell upon the fields, and presently the clouds separated, showing the blue firmament, and then, like the tearing of a veil, the opening grew larger and the beautiful azure sky, clear and fathomless, spread over the world. A fresh and gentle breeze passed over ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... The conviction lay heavy on all hearts that in the settlement of the Morocco dispute no mere commercial or colonial question of minor importance was being discussed, but that the honour and future of the German nation were at stake. A deep rift had opened between the feeling of the nation and the diplomatic action of the Government. Public opinion, which was clearly in favour of asserting ourselves, did not understand the dangers of our ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... thus been described caused no great rift with the past, nor did it produce any great change in his outward life. He did not dedicate himself to the ministry; he did not, so far as can be gathered, even become a member of the Church; and although for a short time he ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... wealthy, good; yet not apparently a whit more reconciled to life than the aged grandam. It was pleasing, and yet it was sad, to see how well we can make up our mind to what is inevitable. And such a sight brings up to one a glimpse of Future Years. The cloud seems to part before one, and through the rift you discern your earthly track far away, and a jaded pilgrim plodding along it with weary step; and though the pilgrim does not look like you, yet you know the pilgrim ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... as I watch thee, all unfettered sweeping High o'er the rift that weighs my pinion here, I yearn like thee my plume in ether steeping, To soar away through yon ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... during my stay in Gorizia, but, as we recrossed the Isonzo onto the Friulian plain, the sinking sun burst through a rift in the leaden clouds and turned into a huge block of rosy coral the red rampart of the Carso. Beyond that wall, scarce a dozen miles as the airplane flies, but many times that distance as the big gun travels, lies Trieste. It will be a long road, a ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... a few gleams of sunlight struggled through a rift in the clouds, and a shower of colored light fell over the wild garden. The brown tiles of the roof glowed in the light, the mosses took bright hues, strange shadows played over the grass beneath the trees; the dead autumn tints grew ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... in, forming a tunnel about six feet high and five feet wide. This tunnel was three or four yards long, and then it opened out again into a second cave of fair size. The second cave was dimly lighted from a rift in the rock, forty feet above their heads. In two minutes Jack had made the circuit of it, and knew that, except for the fact that it was an inner cave, it offered them no refuge. The walls were smooth and unclimbable, and there was no break in them except ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... life continues, in part because much activity is local and relatively easily protected. Agriculture is the most important sector, with livestock normally accounting for about 40% of GDP and about 65% of export earnings, but Saudi Arabia's ban on Somali livestock, due to Rift Valley Fever concerns, has severely hampered the sector. Nomads and semi-nomads, who are dependent upon livestock for their livelihood, make up a large portion of the population. Livestock, hides, fish, charcoal, and bananas are Somalia's ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... altered, and we are steaming over the obliterated banks far in the interior. Once or twice black objects loom up near us—the wrecks of houses floating by. There is a slight rift in the sky toward the north, and a few bearing stars to guide us over the waste. As we penetrate into shallower water, it is deemed advisable to divide our party into smaller boats, and diverge over the submerged prairie. I borrow a peacoat of one of the crew, and in that practical ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... wife's faint suspicion of his alienated affection and by her dogged determination to be sufficient to him as a companion and a helper; and a little ashamed at his middle-aged—he was forty-seven—infatuation for a woman who was herself well on in the thirties. There were times when a rift came in the cloud of his passion for Vivie, when he looked out dispassionately on the prospect of the rest of his life—he could hope at most for twenty more years of mental and bodily activity and energy. Was this all too brief ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... watched the whole scene through the rift in the door with bated breath and great amazement. When he rose to his feet, he remained for a long time, rapt in a brown study, leaning against the wall and staring blankly before him, lost in wonder that two such ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... led us to a point where, over a stony fall veil'd with brown bracken, it plunged into a narrow ravine. Standing on the lip, where the water took a smoother glide before leaping, we saw the line of the ravine mark'd by a rift in the pines, and through this a slice of the country that lay below. 'Twas a level plain, well watered, and dotted here and there with houses. A range of wooded hills clos'd the view, and toward them a broad road wound gently, till the eye lost it ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... and soon they mounted into total darkness, so that the Wizard was obliged to get out his lanterns to light the way. But this enabled them to proceed steadily until they came to a landing where there was a rift in the side of the mountain that let in both light and air. Looking through this opening they could see the Valley of Voe lying far below them, the cottages seeming like toy ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... modulated to another dream—the last. Suffocating and vague, the stillness waxed and ran over the troubled edges of eternity. The Plain, gloomy and implacable, was illuminated on its anonymous horizon by one rift of naked, leering light. Over its illimitable surface surged and shivered women, white, dazzling, numberless. As waves that, lap on lap, sweep fiercely across the sky-line, as bisons that furiously charge upon grassy wastes, "as the rill that runs from ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... when we entered I had three distinct shocks in quick succession. Flashy, painted and rouged as I was I dreaded Orontides' eyes. There he was behind his counter, visible through a rift in the press of handsomely dressed customers ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... red ray from the westering sun shot through a rift in the sky and lay across the English host like a sword of light, whereof the point hung over the eastern plain. Save for this flaming sword all else was dark, and silent also, for the rain and thunder had died away. Only thousands of crows, frightened ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... off on the road that I thought most likely to lead me in the right direction; but as usual I had the misfortune of being wrong; for after I had gone a long distance, the moon broke through a rift in the clouds, and for a moment poured her light down on the dark forest through which I was passing. That one glance was enough to show me that I was heading back toward the railroad I had left in the morning. Wearily I turned ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... seats which the principal legislators and judges occupied during their deliberations. Not far from here lies also the 'Logberg,' or 'law rock,' a large mound from whence the laws were proclaimed or judgments given to the people who assembled on the outside slope of the eastern wall of the rift, in view of the proceedings below. Our notice was likewise directed to the 'blood stone,' on which, for certain offences, the criminals were condemned to have their backs broken, after which barbarous punishment they were hurled backwards, and ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... clouds immediately above their heads were torn asunder by the vehemence of the wind. The gray mass was rent and scattered east and west with ominous speed, a dim uncertain light from the rift in the sky fell full upon the boat, and the travelers beheld each other's faces. All of them, the noble and the wealthy, the sailors and the poor passengers alike, were amazed for a moment by the appearance of the last comer. His golden hair, parted upon ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... told a woman named Rachel Murch that her character was "as black as Hell," and upon Rachel's complaint to the session, he was "churched" for "breach of the Ninth Commandment and also for a violation of his covenant agreement." This incident caused a rift which gradually developed into something very like a schism in the local congregation, and this internal disagreement finally produced a split between Eleazar's son, Dr. John Wheelock, who was now president of Dartmouth College, and the Trustees of the institution. The result was that ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... And the gray coyote trots about here and there, And the buzzard sails on, And comes back and is gone, Stately and still like a ship on the sea; And the rattlesnake slides and glitters and glides Into his rift ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... morning by trampling noises in the stable below, and starting up could not at first make out where she was. The sun was shining through a rift in the loft door, Tib was gone, cocks were crowing outside, all the world was up and busy. She could hear Ben's gruff voice and the clanking of chains and harness, and soon he and the three horses ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... as he hastily scanned the note; "a rift in these gloomy clouds. Break we our camp, my lord Westmoreland, and back to Hereford town. We do but spend our strength to little use awaiting a wily foe in these flooded plains. This billet tells me that Sir Harry Percy and my lord of Worcester, with our son the Prince, have cooped ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... Up this rift I watched Ludar clamber, losing him now and again in the shooting foam, and now and again, as the spray cleared off, seeing him safe, and ever a foot higher than before. How I followed him 'twould be hard to say. Yet the rock seemed riven into cracks which gave ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... decoration of the chapel. The place was filled with them, growing almost in tropical luxuriance; but this was a mile or so farther down, and to reach that spot from above, Alessandro had had to let himself down a sheer wall of stone. The canon at its head was little more than a rift in the rocks, and the stream which had its rise in it was only a trickling spring at the beginning. It was this precious water, as well as the inaccessibility of the spot, which had decided Alessandro to gain the place at all hazards and costs. But a wall of granite would not have seemed a ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... natural daughter. Francesco Guicciardini, the first statesman and historian of his age, had undertaken his defence, and was ready to support him by advice and countenance in the conduct of his government. Within the lute of this prosperity, however, there was one little rift. For some months past he had closely attached to his person a certain kinsman, Lorenzo de' Medici, who was descended in the fourth generation from Lorenzo, the brother of Cosimo Pater Patriae. This Lorenzo, or Lorenzino, or Lorenzaccio, as his ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... rock which there formed the bed of the Zambesi. The lips of the crack are still quite sharp, save about three feet of the edge over which the river rolls. The walls go sheer down from the lips without any projecting crag, or symptoms of stratification or dislocation. When the mighty rift 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 ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... periodic droughts in south; Congo River floods (seasonal); in the east, in the Great Rift Valley, there ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... gripped the revolver remained motionless. Through a rift in the leafy curtain I caught a glimpse of a bulk that was within a yard of our hiding place, and I knew that the youngster was waiting for the brute to speak to make certain that he was covering the right man. The ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... time they sailed slowly on, seeking in vain for a rift in the blanket of mist: then Rodier ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... had done before. She watched tenderly by the bedside of her son, and when he was recovered, and went to St. Paul's to return thanks, she sat by his side, and wore a white flower in her bonnet, and her grateful smile showed that there was a rift in the cloud of her mourning, and that God's sunlight was ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... within was rude and strong, Like an huge cave hewn out of rocky clift, From whose rough vault the ragged breaches hung, Embossed with massy gold of glorious gift, And with rich metal loaded every rift. That heavy ruin they did seem to threat: And over them Arachne high did lift Her cunning web, and spread her subtle net, Enwrapped in foul smoke, and clouds more ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... had broken out at the head of the column as well as the rear. The situation was rendered more difficult by the violence of the rain, which raised a thick steam from the ground and made it impossible to see for any distance. Major Anley, in command of the rearguard, peering back, saw through a rift of the clouds a large body of horsemen in extended order sweeping after them. 