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More "Rift" Quotes from Famous Books



... a deluge of delicious shade. A number of persons were reclining on the grass under it, and one of them, a very handsome Christian boy, spoke to us in Italian and English. I scarcely remember a brighter and purer day than that of our departure. The sky was a sheet of spotless blue; every rift and scar of the distant hills was retouched with a firmer pencil, and all the outlines, blurred away by the haze of the previous few days, were restored with wonderful distinctness. The temperature was hot, but not sultry, and the air we breathed ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... 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 ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... tell him. But he guessed that she knew nothing definite, while suspecting much. She had shown the most acute concern at his own danger, and more than once implored Mark to do nothing but look after his own safety until Peter Ganns was back again. Meantime the rift between her spouse and herself appeared to grow. She was tearful and anxious, yet still chose to be vague, though she did admit that she thought she had glimpsed Robert Redmayne again, one evening. But Brendon did not press her again to confide ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... until the moment 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 words, a direct hit to the heart. In its struggles the man-eater ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... 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 ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... street to the westward, over the wet roofs still glimmering in the twilight, one pale green rift divided the heavy clouds, and in that rift the last of the daylight was dying. Across the way, in the house facing him, a woman was lighting a lamp. As a rule the inhabitants of Prospect Place did not draw the blinds of their upper rooms until they closed ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... it. Great drops 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

... 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

... but naturally 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 quarter,—walled in literally, also, in the fullest sense, with ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte

... there was a rift in it right overhead. Prayer was His refuge, as it must be ours. The soul that can cry, 'Abba, Father!' does not walk in unbroken night. His example teaches us what our own sorrows should also teach us—to betake ourselves to prayer when the spirit is desolate. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... 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, and unquestionably productive ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... '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— ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... lives and 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 war cloud.'" ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... 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 more ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... 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 ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... and book, an old armchair, A glowing hearth, what need I care For empty honors, wealth or fame? Grant me but this: an honest name, A cup of ale, a coat to wear, And then, while smoke wreaths rift the air, The banquet of the gods I share, Content to sit before the flame With ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles

... 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 ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... in his casting of their horoscope, for a prolonged honeymoon spent in going round the world revealed a rift in the lute which a season in town developed ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... 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, but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... precious paper with a grateful heart. An hour ago his future had been all black, but now this rift of light had broken in the west, giving promise of better things. He would have liked to have said something expressive of his feelings to his employer, but the English nature is not effusive, and he could not get beyond a few choking awkward words which were as awkwardly received by his ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... between husbands and wives sometimes goes unexplained, and the rift between them widens through life. I know some houses where the wife enters at one door and the husband at another; where if they meet on the stairs, they do not salute each other. Under the same roof they have lived for years and have not spoken. One word would heal ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... 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

... must remember this: the very prominence of his position will cause him to be the target of contumely, abuse and much stupid misunderstanding. If he complains of these things (as he probably will), he reveals a rift in the lute and proves that he is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... Skag's feeling was called to pity as well as admiration. The rift in this Deal's nature was emotional not physical—some mad poetic thing, forever struggling in the tight matrices of a hard-set world. India was rising clearer to Skag; even certain of her profound complexities. He knew that ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost

... stretched a 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 close ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

... beside his bride of yesterday's making—she intensely happy too, but in another way, for was not her bridegroom of yesterday her husband of twenty years ago—cruelly wrenched away, but her husband for all that. Still, there was always that little rift within the lute that made the music—pray Heaven not to widen! Always that thought!—that he might recollect. How could he remember the messe des paresseux, and keep his mind a blank about how he came to know of it? It was the first discomfort that had crossed ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... tag, as intelligible as any for all his dissent. But cases like his were growing more prevalent; however, usually, in women. Men were the last stronghold of sentimentality. His thoughts were interrupted by a dramatic rift in the discipline of the class: a boy, stubbornly seated, swollen, crimson, with wrath and heroically withheld tears, was being vainly argued with by the dancing master. He wouldn't stir, he wouldn't dance. The man, grasping a shoulder, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... end he saw, for an instant through a rift in the crowd, the three roses on a black gown, but not the face above them; the next instant the rift closed. However, he knew now that she was here and where to find her, and he made his way through the press toward where she ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott

... 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 lay exposed ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... the boat represented a rift widening between me and my past. I sat up and took the oars, feeling older ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... where Mrs. Brown 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' ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner

... a master, not for a student. But suppose there were a tree or a group of trees in the field; suppose a mass of cloud obscured the sky, and a ray of sunlight fell on and around the tree through a rift in the clouds. Or suppose the opposite of this. Suppose all was in broad light, and the tree was strongly lighted on one side, on the other shadowed, and that it threw a mass of shadow below and to one side of it. Immediately there is something which you can take hold of and make ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

... tropic now '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 fell On ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham

... she is lying, and no one knows; And the summer shines and the winter snows; For many a day the flowers have spread A pall of petals over her head; And the little gray hawk hangs aloft in the air, And the sly coyote trots here and there, And the black snake glides and glitters and slides Into a rift in a cotton-wood 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 lie buried there In Texas, down ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... gleam of alkali plains; to the right arose the bluffs, here both steep and rugged, completely shutting off the view, barren of vegetation except for a few scattered patches of grass. Suddenly a man rode out of a rift in the bank, directly in front, and held up his hand. Surprised, startled, the driver instantaneously clamped on his brake, and brought his horses to a quick stop; the conductor, nearly flung from his seat, ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish

... 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 in ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous

... conflict between the national desire for self-government and the Papal claims of overlordship. But his death gave the signal for a more serious struggle, for it was in the oppression of the Church of England by the Popes through the reign of Henry that the little rift first opened which was destined to widen into the gulf that parted the one from the other at the Reformation. In the mediaeval theory of the Papacy, as Innocent and his successors held it, Christendom, as a spiritual realm of ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... 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 day is over, and night has already come on. Darkness follows daylight so ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... gazed down into the green rift at the bottom of which a tumultuous river tumbled downward along its rocky bed, then he closed his eyes as to a sudden spasm of ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... to 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... now near sundown. We had been climbing steadily. The train shrieked twice, and unexpectedly slid out to the edge of the Likipia Escarpment. We looked down once more into the great Rift Valley. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... in the vein of Victor Hugo and Dumas—eulogies besides which the enthusiasm of many English critics appears cold and constrained. So unfaltering a note of admiration sounds gratefully in the ears of Shakespeare's countrymen. Yet on closer investigation there seems a rift within the lute. When one turns to the French versions of Shakespeare, for which the chief of Shakespeare's French encomiasts have made themselves responsible, an Englishman is inclined to moderate his exultation in the ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... in that direction, scanning the woods right and left. By Heavens, the girl had not been mistaken. Through a rift in the foliage, nearly opposite the canoe, peered a swarthy, sinister countenance and I recognized the features of Cuthbert Mackenzie. I took aim at him, but before I could fire he was gone. My brain seemed in a whirl. I had found the clew—the fiendish clew—to ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon

... claim to the gratitude of our generation seems to me to depend. It has restored continuity to history. It has shown some reasonable basis for the most superstitious aberrations of the foretime. It has bridged the chasm, healed the hideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot into ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... no wooing, only a meeting, for a brief space, of two human beings who had been made for each other, but whom fate separated by a rift which could not be bridged. Mary Lincoln knew this, John Dacre did not; but as he had bade her good-night just before, he felt a sadness steal over his heart, and his voice had trembled as he spoke. Even into the heart of this man ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... rupture; 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; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... 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 ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory

... had 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 tawny slime wavered ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... 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, ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith

... negotiations and a continuation of submarine attacks in which Americans had suffered, it seemed that the United States and Germany had at last reached the point of a break. Then, on September 1, came the first rift in the threatening situation. Count von Bernstorff presented this written ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... are a little prepared to go ahead. The guide-book work 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 ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... watching them and laughing with a spasmodic laugh which he might have caught from his own wooden cuckoo. When they reached the other shore Tom fell at once to examining a very perceptible rift in the earth a few feet ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... rift in the cliff which had been widened and extended by the action of the water draining through it from the plateau above. It gave us a rather rough climb to the summit, but finally we stood upon the level mesa which ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... with the scrawny plants in the five red pots on the window-shelf. On gray days, when our house and all the world lay in the soggy shadow of the fog, she fretted sadly for their health; and she kept feverish watch for a rift in the low, sad sky, and sighed and wished for sunlight. It mystified me to perceive the wistful regard she bestowed upon the stalks and leaves that thrived the illest—the soft touches for the yellowing ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan

... December, and round again. The last thing attended to before putting on his coat was always carefully to brush and dispose his hair. Until within two or three years, he had been able to keep up appearances by coaxing a gray rift across the top of the bald place; but it had grown month by month thinner and grayer, and more difficult to keep in position, until at last he had bravely told himself it was a vanity and a delusion, and had consigned it to obscurity and oblivion among ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... the "Sea Bee," instead of dashing against the cliffs, appeared to pass directly into them as though they were but shadows of a solid substance, and in another minute had shot, like an arrow from a bow, through a rift barely wide ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe

... he said, 'of that marvellous sunset at Athens? I was on the Pnyx; had been rambling about there the whole afternoon. For I dare say a couple of hours I had noticed a growing rift of light in the clouds to the west; it looked as if the dull day might have a rich ending. That rift grew broader and brighter—the only bit of light in the sky. On Parnes there were white strips of ragged mist, hanging ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... 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 telescope, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... Its absolute stillness may continue for ten or more hours. During this time it is absolutely inert, but at last the sac—for such it is—opens gently, and there is poured out a brownish glairy fluid. At first the stream is small, but at length its flow enlarges the rift in the cyst, and the cloudy volume of its contents rolls out, and the hyaline film that inclosed it ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... 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 Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn

... I started 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

... been for a long time. Since the Trent episode he had ceased even to imagine her possible marriage. By her own headstrong folly she had ruined all her chances. "The weariful rich" who had got her the post did not spare him this aspect of her deplorable conduct. To-day, however, there was a rift in these dark clouds ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker

... came to a halt, the boats were thrown down and Hugh arrived at the conclusion that they were to stop until morning. In this he found himself mistaken, for with the very next moment he heard the splashing of water, seemingly beneath his feet. Up to now he had been looking upward at the rift in the rocks. Instead of a rocky gorge he now saw the shimmering of water, and a fresh exclamation of surprise ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon

... 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 that ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur

... 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 ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... eastern sky now was light, and Rathburn saw a stone building above them. He also saw that they were on the steep slope of the big mountain on which the Dixie Queen was located, and that there was a rift in this mountain to the left which indicated the presence of a ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts

... rate, was 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 shepherd explained by signs, except the birch-twig ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel

... 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 knows!), that Lord Murgatroyd's grandniece was no longer the intimate of ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... "I am not wholly guilty of keeping you blind. I have told you many times that between us was a gap, a rift of something. I have sometimes said, as your artless caresses, mixed with the bitter recollection of your origin, almost dispossessed my reason, that you ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... Marco, precisely the actual number of stages from Tali-fu to the present boundary of Yung-ch'ang. That this river must have been the demarcation between the two provinces is obvious; one glance into that deep rift, the only exit from which is by painful worked artificial zigzags which, under the most favourable conditions, cannot be called safe, will satisfy the most sceptical geographer. The exact statement of distance is a proof that Marco ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... 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, ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac

... of 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 ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... 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, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... not a rift was visible in the leaden sky, and a slanting gray veil of sleety rain darkened the air and pelted the dumb, shivering earth, Beryl sat on the side of her cot, with her feet resting on the round of a chair, and her hands clasped at the back of her head. Her eyes remarkably large from the bluish ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... and the sides closed 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 ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... sombre 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 ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King

... not shout and because he could not loosen himself, there came a rift in his madness. He remembered who he was, and all the old hatreds and ...
— Happy Ending • Fredric Brown

... 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 you want to ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... 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 ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... of the years ahead of us. I think there are to be many—for us both. The future is so bewildering—like a tangled and endless forest, and very dim to see in.... But sometimes there comes a rift in the foliage—and there is a glimpse of far skies shining. And