'There's miles of them, begob!' cried an excited Irish trooper. Next instant the curtain had closed once more, but all ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... companions save a gorilla-like half-breed, whose animal instinct of love and fidelity fell about the poor boy like a protecting garment. Then comes this bright spot in his life away in Hili-liland, like a momentary rift in the clouds of a stormy day. For Pym the sun shone with a heavenly effulgence, whilst the obstructions of a dire destiny were for a time removed; but when again the clouds closed between him and the brightness of existence, they closed forevermore. Yet this mere ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... To some types of Irish imagination French Naturalism, it is true, was no less congenial; hence the rift between the realist and the spiritual Irishmen delightfully played on in Max Beerbaum's cartoon of Yeats presenting the Faery Queene ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... live where she chose to live: but he grew more sullen and dogged, day by day; and Sally grew sadder and quieter, and things were fast coming to a bad pass, when Hetty Gunn's generous offer came to them, like a great rift of sunlight in ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... abandoned the expedition and tried to return through the desert, but were massacred by Indians. It is only when one stands beside a portion of this lonely river, and sees it shooting stealthily and swiftly from a rift in the Titanic cliffs and disappearing mysteriously between dark gates of granite, that he realizes what a heroic exploit the first navigation of this river was; for nothing had been known of its imprisoned course through this entanglement ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... dissembler; his finer instincts told him that he did not possess her full confidence, and he was too proud to ask it. So they lived together a few short weeks after marriage, on outward terms of courtesy and cordiality, but with this little rift of dissatisfaction gradually yet surely widening into a fissure that should rend each of these proud ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... ringing, flies apart, Suddenly cracks the vaulted hall; And through the rift the flames upstart; The guests in dust are scattered all With the breaking ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... feet; the officer could not make it out. With the instinct of the true cavalryman and a particular indisposition to the discharge of firearms, he drew his saber. The man on foot made no movement in answer to the challenge. The situation was tense and a bit dramatic. Suddenly the moon burst through a rift in the clouds and, himself in the shadow of a group of great oaks, the horseman saw the footman clearly, in a patch of white light. It was Trooper Dunning, unarmed and bareheaded. The object at his feet resolved itself into a dead horse, and at a right angle across the ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... forces." With your denial of any intrinsic beauty in the emotion, with your acceptance of it as an unfortunate incident in human affairs, comes a vague hope that the race will outgrow this force. Here is your rift in the cloud. You picture a scientific Utopia where there are no lovers and no back-harkings to the primitive passion, and you appoint yourself pioneer to the promised land ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... faces the finely wrought figures of the Saviour and the malefactors uplifted upon their crosses behind the altar, and bright with a metallic lustre of many colors. He turns next to the figures close to them of the Virgin and Mary Magdalen; next to the rift in the living rock made by the earthquake at the time of the Crucifixion, and an extension of which he had seen before in the wall of one of the grottoes below; he looks next at the show-case with a figure of the Virgin in it, and is amazed at the princely fortune in precious ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... glass with him, Fairclough did not attempt to use it, at present; but stood gazing fixedly ahead. A quarter of an hour later there was a sudden rift in the clouds, and a low shore was visible, some five or six miles ahead; and a dark mass, much farther off, rising into the cloud. Fairclough instantly unslung the telescope, and adjusted it. A minute afterwards ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... toil in leaguer of yon walls; Some other counsel let your hearts devise, Some stratagem to help the host and us. For here but yesterday I saw a sign: A falcon chased a dove, and she, hard pressed, Entered a cleft of the rock; and chafing he Tarried long time hard by that rift, but she Abode in covert. Nursing still his wrath, He hid him in a bush. Forth darted she, In folly deeming him afar: he swooped, And to the hapless dove dealt wretched death. Therefore by force essay we not to smite Troy, but ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... keeping cool-headed than any other way," rejoined Frank. "A crevasse, into one of which the professor has fallen, is not 'a hole' as you call it, but a long rift in the earth above which snow has drifted. Sometimes they are so covered up that persons can cross in safety, at other times the snow 'bridge' gives way under their weight and they are precipitated into the crevasse itself,—an ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... toyed with men, it wore them out, it stripped them of their strength and their manhood, it wrecked their courage and it broke their hearts. The canon sucked them in and swallowed them. This canon is nothing more nor less than a rift in a great basaltic barrier which lies athwart the river's course, the entrance to it being much like the door in a wall. Above it the waters are dammed and into it they pour as into a flume; down it they rage in swiftly increasing fury, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... this grandeur the young gipsy felt her heart beating and expanding with unknown delight, and again running on she darted through a rift between the rocks, lined with mosses and ferns, to reach the beaten ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... navy of the Empire, or the prerogatives of the parliament or Crown.' But the emphasis was different. Howe insisted on the greatness of the change in local administration; Johnston on the amount of still surviving control by the mother country. The little rift in the lute was already apparent, and was increased by the natural tendency of the governor to consult the courtly Johnston, and to show impatience at the brusque ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... the rocks opened in a deep narrow crevasse, a long rift, evidently slashing back into the cliff, beneath the road on which I had been treading. I could see the moonlit water vanishing into a sort of gleaming lane between the vast overhanging walls. In a few moments I was near the entrance, but, as yet, I could ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... they reached a huge boulder that had broken away from the west side of the gulch. Behind it was an opening among other rocks. Indeed, this whole rift in the hillside was a mass of broken rock. It was hard for the ponies to pick a path between the stones. And it ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... reflection, took fright at their presence, and to get rid of them he concluded, without the knowledge of the First Consul, a peace treaty with the Portuguese, which he cunningly had ratified by the French ambassador, Lucien Bonaparte. This greatly annoyed the First Consul, and caused, from that day, a rift between the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... the Makon Canyon was of a black rift in a rough brown sea of sand, with a blue gray sky above. As the little pack train drew nearer he saw that the walls of the rift were weathered and broken into fissures and points of seeming impassable roughness. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... Democrats were the most successful, but even if they made a Coalition they would still have no majority. [Now and then the Democrats asserted themselves against the Radicals, but when the Opposition thought they could perceive a rift the Democratic Press would write that the two parties were most intimately joined to one another, and especially the Democrats.] The small parties were very numerous, the smallest being that of M. Ribarac, the old Liberal ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... into being, and an issue overriding all the legislative interest of the session. Mr Ritchie's remission of the shilling import-duty on corn led to Mr Chamberlain's crusade in favour of tariff reform and colonial preference, and as the session proceeded the rift grew ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... at first had been kept down by the wind, and lay flat and frothing, now got up into absolute mountains. A singular change, too, had come over the heavens. Around in every direction it was still as black as pitch, but nearly overhead there burst out, all at once, a circular rift of clear sky—as clear as I ever saw—and of a deep bright blue—and through it there blazed forth the full moon with a luster that I never before knew her to wear. She lit up everything about ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... carried out. The entire party embarked, and landed a moment later about ten yards below the mill. The rain had ceased some time before, and the moon was now peeping through a rift in ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... and the seraphim, Slave of the wheel of labour, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time's tragedy is in that ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... was going on Tuttle and Ellhorn rode up. The rain had stopped, and through a rift in the eastern clouds the level, red rays of the sun were shining. Mead met their eager, anxious faces ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... the valley until the road turned toward the range and an opening which he followed into a steeper and narrower rift beyond. Here there were no clearings in the rocky underbrush until he reached Richmond Braley's land. A long upturning sweep ended at the house, directly against the base of the mountain; and without decreasing his gait he passed ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... ocean sounds; And whirls the clattering car through crowded streets, And floods with light the haunts of prowling thieves— That inner world, whose very life is love, Pure love, and perfect, infinite, intense, That world is now astir. A rift appears In those dark clouds that rise from sinful souls And hide from us its clear celestial light, And clouds of messengers from that bright world, Whom they called devas and we angels call, Rush to ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... in tone, black, dark green, and brown and gray. The mist hangs heavy over everything, and the twinkle of an occasional camp-fire is but the sodden glow of ember whose life is long since burned out. But, see! Through the deep, jagged rift where runs the Potomac, along the rock-bound gorge through which in ages past the torrent burst its way, there creeps a host of tiny shafts of color—the skirmishers, the eclaireurs, of the irresistible array of which ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... day in again searching for some indication that might assist them, but in vain. Dias and Jose both asserted that the tiny rift in the rocky peak looked wider from the middle of the valley than at any other point, and even Harry and his brother admitted that it could scarcely be seen from the foot of the hills on either side, and therefore it was agreed that Dias, Harry, ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... resources have wrought their will upon man. They are to be cherished as the mariner cherishes the guiding star that stands upon the horizon; they are to be cherished as some traveler, lost in a close, dark forest, cherishes the moment when the sun breaks through a rift in the clouds and he takes his bearings out of the swamp and toward his home. Visions are God within the soul. They come to lead man away from sin and sorrow. They come to guide him ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... exclamation, those who stood near seized and held him. Presently he saw the reason. He was standing on the brink of a precipice at the back of and dominating the dim and shadow-clad city, while far beneath him lay a gloomy rift along which ran the trade ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... So here some pick out bullets from the sides, Some drive old oakum through each seam and rift: Their left hand does the calking-iron guide, The rattling mallet ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... they were close by the narrow entrance, and as Fred searched for the exact place he uttered a cry of satisfaction, for there by the gaping rift lay two large bundles, whose ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... balcony. Once he saw a man's figure cross the room, but he could not be sure who it was. The last distant rumblings of thunder had died away and the clouds were breaking. It was not long before the dark mountainous billows broke apart, and a brilliant full moon showed herself sailing in the rift, suddenly flooding everything with light. Parts of the garden were silver white, and the tree shadows were like black velvet. A silvery lance pierced even into the hollow of Marco's evergreen and struck across ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and by going back to what was old has found topics that are really fresh and delightful. The Italy of the ancient Romans is a foreign country to us, and must always continue so; but the Italy of the Middle Ages is nearer, not so much in time, as because there is no impassable rift of religious faith, and consequently of ideas and motives, between us and it. Far enough away in the centuries to be picturesque, it is near enough in the sympathy of belief and thought to be thoroughly intelligible. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... out of which pussy has crept is small and barely furnished; it would be perfectly dark too, but that the holes in the roof and the rift in the door admit light into this most squalid room. There is nothing standing against its rough gray walls but a wooden chest, near this a few earthen bowls stand on the ground with a wooden cup ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... life. That a great deal of domestic dissatisfaction and unhappiness could be obviated if wisdom and experience instructed the husband and wife in the matter I have not the slightest doubt. The first rift in the domestic lute often dates from difficulties in the intimate life of the pair, difficulties that need not exist if there were knowledge. That reason and love may coexist, that the beauty of life is not dependent on a sentimentalized ignorance ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... o' her Hottentot pillow-shams 'n' old Dr. Carter tore a sham with his toothpick. 'N', added to all that, Amelia 's furious 'cause she read in a book 't teaches how to stay married 't a husband's first night out is the first rift in the lute, 'n' she was down town buyin' a dictionary so 's to be sure what a lute is afore she accuses young Dr. Brown. 'N' there's a man over in Meadville down with a sun-stroke, 'n' they want Dr. Carter to hurry, 'n' they can't seem to make him realize nothin'. ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... lay of the land at Skulltree, himself. When he was a young chap the Latisans had operated in a small way as a side-line on the Noda waters. There was a rift in the watershed near Skulltree. There was a canon leading down to the Tomah end, and the waters of the gorge were fed by a chain of ponds whose master source was near the Noda. The Latisans had hauled over to the pond from the ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... "In itself it is worth nothing, being but the catspaw to scheming forces." With your denial of any intrinsic beauty in the emotion, with your acceptance of it as an unfortunate incident in human affairs, comes a vague hope that the race will outgrow this force. Here is your rift in the cloud. You picture a scientific Utopia where there are no lovers and no back-harkings to the primitive passion, and you appoint yourself pioneer to the promised land ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... examine closely every rift and crevice in the boundary cliff, it was a most tedious undertaking; and I do remember how my great trooper boots, sun-drying on my feet, made every step a wincing agony. They say an army goes upon its belly, but an old campaigner will tell you that you can march a ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... Devar's description, it was not easy to comprehend the distinction that forbade friendship with Fitzroy while offering it with Millicent, Countess of Porthcawl. But the girl was resolved not to open a new rift. In her heart she longed for the day that would reunite her to her father; meanwhile, Mrs. Devar must be dealt ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... bed, had, by means of a fortunate rift in the blankets, a complete view of the whole party, and he could mark with accuracy, in consequence of their black faces, every grin now made distinctly visible ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... tropical clouds added obscurity to the darkness of the sky, so that the night fell with even more startling quickness than usual. The blackness was very dense. Now and then a group of drifting stars swam out of a rift in the vapors, but the night was curiously silent and of a ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... each other at Monticello, but there was nothing else to mar the peace of that happy home. Between husband and wife there was no strife or discord, not a jar nor a rift in that unity of life and purpose which welds ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. The rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the married and the unmarried, and I was beginning to leave my protege to a fate ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... little rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute, The little rift within the lover's lute Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit That rotting inward ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... mist. It seemed to him they were wide-yawning caverns that he saw there leading into that mist. It seemed to him it was all-white, flaxy sheets of linen, or sifted snow a-falling that he saw there through a rift in the mist. It seemed to him it was a flight of many, varied, wonderful, numerous birds [1]that he[a] saw in the same mist,[1] or the constant sparkling of shining stars [LL.fo.96a.] on a bright, clear night ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... descended into another valley. Here they came upon Pendle Water, and while skirting its banks, could see at a great depth below, the river rushing over its rocky bed like an Alpine torrent. The scenery had now begun to assume a savage and sombre character. The deep rift through which the river ran was evidently the result of some terrible convulsion of the earth, and the rocky strata were strangely and fantastically displayed. On the further side the banks rose up precipitously, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... abate. The vault of clouds seemed to rise and heighten and suddenly, through a rift, a long ray of sunshine fell upon the fields, and presently the clouds separated, showing the blue firmament, and then, like the tearing of a veil, the opening grew larger and the beautiful azure sky, clear and fathomless, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... to my Lord, The Ioue of power make me most weake, most weake, Your reconciler: Warres 'twixt you twaine would be, As if the world should cleaue, and that slaine men Should soalder vp the Rift ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... beaten a prudent retreat through the back of the tent. The canvas was ripped open, letting in a streak of light. They left their prisoner upon the ground, and cautiously drew near the rift. ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... foothold, he cast about vainly for a clue to the other's whereabouts; for if the night was thick in the open, here in the trench its density was as that of the pit; the man could distinguish positively nothing more than a pallid rift where ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... quantities of red-hot ashes, mingled with huge masses of glowing incandescent rock, were projected far into the air; a terrific storm of thunder and lightning suddenly burst forth to add new terrors to the scene; and to crown all, a new rift suddenly burst open in the side of the hill, out of which there immediately poured a perfect ocean ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... a spectacle to watch, those thunder-clouds come through the glack, or rift, dividing the falling hill on which I stood, from the rising one beyond. Down in the valley ran a stream and a track used by cattle-drovers, and, as my eye went there, I thought I saw a tall figure. Certainly, ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... lake and plain The stork, the heron, and the crane Through the clear realms of azure drift, And on the hillside I can see The villages of Imari, Whose thronged and flaming workshops lift Their twisted columns of smoke on high, Cloud cloisters that in ruins lie, With sunshine streaming through each rift, And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... driving down the slopes from Sant' Angelo comfortably sheltered against the storm, while the generous mountain wine sped through my veins, warming my fancy. Then, at last, the sun came out in a sudden burst of light, opening a rift in the vapours and revealing the whole chain of the Apennines, together with the peaked crater ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... in the canon, filling it with gloom. Sometimes they hung above from wall to wall and formed a roof: then a gust of wind from a side-canon made a rift in them and the blue heavens were revealed, or they dispersed in patches which settled on the crags, while puffs of vapor issued out of the smaller gulches, and occasionally formed bars across the canon, one above another, each opening a different vista. When they discharged their rains little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... that took it from his lips heard the Tall One's answer; for at that moment his horse reared and sheered away before a spear-prick, and into the rift a handful of English rushed with shouts ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... these armies. But the book closes with a note of hope, with the unspoken oath of international brotherhood, what time a rift forms in the black skies and a calm ray of light falls upon the ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with all things with a name or with ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... man has been ruined into salvation. The lightning which smote his dearest hopes opened up a new rift in his dark life, and gave him glimpses of himself which, until then, he had never seen. The grave buried his dearest hopes, but uncovered in his nature possibilities of patience, endurance, and hope which he never before dreamed ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... unusually early to bed and to sleep. I remember looking from the window after the light was out, and seeing, through a rift in the clouds, the new moon just touching the peak of the opposite mountain. A whippoorwill sang in the great chestnut-tree at the farther corner of the yard; tree-toads trilled, and frogs peeped, and through all could just be heard the rapids ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... side and ahead. The gloomy woods on the vast slopes threw a marked shadow over the prospect. Ahead lay a wide vista of tremendous mountains, with their crowning, snow-bound peaks lost in a world of gray, fleecy cloud. In the heart of one distant rift lay the steely bed of a glacier, hoary with age and immovable as the very bedrocks of the mountains themselves. It sloped away into the distance, and lost itself in the heart of a mighty canyon. Even to these men on their trail of death, living, as they did, so adjacent ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... almost overpowered him; then the old Psalm whispered, "He that keepeth thee will not slumber nor sleep." A sweet consciousness of the absolute safety of God's children stole over the youth; and catching, from a rift in the roof, one glimpse of the stars struggling through the tree tops, he turned over and fell asleep as peacefully as if ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... out magnificently. Their huge sides tower up nearly a thousand feet from the river, until they are within reach of the lowering clouds that every moment threaten to envelop them in their indigo embrace. There is a curious rift in the dark cumulus revealing a thin line of dull carmine that frequently changes its shape and becomes nearly obliterated, but its presence in no way weakens the awesomeness of the picture. The dale appears to become huger and steeper as the clouds thicken, and what ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... showed admirable sang-froid and energy. At the most critical moment, the decisive hour of the battle, he accomplished a magnificent maneuver, which is known under the name of the maneuver of Fere Champenoise. Foch noted a rift between the German army of Von Buelow and that of Von Hausen. The German Guard was engaged with the Tenth Division of the reserve in the region of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... laughed, and the little rift was closed. But the Squire's words had not been unheeded and two hearts were busily thinking and wondering if he had really ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... temperaments, these sudden storms that spring up out of a clear sky, it is possible sometimes to repair the damage, if the psychological moment is resolutely seized, by talking rapidly and with detachment on neutral topics. Words have made the rift, and words alone can bridge it. But neither Jill nor her companion could find words, and the silence lengthened grimly. When Wally spoke, it was in the level tones of a ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... in east, highland area in west; Great Rift Valley separates East and West Banks of the ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... across the river, rose the buttes that met her eyes always when she came to the cabin door. This hill upon which she sat was one that she saw often, when in the evening, watching the setting sun, she followed its golden rays with her eyes. Many times, as the sun had gone slowly down into a rift of the mountains, she had seen the crest of this hill shimmering in a saffron light; the only spot in the flat that rose above the somber, oncoming ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... are beautiful, Mademoiselle. No nation has such hills and lakes and flowers as the Iroquois. The Hurons boast of their lake country,—and the Sacs and Foxes, too, though they have a duller eye for the picturesque. See—the valley yonder—" He pointed through a rift in the foliage to the league-long glimpse of green, bound in by the gentle hills that rose beyond—"even to the tired old soldier there is ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... sufficient light for keen eyes to make out the road ahead. Harry Peyton was inwardly deploring the loss of time at Philipse Manor-house, and fearing that the prey would reach its covert, when suddenly the moon appeared in a cloud-rift, the troops passed a turn in the road, and there stood a line of Hessians barring ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... our water-way being blocked for nearly a mile. It is a charming walk to Les Vignes: to the left we have a continuation of the rocky chaos just described, to the right a path under the shadow of the cliffs, every rift showing maidenhair fern and wild-flowers in abundance, the fragrant evening primrose and lavender, the fringed gentian. The weather is warm as in July, and of deepest blue the sky above the glittering white peaks. Half-way we meet the rural postman, whose presence reminds us ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the Emperor's natural daughter. Francesco Guicciardini, the first statesman and historian of his age, had undertaken his defence, and was ready to support him by advice and countenance in the conduct of his government. Within the lute of this prosperity, however, there was one little rift. For some months past he had closely attached to his person a certain kinsman, Lorenzo de' Medici, who was descended in the fourth generation from Lorenzo, the brother of Cosimo Pater Patriae. This Lorenzo, or Lorenzino, or Lorenzaccio, as his ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... is finished for good and all. There is the steaming hot low coast belt, and the hot dry thorn desert belt, and the varied immense plains, and the high mountain belt of the forests, and again the variegated wide country of the Rift Valley and the high plateau. To attempt to tell you seriatim and in detail just what they are like is the task of an encyclopaedist. Perhaps more indirectly you may be able to fill in the picture of the country, ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... had made in the course of our explorations which enabled us to understand how the fate that had overtaken the drowned city had fallen upon it. Close by the northern border of the valley we saw, high up above us, a vast rift more than a thousand feet wide in the face of the cliff; and below this the ground was torn into a deep wild channel, and everywhere huge fragments of rock were scattered over the ground. Here it was, then, that the water ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... on Tuttle and Ellhorn rode up. The rain had stopped, and through a rift in the eastern clouds the level, red rays of the sun were shining. Mead met their eager, anxious faces with ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... leading to war would be established. This was the ultimate ulterior purpose in Seward's mind; the negotiation was but a method of fixing a quarrel on some foreign Power in case the United States should seek, as Seward desired, a cementing of the rift at ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... my servant," said Chaka, and the dreadful light came into his eyes that never shone in the eyes of any other man. Then I grew sick at heart, my father—ay, though I loved my people little, and they had driven me away, I grew sick at heart. Now we had come to a spot where there is a great rift of black rock, and the name of that rift is U'Donga-lu-ka-Tatiyana. On either side of this donga the ground slopes steeply down towards its yawning lips, and from its end a man may see the open country. Here Chaka sat down at the end of the rift, pondering. Presently he looked up and ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... experiencing but watching. This figure of himself and Soames was trying to find a way out through the curtains, which, heavy and dark, kept him in. Several times he had crossed in front of them before he saw with delight a sudden narrow rift—a tall chink of beauty the colour of iris flowers, like a glimpse of Paradise, remote, ineffable. Stepping quickly forward to pass into it, he found the curtains closing before him. Bitterly disappointed he —or was it Soames?—moved on, and there was the chink ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... lived half the year up here in the wild Peak country, caring for a few sheep, and going down to the village not more than once or twice a week. There was a little spring welling up in a hollow not fifty yards away from the hut, which itself stood in a deep, natural rift among the high hills, so that men might search for it a lifetime and not ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... and romance knows no limits when dealing with the subject. The lives of the Man and the Dog are found to be ever intertwined. Yet is there always this besides—the rift in the lute and the familiar refrain, that the life of the dog shall be short, and that Man shall go on his way with his head bent, till such time as he shall become rich once more in the love of a new-found ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... have it!" cried the girl suddenly at her end of the wall. The other three ran over, and saw, just above her head, a narrow rift in the rock, barely wide enough to squirm through. "Into it!" Phil ordered tersely. He grasped her, raised her high, and she wormed through. Quade scrambled to get in next, but Holmes shoved him aside and boosted the old man through. Then ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... poets, and is therefore all the more welcome to us—I mean the romantic temper. He is essentially Celtic, and his verse, at its best, is Celtic also. Strongly influenced by Keats, he seems to study how to 'load every rift with ore,' yet is more fascinated by the beauty of words than by the beauty of metrical music. The spirit that dominates the whole book is perhaps more valuable than any individual poem or particular passage, but this from The Wanderings of Oisin is worth quoting. It describes the ride ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... tell you more about the Miss Murgatroyds—Amelia, Eliza, and Susannah. When quite at peace among themselves, which is not often, they are Milly, Lizzie, and Susie; but a little rift within the lute is marked by the immediate use of their full baptismal names. Poor Susannah being the youngest—the youthful side of sixty—and inclined to be kittenish and giddy, is very rarely "Susie." Miss Murgatroyd—Amelia—is stern and unbending. ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... innermost depths of this colossal chasm runs the Colorado River. Descending the stupendous crags and terraces by one of the two or three "trails," the traveller at last stands upon a sandy rift confronted by nearly vertical walls many hundred feet high, at whose base a black torrent pitches in a giddying onward slide that gives him momentarily the sensation of slipping ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... it through the snow, following it upon snow-shoes. These give them the advantage of skimming along the surface, while the moose plunges through the deep rift, and is therefore impeded in its flight. Notwithstanding, it will frequently escape from the hunter, after a chase of several days' duration! Sometimes, in deep snow, a dozen or more of these animals will be found in one place, where ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... sent for his brother John's medical education in Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new Annual Register, designed to be a literary resume of the year, make up the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when they dined ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... he her takes To be the fairest wight that lived yit; 265 Which to expresse he bends his gentle wit, And thinking of those braunches greene to frame A girlond for her dainty forehead fit, He pluckt a bough;[*] out of whose rift there came Small drops of gory bloud, that trickled down the ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... but it served after a while to keep the house empty, while its reputation for mystery did not lie idle. Sounds were heard to issue from it. At times lights were seen glimmering through this or that chink or rift in the window curtain, but by the time the door was unlocked and people were able to rush in, the interior was still and dark and seemingly untouched. Finally the police took a hand in the matter. They were on ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... accustomed to the dim light of candles in passages where absolute darkness, unrelieved by the stars of midnight, always reigns, the great Auditorium appeared before us softly flooded with daylight diffused from a broad white beam slanting down in long straight lines from the entrance as from a rift in heavy clouds; only this rift displayed around its edges a brilliant border of vegetation that the rough rocks ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... bless you, yours truly," at the end. They were all there, aridly complete, the limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind himself without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through which tiniest hope could creep, to emerge smiling upon the other side. When she saw him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten years hence attached to the body of this petrification, she ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... in hopes Miss Rasmith might have told you. Well, it is simply this, and you will see that I'm not quite the universal favorite she's been making you fancy me. There is a rift in my lute, a schism in my little society, which is so little that I could not have supposed there was enough of it to break in two. There are some who think their lecturer—for that's what I amount to—ought to be an older, if not a graver man. They are in the minority, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and lay flat and frothing, now got up into absolute mountains. A singular change, too, had come over the heavens. Around in every direction it was still as black as pitch, but nearly overhead there burst out, all at once, a circular rift of clear sky—as clear as I ever saw, and of a deep bright blue—and through it there blazed forth the full moon with a luster that I never before knew her to wear. She lit up everything about ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... respecting the army or navy of the Empire, or the prerogatives of the parliament or Crown.' But the emphasis was different. Howe insisted on the greatness of the change in local administration; Johnston on the amount of still surviving control by the mother country. The little rift in the lute was already apparent, and was increased by the natural tendency of the governor to consult the courtly Johnston, and to show impatience at the brusque ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... he protested. "Everything was all right until this political business came up between us. But that opened the rift. I couldn't do as he wanted me to, and my sympathies were with the corporations which I thought he was fighting unjustly. So when Mr. McVickar made me an offer, I accepted in good faith, believing that I ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... encirclement of clouds like a silver gleam of moonlight, and for a moment, where they parted, Noodle saw a rift of blue sky, and the light of the outer world ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman
... Point, a lofty eminence jutting upon a lake apparently without any outlet. The spurs of mountain ranges which meet here project in precipices from five to fifteen hundred feet in height; trees find a place for their roots in every rift among the rocks; festoons of clematis and wild-vine hang in graceful drapery from base to summit, and the dark mountain shadows loom over the lake-like expanse below. The hand wearies of writing of the loveliness of this river. I saw it on a perfect day. The Indian summer lingered, as ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... droughts in south; Congo River floods (seasonal); in the east, in the Great Rift Valley, ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... not a dawn in eastern skies To rift the fiery night that's in your eyes; But there where western glooms are gathering, The dark will end the dark, if anything: God slays Himself with every leaf that flies, And hell is more than half of paradise. No, there is not a dawn in ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... this little rift in her perfect harmony, Audrey thoroughly enjoyed the next month; she was almost sorry that the vacation was so near. It had been a very gay month. Relays of visitors—distant relations or mere friends—had been invited to Woodcote and Hillside. Mrs. Ross's garden-party had rivalled Mrs. ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... had passed evolved itself an instant later, and just as they entered the door—through which another and sadder burden had been carried but a few instants before—her eyes caught sight of the south-western sky, and, without heeding, saw white sunlight shining in shaft-like lines from a rift in a slaty cloud. Emotions will attach themselves to scenes that are simultaneous—however foreign in essence these scenes may be—as chemical waters will crystallize on twigs and wires. Even after that time any mental agony brought less vividly to Cytherea's ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... territorial dispute with Somalia over the Ogaden Climate: tropical monsoon with wide topographic-induced variation; some areas prone to extended droughts Terrain: high plateau with central mountain range divided by Great Rift Valley Natural resources: small reserves of gold, platinum, copper, potash Land use: arable land: 12% permanent crops: 1% meadows and pastures: 41% forest and woodland: 24% other: 22% Irrigated land: 1,620 km2 (1989 est.) Environment: geologically active Great Rift Valley susceptible ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of that night the gale continued to blow with unabated fury; but about three o'clock on the following morning a rapid rise of the barometer commenced, and some two hours later a single star twinkling brightly for a moment through a small rift in the hitherto unbroken cloud-rack overhead gave welcome assurance that the worst of the weather was now over—an assurance which was shortly afterward strengthened by a slight but unmistakable decrease in the violence of the wind. Then a few more stars beamed mildly ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... day, to the beating of drums, a bevy of priests came from afar; they made for the market-place and there sold indulgences. The Pragers, distracted by the dissensions that rent the country, took to arms repeatedly. Now and then a rift in the clouds would hold out promise of a serener atmosphere; after two Habsburgs, Albert and his posthumous son, Ladislaus, came a King of their own choosing, of their own race and faith, George Podiebrad. But much as the Pragers venerated this native King of theirs, ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... the Sheikh, and through the rift I now beheld Baji Lal, standing with his hands tied behind him at a little distance from his burning home. But to my surprise ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... revolver remained motionless. Through a rift in the leafy curtain I caught a glimpse of a bulk that was within a yard of our hiding place, and I knew that the youngster was waiting for the brute to speak to make certain that he was covering the right man. The silence ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... prospect of food and rest, and the poor travellers brisked up again. But alas! between them and the tents lay a formidable obstacle. Nothing less than a birch-twig bridge over a rushing stream which filled up the bottom of a wide rift or chasm in the upland. This chasm stretched right across the upland from a steep rock which blocked up the head of the little valley, and out of which the stream gushed, and there was no way of crossing it, so the ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... gorgeousness of her material fabric. The religious ideals taught him by his good mother took deep root. But the day arrived when the expansion of his intellect reached such a point as to enable him to detect a flaw in her reasoning. It was but a little rift, yet the sharp edge of doubt slipped in. Alas! from that hour he ceased to drift with the current of popular theological belief; his frail bark turned, and launched out upon the storm-tossed sea, where only the outstretched hand of the Master, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... web. I don't like this inspection, and I fear that foxy old Bhme who prompted it. The mere fact of their inviting us shows that we stand badly; for it runs in the teeth of Brning's warning at Bensersiel, and smells uncommonly like arrest. There's a rift between Dollmann and the others, but it's a ticklish matter to drive our wedge in; as to to-night, hopeless; they're on the watch, and won't give us a chance. And after all, do we know enough? We don't know why he ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... freely as I drove down to Brinkley in the old two-seater that afternoon. The news of this rift or rupture of Angela's and Tuppy's had ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... goats, as it were, one dinner to the Allied representatives, the next to the representatives of the Central powers. Much nice sorting is required, and they tell us that in consequence of the war Peking society is rift in twain. This is all very well when it happens in a big community, but when it happens in such a limited little society as Peking, all walled in together within the narrow inclosure of the legation quarter,—walled in literally, also, in the fullest sense, with soldiers from the guards ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... knew what, something good, no doubt. Another thing that impressed him was the good order that prevailed in the artillery, which had its camp above him, on the hillside. The setting sun peeped out from a rift in the clouds and his rays were reflected from the burnished guns, from which the men had cleansed the coat of mud that they had picked ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... house's form within was rude and strong, Like an huge cave hewn out of rocky clift, From whose rough vault the ragged breaches hung, Embossed with massy gold of glorious gift, And with rich metal loaded every rift. That heavy ruin they did seem to threat: And over them Arachne high did lift Her cunning web, and spread her subtle net, Enwrapped in foul smoke, and clouds ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... together the two lads made their way to the edge of the slaty cliffs, and then a long way by the edge, before they could find a rift of a sufficient slope to warrant ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... palace is encircled with a charming little garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the gray rift in the clouds narrowed and closed, a few great drops of rain fell heavily. Around us the air blew chill, the trees, whose points stood out jet black among the sweeping line of the still shrouded Embankment ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... ardent She Aunty, and Maud Genevieve takes after her. Royal Gray, his handsome attractive personality, and his millions, had long been the goal of Maud's ambition. And how ardently did she hail the coolness growing between him and Polly, the little rift in the lute, and how zealously did she labor to ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... from a rift in the dark clouds seemed sent as a heavenly messenger to guide them. By it the Eskimos as well as the sailor were enabled to judge of the position of land, and to steer, accordingly, in what western hunters would call "a bee-line." The great danger, of course, ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... defeat of the Whigs, in 1836, left a single rift in the dark cloud through which gleamed a ray of substantial hope. It was plain to the most cautious business man that if banking had been highly remunerative, with the United States Bank controlling government deposits, it must become more productive after Jackson had transferred these deposits ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... then, after coursing in distracted filaments about the "corbeille," join their waters and speed downhill towards the oasis, a narrow belt of trees running along either side. This marvellous palm-embroidered rift sunders Nefta, seated on the arid sand-hills overhead, into two distinct towns or settlements. The eye follows the stream as far as the low-lying plantations and into the Chott beyond, resting at last upon the violet haze ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... spirit that breathes through Tegner's speeches and poems, during his most vigorous manhood; and even, when the rift in his lute made its music harsh and uncertain, the strain was yet essentially the same, though transposed into an alien key. It is very tempting to quote the many noble sayings of this master of the commanding phrase, but one or ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... fellow's story, and it has made me believe that I have more heart than I supposed. Sometimes, especially when I hear or read of some such noble deed, I catch glimpses of a life infinitely better than the one I know, like the sun shining through a rift in the clouds; then they shut down again, and father's practical wisdom ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... on a thousand wings it came rushing and surging and pushed angrily against the houses that would retard it; whistling and shrieking, it drove through every crevice that it met, and blustered about the house until it found another rift to drive out of again; it tore shutters open and slammed them furiously, it squeezed its way groaningly between adjacent walls, whistled madly round street corners, lost itself in a thousand currents, found itself again and rushed headlong into a raging stream, careered up and down with savage ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... night the moments throbbed away as I lay on my flea-ridden couch—moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace of Interior China. Stenches rose up ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... you, on every side, is a screen of secrecy. Once in a while it parts for a moment, and through the rift you catch a glimpse of the movement of armies and the swing and sweep of campaigns. Then the curtain closes and again you ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... lord. The Jove of power make me, most weak, most weak, Your reconciler! Wars 'twixt you twain would be As if the world should cleave, and that slain men Should solder up the rift. ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... noon before they reached the big cemetery on the edge of Lexington. Through a rift in the trees the Major pointed out the grave of Henry Clay, and told him about the big monument that was to be reared above his remains. The grave of Henry Clay! Chad knew all about him. He had heard Caleb Hazel read the great man's speeches aloud ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... for such a passionate outburst. It was like a rift in a cloud, through which he had a glimpse of her real life. Words of eager protest sprang to his lips, but, before they could be uttered, either her mood had changed or pride had come to the rescue, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of these tribunals the former was unsatisfactory, as its decisions were of merely local validity and might be overruled by the voice of the universal Church. The general council was hard to convene, particularly after a rift had opened between the Eastern and the Western Churches. It was easier to select as the final arbiter a bishop whose knowledge of tradition was derived from an apostolic predecessor. In the East there were three such sees ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... was deserted, a dry wind stirred the dust here and there; the moon shone through a rift in the clouds and lighted the spot where the man slept. So I found myself tete-a-tete with this boor, who, not suspecting my presence, was sleeping on that stone bench as peacefully as if ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a concept of teeming universes of space-time, of an immense spiral of lives and civilizations, races and cultures, covering an infinite cosmos. And yet—what had happened? Very little, in that inconceivable infinity. A rift in time, a dimensional slip—and a sector of land and three beings on it had been wrenched from their place in time and transported ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... vivacious, healthy nature—but he was over- sensitively organised,—his nerves did not resemble iron so much as finely-tempered steel, which could not but suffer from the damp and rust in the world's conventionalities. And some "little rift within the lute" chanced to him, as it often chances to many, so that the subtle music of his soul jarred into discord with the things of life, making harsh sounds in place of melody. There was no adequate ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... stars Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light In the clear presence of the full-orbed Moon, Who, from her sovereign elevation, gazed Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay 55 All meek and silent, save that through a rift— Not distant from the shore whereon we stood, A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing-place— Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice! 60 Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour, For so it seemed, felt ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... the south, across the plain, lies the town of Talbot; and beyond it the forest seems to extend to the foot of the Pyrenees, standing up blue in the distance some forty miles away. The clouds hang over the mountain summits, and slowly the monarch of day descends seemingly into a dark rift, leaving a track of golden light behind him. The greeny-blue sky above shines and glows for a few minutes longer, and then all is suffused in a soft and mournful grey. The change is almost sudden. The ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... a card was brought to her rooms. For the next two weeks she had a true and unavoidable friend in Lucerne. It would appear that Mrs. Rowe-Martin had not been apprised of the rift in the Wrandall lute. She had no reason to consider the exclusive Miss Castleton as anything but the most desirable of companions. Mrs. Rowe-Martin was not long in finding out (though how she did it, heaven ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... tried the right-hand side, but with no better luck, for here he was stopped by a yawning rift in the rock. Now Otter sat down ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... line of moving horses, white against dark shadows. He could not see the head of that column; he scarcely heard a soft hoofbeat. A single star shone out of a rift in thin clouds. There was no wind. The air was cold. The dark space of desert seemed to yawn. To the left across the river flickered a few campfires. The chill night, silent and mystical, seemed to ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... over the precipitous side of the gorge Tarzan half clambered and half slid to the sandy floor beneath. He had come upon the rift at almost the exact spot at which he had clambered from it weeks before, and there he saw, just as he had left it, just, doubtless, as it had lain for centuries, the mighty ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Infantry 18th Company, 5th Battalion, 299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121." by which you will know the rural free delivery methods along the French front. This address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which hides the individuality of the millions under Joffre. Only the army knows the sector and the numbers of the regiment in that sector. By the same kind of a card-index system ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the small blue rift of sky above. Even the sun seems slow to peep in, as if his brightness were not needed by those who walk in the light of their own hearts. And the little birds warble and the little burnie runs, as if neither knew there was a weary world outside, where many ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... miserable inhabitants, not daring to go to bed, remained in the utmost solicitude and confusion, expecting every moment to be buried under the ruins of their shattered edifices. When day-light came they were at leisure to contemplate the devastations of the night: they then found that a deep rift, or chasm, had opened under their houses, and torn them, as it were, in two; and that one end of the barn had suffered in a similar manner; that a pond near the cottage had undergone a strange reverse, becoming deep at the shallow end, and so vice versa; that many large ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... four feet wide—appeared on the wall; widened, and as the sinking slab that made it dropped to the level of our eyes, we looked through a hundred-feet-long rift in the living rock! The stone fell steadily—and we saw that it was a Cyclopean wedge set within the slit of the passageway. It reached the level of our feet and stopped. At the far end of this tunnel, whose floor was the polished rock that had, a moment before, fitted hermetically ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... had a huge fire and a savory repast of coffee, turtles' eggs, and yams. At midnight it was extinguished, and a watch stationed on top of the plateau. Toward morning I clambered grumblingly up the narrow, almost perpendicular sides of the rift that cut into the rocky watch-tower. I did not believe in pirates and was willing to take my chances in sleep. I paced back and forth, inhaling deep breaths of the rich tropical air; below me the waves beat in ripples against ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... 'Gan thunder, and both ends of heav'n: the clouds From many a horrid rift abortive poured Fierce rain with lightning mixt, water with fire In ruin reconciled; nor slept the winds Within their stoney caves, but rush'd abroad From the four hinges of the world, and ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... speech Faster than light, farther than ocean sounds; And whirls the clattering car through crowded streets, And floods with light the haunts of prowling thieves— That inner world, whose very life is love, Pure love, and perfect, infinite, intense, That world is now astir. A rift appears In those dark clouds that rise from sinful souls And hide from us its clear celestial light, And clouds of messengers from that bright world, Whom they called devas and we angels call, Rush to that rift to rescue and to save. The wind from their bright wings fanned Buddha's ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... close as he could to his general, who was now in the very heart of the conflict. But it was a difficult task. His clothing was torn by bushes and briars, and boughs whipped him across the face. Now and then in a rift in the smoke he beheld a terrible sight. The ground was covered with the arms and blankets and tents of the Union army. Ahead of them were great masses of men, retreating and jammed among the wagons. The horses, many of them wounded, were running ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the quest because there was no excuse), he discovered that Ruth was being honored with a thrilling account of aviation. The talking-man, it appeared, knew a great deal about the subject. Carl heard through a rift in the cloud of words that the man had once actually flown, as a passenger with Henry Odell! For five minutes on end, judging by the motions with which he steered a monoplane through perilous abysses, the reckless spirit kept ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... You see that little rift? But first permit me! [Lights his torch at ORDONIO'S, and while lighting it. (A lighted torch in the hand Is no unpleasant object here—one's breath Floats round the flame, and makes as many colours As the thin clouds that travel near ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... pioneer netted in the rift, Leaning over Maori Hill, dreaming in the lift, Dropped her starry memories through ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... out of the window. A mild fresh air which seemed to be pouring over the earth through that rift in heaven which the sunset had made, breathed freshly on her face and the yellow light shone on her amber hair, which lay on her shoulders about the length of the hair of an angel in some ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... affinity, or what you will, they love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold. This includes home sympathies and household wisdom. Such fellowship makes of home a joy, and of toil a delight. When first the joy is reached, a foretaste of heaven is enjoyed. "For it is the one rift of heaven which makes all heaven appear possible; the ecstasy of hope and faith, out of which grows the love which is our strongest mortal ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... old. James Antony agonized his wife by portentous nods and winks behind their backs, indicative of the complete and final understanding now in course of accomplishment, but Mrs Antony was not so well satisfied, though she was unaware of the exact nature of the rift in Gerrard's lute. One day Honour broke into a deep discussion of the social and educational topics touched on in the Princess with a question which had no relation to them whatever. It was clear that her thoughts were far from Gerrard's exposition of his views, or ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... imagination, a place where spontaneous feeling and primitive imagination had not been repressed by the outside world's customs and discipline, and where the constant voice of the ocean, the touch of the mysterious, all-embracing mist, and the gleam of the star through a rift in the clouds banished all sense of difference between the natural and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Campus Martius, upon the Via Flaminia. It was rapidly darkening. The houses grew fewer and fewer. At a little distance the dim structures of the Portico and Theatre of Pompeius could be seen, looming up to an exaggerated size in the evening haze. A grey fog was drifting up from the Tiber, and out of a rift in a heavy cloud-bank a beam of the imprisoned moon was struggling. Along the road were peasants with their carts and asses hastening home. Over on the Pincian Mount the dark green masses of the splendid gardens of Pompeius and of Lucullus were ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... saw the message-torp. It wasn't to be expected. It came in on a course that extended backward to somewhere near the Rift—where there used to be Huks—and for a very, very long way it had traveled as only message-torps do travel. It hopped half a light-year in overdrive, and came back to normality long enough for its photocells ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... glittered resplendent, lying close upon an irradiated earth, and ever brightening toward the horizon, and it seemed as if the sun in sinking might hope to fall in fairer spheres than the skies he had left, for they were of a dun-color and an opaque consistency. Only one horizontal rift gave glimpses of a dazzling ochreous tint of indescribable brilliancy, from the focus of which the divergent light was shed upon the western limits of the land. Chilhowee, near at hand, was dark enough—a purplish garnet hue; but the scarlet ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... rise The purple hills of Paradise. Oh, softly on yon banks of haze Her rosy face the Summer lays! Becalmed along the azure sky, The argosies of cloudland lie, Whose shores, with many a shining rift, Far off their ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... the sky, week after week until near December. Then comes a sudden change. Clouds of a peculiar aspect with a slow, crawling gait gather and grow in the azure, throwing out satiny fringes, and becoming gradually darker until every lake-like rift and opening is closed and the whole bent firmament is obscured in equal structureless gloom. Then comes the snow, for the clouds are ripe, the meadows of the sky are in bloom, and shed their radiant blossoms like an orchard in the spring. Lightly, ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... spoke, while still his greeting kiss Ached in her hair. She did not dare to lift Her eyes to his—her anguished eyes to his, While tears smote crystal in her throat. One rift Of weakness humored might set ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... there comes a time supreme; One day, one night, one morning, or one noon, One freighted hour, one moment opportune, One rift through which sublime fulfillments gleam, One space when fate goes tiding with the stream, One Once, in balance 'twixt Too Late, Too Soon, And ready for the passing instant's boon To tip in favor the uncertain beam. Ah, happy he who, knowing how to wait, Knows also how to watch and work and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... time there was a rift between the two friends. Paul did not tell Stanley what had happened at the meeting, but left him to find out. He heard all about it from Waterman—the ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... by a river, now frozen to its bed. But, from the hut door, the rift which marks its course in the dark carpet cannot ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... his clothes, was a problematical place of abode. The light came from a round port-hole of heavy glass. When the wall with the port-hole in it rose and turned inward like a slanting roof, the sunlight from a rift between the clouds in the sky fell upon the mahogany berth opposite. Sitting on the edge of the lower berth, Frederick tried to steady himself, holding his head bent to keep from striking against his upper berth, and frantically endeavouring ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... neared the breakwater the path became drier and firmer, and the light of the moon, falling through a ragged rift in the scurrying clouds, showed a line of sand banks and strips of tussock-land emerging from the marshes as ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... figs are of the black kind having a white rift or Chanifre, and are surnamed Delicate. . . . Certain figs there be, which are both early and also lateward; . . . . they are ripe first in harvest, and afterwards in time of vintage; . . . . also some there be which beare thrice a year" (Pliny, Nat. ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... had no desire to deny him. He seemed to have robbed her of all will of her own. His will had become wholly her desire. She took her seat on the tree-trunk, just removed from his side by a rift in the great log which was hidden ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... It was a crack, a fissure. Now it was a yard in width, now three, and blackness seemed to well up from within it, blackness that was the very essence of the depths. Steadily the ebon rift expanded; spread suddenly wide open ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... precedence to be assigned to his works. No, on such matters they are apparently at one; but in other matters they are at one another. Thus the unity appears to be only superficial, a decent plaster hiding the rift occasioned by one of their number having literally translated into English IBSEN's latest Norwegian drama, of which translation the verbal correctness is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... Gettysburg and Vicksburg had pierced the spirit of the South, Cumberland Gap had liberated East Tennessee, Fort Smith and Little Rock supplied a firm footing for the army beyond the Mississippi, and the surrender of Port Hudson permitted Federal gunboats to pass unvexed to the sea. The rift in the war cloud had, indeed, let in a flood of sunlight, and, while it lasted, gave fresh ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... few minutes, during which I lay as close as I could, there was a rift in the cloud. I looked out again. I stood alone on the point of the peak with the snow ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... thronging from every part of the city, they united in single column into an endless host that appeared to stretch from the rising to the setting of the sun. They seemed making for the Tiber, which they would have speedily choked; but ere they could arrive there a huge rift opened in the earth, down which they madly precipitated themselves. Their descent, it is affirmed, lasted as many hours as Vulcan occupied in falling from Heaven to Lemnos; but when the last tail ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... which the seven Companies worked together, and the success they attained was, I think, something to be proud of. Sir William Goulding was an excellent Chairman. There was just one little rift in the lute. One of the seven Companies showed a disposition, at times, to play off its own bat, but this was, after all, only a small matter, and the general harmony, cohesion and unanimity that prevailed were admirable, ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... was enough for him at the moment. He threw himself from the pinnacle of the cliff once more into the arms of the projecting oak-tree, whose boughs waved in middle air, anchored by the roots in a huge rift or chasm of the rock. Catching at the branch which was nearest to him, he dropped himself from that height upon the ground; and such was the athletic springiness of his youthful sinews, that he pitched there as lightly, and with as little injury, as the falcon stooping ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... leave home. He had said very little on the subject. And Roy—with the instinct of sensitive natures to take their tone from others—had also said little: too little, perhaps. Least said may be soonest mended; but there are times when it may widen a rift ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... screech-owl shrieks: ungracious sound! I'll hear no more; it makes one's blood run chill. Quite round the pile, a row of reverend elms, Coeval near with that, all ragged show, Long lash'd by the rude winds: some rift half down Their branchless trunks; others so thin at top, That scarce two crows could lodge in the same tree. Strange things, the neighbours say, have happen'd here: 50 Wild shrieks have issued from the hollow tombs; Dead men have come again, and walk'd about; And the great bell has toll'd, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... till thou come unto her, from her palms she will not lift The dark face hidden deep within them like the moon in cloudy rift. ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... as if the sea, tired of its endless task, were doing dispiritedly as little as it dared, and murmuring at that. The curving cliffs on the left looked like white curtains, closely drawn. The low grey sky was unbroken by cloud or rift except low down on the horizon, where it had risen like a blind drawn up a little to admit the light. It was a melancholy prospect, and Beth shivered and sighed in sympathy. Then a sparrow cheeped somewhere behind her, and another bird in the hedge softly fluted a little roulade. ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the party throughout the first winter, though morale had its first blow when Greeley issued an unwise order forbidding enlisted men to go more than 500 yards from the base without permission. The strain was beginning to tell, but there was no fatal rift in the working harmony of the group while supply and hope ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Prospero for a specified time. Prospero reminded the spirit that he had freed him from torment; and asked if he remembered the witch Sycorax, famed for her sorceries, and who had, by the aid of her most potent ministers, put him (Ariel) into a cloven pine, within whose rift he remained imprisoned for twelve years, tormented so greatly that his groans made the wolves howl, and penetrated the breast of every bear. Sycorax could not, proceeded Prospero, undo what she had done; it was his art alone that made the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... are of the black kind having a white rift or Chanifre, and are surnamed Delicate. . . . Certain figs there be, which are both early and also lateward; . . . . they are ripe first in harvest, and afterwards in time of vintage; . . . . also some there be which beare thrice a year" (Pliny, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... ravine which I should have descended had I crossed the Nufenen. I thought of the Val Bavona, only just over the great wall that held the west; and in one place where a rift (you have just seen its picture) led up to the summits of the hills I was half tempted to go back to Airolo and sleep and next morning to attempt a crossing. But I had accepted my fate on the Gries and the falling road also held me, and so ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... floor was strewn with the short needles of the mountain pine. As she turned, looking about her, she noted first another opening in a wall suggesting still another cave; then, feeling a faint breath of the night air on her cheek she saw a small rift in the outer shell of rock and through it the stars thick in ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... Great Rift Valley susceptible to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions; deforestation; overgrazing; soil ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... with central mountain range divided by Great Rift Valley lowest point: Denakil -125 m highest point: Ras ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... our ruins Love is gleaming, Rippling o'er in molten gold, Rosy streams of life are pouring Through our tempest's blackness rolled. Glittering thus in growing beauty, Every moment fraught with change, Through each rift and shattered chasm ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... green, and brown and gray. The mist hangs heavy over everything, and the twinkle of an occasional camp-fire is but the sodden glow of ember whose life is long since burned out. But, see! Through the deep, jagged rift where runs the Potomac, along the rock-bound gorge through which in ages past the torrent burst its way, there creeps a host of tiny shafts of color—the skirmishers, the eclaireurs, of the irresistible ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... side, but with no better luck, for here he was stopped by a yawning rift in the rock. Now Otter sat down and ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... regard to weather, for we hardly passed the Delftsche Poort, the great Renaissance gateway through which one passes to Delft, Schiedam, The Hague, and all the well-worn place names of Dutch history, before a rift of sunlight streaked through the clouds and framed a typical Holland landscape in as golden and yellow a light as one might see in Venice. It was remarkable, in every sense of the word, and we had good weather throughout ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... compartition^; dismemberment, dislocation; luxation^; severance, disseverance; scission; rescission, abscission; laceration, dilaceration^; disruption, abruption^; avulsion^, divulsion^; section, resection, cleavage; fission; partibility^, separability. fissure, breach, rent, split, rift, crack, slit, incision. dissection anatomy; decomposition &c 49; cutting instrument &c (sharpness) 253; buzzsaw, circular saw, rip saw. separatist. V. be disjoined &c; come off, fall off, come to pieces, fall to pieces; peel off; get loose. disjoin, disconnect, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... those hot June days when the heavens shone like a blazing fire above the rift overhead, the heavy, mouldering timbers came to life again, as if their forest days had returned. People swarmed in and out on the stairs, shadows came and went, and an incessant chattering filled the twilight. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... And how, as he walks, a Serpent stings him. And how he is recovered of his Wound. And how the little Rift is mended—but ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... they got right in on top o' her Hottentot pillow-shams 'n' old Dr. Carter tore a sham with his toothpick. 'N', added to all that, Amelia 's furious 'cause she read in a book 't teaches how to stay married 't a husband's first night out is the first rift in the lute, 'n' she was down town buyin' a dictionary so 's to be sure what a lute is afore she accuses young Dr. Brown. 'N' there's a man over in Meadville down with a sun-stroke, 'n' they want Dr. Carter ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... never seen anything like the excitement in Wall Street. Everyone he met had a new set of rumours, wilder than the last. It was as if a great rift in the earth had suddenly opened before the eyes of the banking community. But Montague was at an important crisis in a suit which he had taken up against the Tobacco Trust; and he had no idea that he was in any way concerned in what was taking place. The newspapers were all making desperate efforts ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... were borne to the ears of the girl. Bearded men looked, listened, and turned away, shuddering. The sun burst suddenly through a rift in the flying clouds, and his golden radiance ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... are doing. We are wrought up to the highest pitch. As Company K clears its ground, we press forward eagerly. Now we go into line just as we raise the hill, and as my four comes around, I catch a hurried glimpse through a rift in the smoke of a line of butternut and gray clad men a hundred yards or so away. Their guns are at their faces, and I see the smoke and fire spurt from the muzzles. At the same instant our sabers and revolvers are drawn. We shout in a frenzy of excitement, and the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... physiologist, would very probably obtain the desired production of mutually more or less infertile breeds from a common stock, in a comparatively few years; but still, as the case stands at present, this "little rift within the lute" is not to be ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... thyme and juniper grew rank, but above all the place was strewn with rocks, leg-twisting boulders, and great cliffs where eagles dwelt. Being a seaman, Atta had his bearings. The path to Delphi left the shore road near the Hot Springs, and went south by a rift of the mountain. If he went up the slope in a beeline he must strike it in time and find better going. Still it was an eerie place to be tramping after dark. The Hellenes had strange gods of the thicket and hillside, and he had no ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... him. Besides himself, and that one tiny dwelling, there was not a sign of human life to be seen. Overhead the storm still threatened and grumbled; below, the man and the house stood powerless, but undaunted. Far away to the south the sun shone out brightly through a rift in the clouds. "Always God's promise somewhere. God's sign to us that ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... foliage with impeccable truthfulness and then, after coursing in distracted filaments about the "corbeille," join their waters and speed downhill towards the oasis, a narrow belt of trees running along either side. This marvellous palm-embroidered rift sunders Nefta, seated on the arid sand-hills overhead, into two distinct towns or settlements. The eye follows the stream as far as the low-lying plantations and into the Chott beyond, resting at last upon the violet haze of its ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... heart, that the least he could do for her now was to let her live where she chose to live: but he grew more sullen and dogged, day by day; and Sally grew sadder and quieter, and things were fast coming to a bad pass, when Hetty Gunn's generous offer came to them, like a great rift of sunlight ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... risk: very high food or waterborne diseases: bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A, and typhoid fever vectorborne diseases: malaria and Rift Valley fever are high risks in some locations ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... Again the screech-owl shrieks: ungracious sound! I'll hear no more; it makes one's blood run chill. Quite round the pile, a row of reverend elms, Coeval near with that, all ragged show, Long lash'd by the rude winds: some rift half down Their branchless trunks; others so thin at top, That scarce two crows could lodge in the same tree. Strange things, the neighbours say, have happen'd here: 50 Wild shrieks have issued from the hollow tombs; Dead men have ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... legislators and judges occupied during their deliberations. Not far from here lies also the 'Logberg,' or 'law rock,' a large mound from whence the laws were proclaimed or judgments given to the people who assembled on the outside slope of the eastern wall of the rift, in view of the proceedings below. Our notice was likewise directed to the 'blood stone,' on which, for certain offences, the criminals were condemned to have their backs broken, after which barbarous punishment they were hurled backwards, and ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... notion what the prices—I presume of corn—were in 1845; and I should never think of expressing an opinion, in any way, upon politics, except against that school which abuses respectability and philanthropizes mischievous rift-raff." ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... prodigious waste of matches kindled the candle-end inside, turned the dark shutter, and trotted happily on. We had no need of his lighting till the Dyve Burn was reached and the path began to descend steeply through the rift ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... impracticable. So far as my eye could estimate it, the breadth was thirty or forty feet. I could scarcely venture to look beneath. The height was dizzy, and the walls, which approached each other at top, receded at the bottom, so as to form the resemblance of an immense hall, lighted from a rift which some convulsion of nature had made in the roof. Where I stood there ascended a perpetual mist, occasioned by a torrent that dashed along the ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... every wagon left the place, climbing the divide beyond, the occupants forgot their sufferings and talked of the desert as something which they had left behind. For Furnace Creek canyon lay ahead of them, a rift in the black range which rose between ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... rising one above the other, stand out magnificently. Their huge sides tower up nearly a thousand feet from the river, until they are within reach of the lowering clouds that every moment threaten to envelop them in their indigo embrace. There is a curious rift in the dark cumulus revealing a thin line of dull carmine that frequently changes its shape and becomes nearly obliterated, but its presence in no way weakens the awesomeness of the picture. The dale appears to become huger ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... Ysabel in his arms and dashed across the room and corridor. His knife cut a long rift in the canvas, and in a moment they stood upon the rocks. The shrieking crowd was on the ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... activity itself, and they slashed and trampled down and hauled and lowered till the whole party found themselves upon a broad stony shelf at the very edge of a sharply-cut rift, whose sides showed that it must have been split from the opposite side by some convulsion of Nature, so exactly was ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... and others expressed their agreement with it. Fox answered him in a conciliatory tone. Sheridan fanned the flame; he taunted Burke with inconsistency, and pronounced a panegyric on the revolutionary leaders. Burke replied that thenceforth he and Sheridan were separated in politics. A rift in the opposition was started, and an attempt to close it by a conference two days later was ineffectual. The opinion of parliament on two other questions during the session was, seemingly, influenced by events in France. Fox ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... one rift! Through this sepultural blight A breath runs living, new; Unburdening light As when the flame-borne prophet on The Syrian ploughman threw A people's dawn. The world is Heaven worth, The cradle earth Casts orphanhood, a Bethlehem God-swung From crimson grapple with his lyric ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... last comes a rift in the clouds. One of them happens to mention Beverley Dixon. The other is ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... I saw him leave in the midst of a company of gods. There—there is the rift in the blue where he entered. Chios! Chios! Thou wilt come again—again,' and she ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... scraped away more dirt in the light of the electric torch I had provided. The surface I uncovered was fishy and glassy—a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions of translucency. I scraped further, and saw that it had form. There was a rift where a part of the substance was folded over. The exposed area was huge and roughly cylindrical; like a mammoth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two, its largest part some two feet in diameter. Still more I scraped, and then abruptly ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... instructions; only the Democrats from the southern counties voted solidly to sustain the Illinois delegation in its opposition to the Proviso.[320] While not a strict sectional vote, it showed plainly enough the rift in the Democratic party. A disruptive issue had been raised. For the moment a re-alignment of parties on geographical lines seemed imminent. This was precisely the trend in national ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... on the steamship Baroda, moving down the Red Sea, once thought to be an arm of the Indian Ocean, but which we now know to be only a portion of "the great rift valley,"—the longest and deepest and widest trough on the earth's surface, which extends from the base of Mount Lebanon and the Sea of Galilee, through the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, the dried up wadies, the Red Sea, and the ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... the great rift of the earth called Tze-ye did he carry it, where the cliff homes of the Ancient Others lined the sides of the canyon and the medicine-men of Ah-ko spoke in hushed tones because of the echoing walls, and of the strong gods who had dwelt there in the ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Thing next summer, Gizur the white, and Geir the priest, gave notice of Gunnar's outlawry at the Hill of Laws; and before the Thing broke up Gizur summoned all Gunnar's foes to meet in the "Great Rift".[27] He summoned Starkad under the Threecorner, and Thorgeir his son; Mord and Valgard the guileful; Geir the priest and Hjalti Skeggi's son; Thorbrand and Asbrand, Thorleik's sons; Eyjulf, and Aunund his son, Aunund of Witchwood and Thorgrim ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... ground of complaint leading to war would be established. This was the ultimate ulterior purpose in Seward's mind; the negotiation was but a method of fixing a quarrel on some foreign Power in case the United States should seek, as Seward desired, a cementing of the rift at ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... irregularity, which promised encouragingly for his intended efforts. He descended into the chasm of the rivulet, crawled up on a heap of crumbling brick-work, and gained a hole above it, which he immediately began to widen, to admit of his passage through. Inch by inch, he enlarged the rift, crept into it, and found himself on a fragment of the bow of one of the foundation arches, which, though partly destroyed, still supported itself, isolated from all connection with the part of the upper wall which it had once sustained, and which had gradually ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... the Russian armament was still occupying the minister, an event of signal importance happened in the ranks of his political adversaries. The alliance which had lasted between Burke and Fox for five and twenty years came to a sudden end, and this rift gradually widened into a destructive breach throughout the party. There is no parallel in our parliamentary history to the fatal scene. In Ireland, indeed, only eight years before, Flood and Grattan, after fighting side by side for many years, had all at once sprung upon one another in ...
— Burke • John Morley
... leaned back and laughed—a pretty rippling laugh that shook the diamonds upon her throat. Sam guffawed, and by this action sprang that little rift between the friends that widened before ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... performing the other ceremonies which are deemed necessary to ensure the fertility of the earth and the multiplication of animals. Men who are credited with powers so lofty and far-reaching naturally hold the highest place in the land, and while the rift between the spiritual and the temporal spheres has not yet widened too far, they are supreme in civil as well as religious matters: in a word, they are kings as well as gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has its roots deep down in human history, and long ages ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... watched, Berna and I, lying in the snow that melts all around us in the fierce, scorching glare. Through the lurid rift of smoke I can see the friendly stars. Against that curtain of blaze, strangely beautiful in its sinuous strength, I watch the black silhouettes of men running hither and thither like rats, gutting the houses, looting the stores, tearing ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... cliffs with a single mountain peak. The Admiral, who knew more of sea and air than any two men upon those ships, cried "Cloud—cloud!" but for a time none believed him. There sprang great commotion, the Pinta too signaling. Then before our eyes came a rift in the mountain and the cliffs ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... was at your very feet," she said with a bright look into his eyes. For some unaccountable reason, Genevra resented that look and speech. Perhaps it was because she felt the rift of ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... people would believe the tidings of the disaster. A pilot who had left the Chesapeake at five o'clock in the afternoon reported that he was still near enough an hour later to see the two ships locked side by side, that a fearful explosion had happened aboard the Chesapeake, and that through a rift in the battle smoke he had beheld the British flag flying above the ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... Tuttle and Ellhorn rode up. The rain had stopped, and through a rift in the eastern clouds the level, red rays of the sun were shining. Mead met their eager, ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... unwillingly. His was naturally a bright, vivacious, healthy nature—but he was over- sensitively organised,—his nerves did not resemble iron so much as finely-tempered steel, which could not but suffer from the damp and rust in the world's conventionalities. And some "little rift within the lute" chanced to him, as it often chances to many, so that the subtle music of his soul jarred into discord with the things of life, making harsh sounds in place of melody. There was no adequate cause ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... in an easterly direction, but is still very slight. I think the ice is lying closer than it did yesterday. As far as the eye can reach on every side there is one wide expanse of spotless white, only broken by an occasional rift or the dark shadow of a hummock. To the south there is the narrow lane of blue water which is our sole means of escape, and which is closing up every day. The Captain is taking a heavy responsibility upon himself. I hear that the tank ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... upper edge of that great belt of sunken land between the mountains of Gilead and the mountains of Ephraim and Judah, which reaches from the Lake of Galilee to the Dead Sea, and which the Arabs call El-Ghor, the "Rift." It is a huge trench, from three to fourteen miles wide, sinking from six hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean, at the northern end, to thirteen hundred feet below, at the southern end. The surface is fairly level, sloping gently from each side toward ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... silver rift in the purple sky—and presently stole, in pearly light, through the oriel window. Upon the Prioress's table, lay a beautifully executed copy of the Pope's mandate. Beside it, carefully pieced together, the torn fragments of ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... and Poetry.] and others. [Footnote: See The Master, A. E. Cheney.] Or, more often, his moment of sudden insight seems a lightning flash upon the dark ways in which he is ordinarily groping. Keats says that his early visions were seen as through a rift of sheet lightning. [Footnote: See The Epistle to George Keats.] Emerson's impression is the same; visions come "as if life were a thunderstorm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand." [Footnote: Essay on ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... about the lay of the land at Skulltree, himself. When he was a young chap the Latisans had operated in a small way as a side-line on the Noda waters. There was a rift in the watershed near Skulltree. There was a canon leading down to the Tomah end, and the waters of the gorge were fed by a chain of ponds whose master source was near the Noda. The Latisans had hauled over to the ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... things could add to the pleasure of life more than this. There are, to my knowledge, gifted people now alive who have no other vice than this of restlessness, and seemingly no other curse in their lives to make them unhappy: but that is enough; it is "the little rift within the lute." Restlessness makes them ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... in clay of a bluish colour, and various marine objects are found there. And if the earth of our hemisphere is indeed raised by so much higher than it used to be, it must have become by so much lighter by the waters which it lost through the rift between Gibraltar and Ceuta; and all the more the higher it rose, because the weight of the waters which were thus lost would be added to the earth in the other hemisphere. And if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... cave-bear, enormously enlarged and modified by its new environment. For countless aeons the internal and the external creation had kept apart, growing steadily away from each other. Then there had come some rift in the depths of the mountain which had enabled one creature to wander up and, by means of the Roman tunnel, to reach the open air. Like all subterranean life, it had lost the power of sight, but ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sudden rift in the fog that gave a moment's hope, but it closed down again. A minute afterwards, with a suddenness that was strange, the whole blue ocean lay before us. Then full steam ahead. The fog still was thick behind us in New York Bay. We saw it far ahead coming in from ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... is altered, and we are steaming over the obliterated banks far in the interior. Once or twice black objects loom up near us,—the wrecks of houses floating by. There is a slight rift in the sky towards the north, and a few bearing stars to guide us over the waste. As we penetrate into shallower water, it is deemed advisable to divide our party into smaller boats, and diverge over the submerged prairie. I borrow a pea-coat of one of the crew, and in that practical ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... hamper, and Betty went out to the kitchen to prepare for the morning gathering of the field hands and their families. Returning after the work was over, she lingered a moment in the path to the house, looking far across the white country. The snow had ceased, and a single star was shining, through a rift in the scudding clouds, straight overhead. From the northwest the wind blew hard, and the fleecy covering on the ground was fast freezing a foot deep in ice. With a shiver she drew her cloak about her and ran indoors and upstairs to where Virginia lay asleep ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... could survive more sleep than any other human being I have ever known. We took the field auspiciously, Mr. Frederic Villiers, the war artist of the London Graphic, being my campaigning comrade. Thus early I discerned a slight rift in the lute. Andreas did not like Villiers, which showed his bad taste, or rather, perhaps, the narrowness of his capacity of affection; and I fear Villiers did not much like Andreas, whom he thought too familiar. This ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... by the wet place on the cliff had sufficed for the three men who accompanied the stag-hound. They had marked the spot carefully in memory by its distance from a certain stunted pine growing above it and a rift in the precipice to one side. Then they had ascended a furlong to the north, where the ascent was gradual and broken. When they had made sure that they were at the proper level, they searched for an approach to the desired ledge. The dog found the scent by the tunnel, but ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... sloping [W.5044.] valleys of mist. It seemed to him they were wide-yawning caverns that he saw there leading into that mist. It seemed to him it was all-white, flaxy sheets of linen, or sifted snow a-falling that he saw there through a rift in the mist. It seemed to him it was a flight of many, varied, wonderful, numerous birds [1]that he[a] saw in the same mist,[1] or the constant sparkling of shining stars [LL.fo.96a.] on a bright, ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... the astute Redell discovered a rift in Cappy's armor—two rifts, in fact. The first was that Cappy feared and loathed old age and fiercely resented even the most shadowy intimation that with age he was, to employ a sporting phrase, "losing his punch." The second weakness that ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... only one little rift in the harmony of the whole congregation. In spite of Mr. McPherson's objections, Lawyer Ed and J. P. Thornton had succeeded in putting the "Amen" at the end of the psalms, as well as the hymns, and when the objectionable word came this morning, Jock sat down as he always did, heavily and ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... not yet strong enough to be able to meet the French forces, and when they attempted to besiege Leith and put a forcible stop to the building they were defeated with shame and loss. A curious sign of the inevitable "rift within the lute," which up to this time had been avoided by the concentration of all men's thoughts upon the first necessity of securing the freedom of the preachings, becomes visible before this futile attempt at a siege. When the leaders of the Congregation, among ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... instant showed, Through a rift, on the vessel's lee; What manner of creatures may be those That build upon ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... the horizon appeared a rift of clear blue sky, sown with stars. Longer and wider it grew. Other rifts added themselves to it, and in an unbelievably short time the entire heaven was swept clean. But somehow the wind seemed to blow harder ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... is hemmed in by hills that lie up against the sky, marked off into fields by whin hedges, till they look like sloping chequer-boards. Beyond them, in places, tower up the mountain-tops of dark Donegal, crusted over with black heather, seamed by rift and ravine, bare in places where these rocks, those bones of the mountains, have pushed themselves through the heather, till it looks like a ragged cloak. The sun shines, the rooks flap busily about, as noisy as a parliament, the air is keen, and so ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... out bullets from the side, Some drive old okum through each seam and rift; Their left hand does the calking-iron guide, The rattling mallet with the right ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... lagged in answer loth to render up My precontract, and loth by brainless war To cleave the rift of difference deeper yet; Till one of those two brothers, half aside And fingering at the hair about his lip, To prick us on to combat 'Like to like! The woman's garment hid the woman's heart.' A taunt that clenched his purpose like a blow! For fiery-short was Cyril's ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Underneath, on the margin of the canvas, was written in charcoal, "Hope." The other represented the same figure, darkly dressed, with a wan, hopeless look in her face, standing on a rock at the edge of an angry sea, over which she was gazing; while the sky overhead was dark and sombre without a rift in the hurrying clouds. It ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... boiling waters of the Humboldt - that for once awakens from its characteristic lethargy, and madly plunges and splutters over a bed of jagged rocks which seem to have been tossed into its channel by some Herculean hand - fill this mighty "rift" in the mountains with a never-ending roar. It has been threatening rain for the last two hours, and now the first peal of thunder I have heard on the whole journey awakens the echoing voices of the caon and rolls and rumbles along the great ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... little garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... drove it with a lithe, long swing of body, forward and back, forward and back, in alternate postures of untiring grace. The air was not cold. There was the cloudy softness premonitory of a spring storm; the sun glowed like a dying fire through a long, narrow rift in the shrouded west. Pete had thrown aside his coat and drawn in his belt. The collar of his flannel shirt was open and turned back; his head was bare. The bright gold of his short hair, the scarlet of his cheeks, the vivid ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... that he could not avoid the discussions which his father, with a weak man's obstinacy, forced upon him. Some unhappy, baneful power seemed to drive Colonel Parsons to widen the rift, the existence of which caused him such exquisite pain; his natural kindliness was obscured by an uncontrollable irritation. One day ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... position behind a sand-rift, and commenced to shriek and scream like a woman; and a moment later he became aware that his ruse was successful; two men came running toward the place where he lay concealed and as they approached the detective leaped to his feet. He had ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... that little rift? But first permit me! [Lights his torch at ORDONIO'S, and while lighting it. (A lighted torch in the hand Is no unpleasant object here—one's breath Floats round the flame, and makes as many colours As the thin clouds that travel near the moon.) You see that crevice there? ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... shelf, placed his feet exactly as he had seen the smuggler prepare to drop, and then, with his elbows pressed close to his sides and his open hands raised to a level with his chest, he took the little leap, with the opposite side of the rift seeming to rush upward past his staring eyes, while he dropped what seemed, from the time it lasted, to his overstrained nerves and imagination a tremendous depth—in reality about seven feet—before his feet came flat upon the rock and a strong arm caught him across the chest ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... of land it was, with a great rift of rock running through it where the children played house, and had parties, and occasionally took their dinner out to eat in picnic fashion. Just beyond the strata of rock, on the good ground, stood two splendid ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... from where the half dozen valuable animals had dropped dead there was a little crack or rift in the earth. It was a sort of opening between two long ridges of rocks, there being an outcropping of stone at this point. It was part of the two ridges which, suddenly rising higher, formed the walls of Smugglers' Glen farther ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... the wind, and lay flat and frothing, now got up into absolute mountains. A singular change, too, had come over the heavens. Around in every direction it was still as black as pitch, but nearly overhead there burst out, all at once, a circular rift of clear sky—as clear as I ever saw—and of a deep bright blue—and through it there blazed forth the full moon with a luster that I never before knew her to wear. She lit up everything about us with the greatest distinctness—but, oh God, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... after many hard cutting words relents somewhat and speaks calmly if still coldly, so nature, that had been stingingly severe the evening before, was now quietly letting fall a few final hints of the harsh mood that was passing away. Even while he looked, the sun broke through a rift over the eastern mountains, and lighted up the landscape as with genial smiles. It shone, not on an ordinary and prosaic world, but rather on one that had been touched by magic during the night and transformed into ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... even while it took short flights to the troubled waters. Of her firm footing she was exultingly proud. She stood high, close to danger, without giddiness. If at intervals her soul flew out like lightning from the rift (a mere shot of involuntary fancy, it seemed to her), the suspicion of instability made her draw on her treasury of impressions of the mornings at Lugano—her loftiest, purest, dearest; and these reinforced her. She did not ask herself why she should have to seek them for aid. In other ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of rival factions. Economic life continues, in part because much activity is local and relatively easily protected. Agriculture is the most important sector, with livestock normally accounting for about 40% of GDP and about 65% of export earnings, but Saudi Arabia's ban on Somali livestock, due to Rift Valley Fever concerns, has severely hampered the sector. Nomads and semi-nomads, who are dependent upon livestock for their livelihood, make up a large portion of the population. Livestock, hides, fish, charcoal, and bananas are Somalia's principal exports, while sugar, sorghum, corn, qat, and machined ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... Yankee" was situated out of doors, a small rift in the face of the bluff forming a natural fireplace, while a narrow crevice between rocks acted as chimney, and carried away the smoke. The preparation of an ordinary meal under such primitive conditions was speedily accomplished, the menu not being elaborate nor ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... the canon, filling it with gloom. Sometimes they hung above from wall to wall and formed a roof: then a gust of wind from a side-canon made a rift in them and the blue heavens were revealed, or they dispersed in patches which settled on the crags, while puffs of vapor issued out of the smaller gulches, and occasionally formed bars across the canon, one above another, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... destination. He was going farther, where the ordinary traveller would fare worse, and hurried along without looking to the left or right. A half-moon was peeping through an occasional rift in those heavy clouds which precede the autumn rains in these latitudes, and gather with such astonishing slowness and deliberation. It was not a dark night, and the air was still. The abbe had mounted considerably since leaving the cross-roads. His path now entered a valley ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... to a new observation, had hindered the intended triumph. What circumstance was that? He looked back along the past evening and found it in himself, in his theory that a soul expelled was not necessarily a soul dead. The rift in the glory of the Litany came with that. Valentine was trying to close it by this act of sitting, to impress the strength of his will upon his companions in the darkness. The doctor felt his effort like a continually repeated blow, stealthy ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Olav Bjaaland — lay closer together. Behind this group the air had been heavy and black the whole time, showing that more land must be concealed there. Suddenly, in one of the brightest intervals, there came a rift in this curtain, and the summits of a colossal mountain mass appeared. Our first impression was that this mountain — Mount Thorvald Nilsen — must be something over 20,000 feet high; it positively took our breath away, so formidable did it appear. ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... to prepare to follow them. A few moments' scrambling brought them to the top of the ledge; the path then passed between a narrow defile, where only one could walk at a time, till suddenly they came to a rift or chasm more than a yard in breadth, and beyond which lay a pile of rocks, separate from the rest of the ledge, standing full thirty feet high, with its sides steep and perpendicular as those of a castle. Phineas ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... find them smiling and happy as of yore, or driving off in separate cabs to take refuge in the bosoms of their separate families? Darsie opined that all would seem the same on the surface, but darkly hinted at the little rift within the lute, and somehow after that night the glamour seemed to have departed from this honeymoon pair, and the fair seeming was regarded ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a moment the blue skirmishers had not yet found Anna, but it was their advance, their soft stir at her back as they came upon their fallen leader, that had hushed her cries. At the rift in the wood she had leaned on a huge oak and as body and mind again failed had sunk to its base in leafy hiding. Vaguely thence she presently perceived, lit from behind her by sunset beams, the farther edge of the green opening, and on that border, while ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... the breeze had died down; that waves of hot, sultry air were rising from the sun-baked earth. Usually at this time of the night there were countless stars, and now as he looked up into the great, vast arc of sky he saw no stars at all except away down in the west in a big rift between some mountains. He pulled up his pony and sat motionless in the saddle, watching the sky. A sudden awe for the grandeur of the scene filled him. He remembered to have seen nothing quite ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... moment, when the year-end has come, we seem somehow to have been cheated after all. Who, at the beginning of each year, has not promised himself a stricter attentiveness to his experience? This year he will "load every rift with ore." ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... Nine large towns, each containing fifteen thousand inhabitants, bordered on the lake. Numerous populous villages lined the shores, or nestled in the neighboring valleys, or were perched on the hilltops. Fishermen's huts—which were mere stone sheds—fringed the lake. They stood in every rift of rock, and on every knoll, with their little cornfields and vine ledges extending ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... azure sky, The argosies of cloudland lie, Whose shores, with many a shining rift, Far ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... all dine at the legation on the same evening. Sheep and goats, as it were, one dinner to the Allied representatives, the next to the representatives of the Central powers. Much nice sorting is required, and they tell us that in consequence of the war Peking society is rift in twain. This is all very well when it happens in a big community, but when it happens in such a limited little society as Peking, all walled in together within the narrow inclosure of the legation quarter,—walled in literally, also, in the fullest sense, with soldiers ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... somethings menaced on all sides, menaced in greater and greater threat, until with actual proximity they mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind them as a blind to conceal their real identity such small matters as a stunted shrub, an exposed rock, the shadow of a wind-rift on the snow. And low in the sky danced in unholy revel the suns, sometimes as many as eight of them, gazing with the abandoned red eyes of debauchees on the insignificant travellers groping ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... clerk that the box presented by the district attorney had not come from their store, was the only rift in the otherwise dense cloud of incriminating evidence for the State, and the prosecution closed its case with perceptible gloom hanging over every person connected with the defense, and the jury was grave of face, as men well may be who ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... of their struggle, laughed at this blocking move. Katharine Graham, although she did not laugh, enjoyed Pellams's unconscious "like this." She was a Theta Gamma with Miss Meiggs, and of late there had been a little rift in their ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... on horseback, there is ever some minor novelty. And on the swift train, if you draw down the curtain against the glare, or turn to your book, you are sure to miss something of interest—a deep canon rift in the plain, a turn that gives a wide view glowing in a hundred hues in the sun, a savage gorge with beetling rocks, a solitary butte or red truncated pyramid thrust up into the blue sky, a horizontal ledge cutting the horizon line ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... Rift it aff yer chist!" he adjured him. "Something has gone bad inside your Denmark, and I'm so far kindred to the blessed angels that I don't tell ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... they of a change from the fierce heat and drought of the past fortnight. As it was, the clouds brooded low, and the breeze held the freshness of showers near by, while now and then the moon peered through a rift and lit up the hushed darkness, which was like that of a chamber where ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... smoke thicker and denser, but, ever and anon, through some rift I might catch a glimpse of the scarred, blackened side of the English ship, or the litter and confusion of our decks. Twice shots ploughed up the planking hard by me, and once my post itself was struck, so that for a moment I had some hope of winning ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... the boat represented a rift widening between me and my past. I sat up and took the oars, feeling older ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... hotel had its beginnings far back in the days before the great war. They had been neighbors, these three families, had settled side by side in this new land of Arkansas, had hunted and feasted together in amity. In an hour had arisen the rift between them that was to widen to a chasm into which much blood had since been spilt. It began with a quarrel between hotheaded young men. Forty years later it was still running ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... though I was to hard ships and hard men. I wished I had not shown myself such a hard case back there in the Swede's. I cursed myself for the vainglorious fool I was for having put myself in such a hole. The only rift in my cloud of gloom was Lynch; the second mate seemed favorably disposed towards me, I reflected, and had promised to choose me for his watch. He said I would be safe if I jumped lively to my work. I promised myself to do that same, for I foresaw a cruel fate for the malingering man aboard ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... way into the dusk of the evening, and night came swiftly to fellowship the judge's fears. A single moonbeam found its way into the place, making a thin rift in the darkness. The judge sat down on the three-legged stool, which, with a shake-down bed, furnished the jail. His loneliness was a great wave of ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
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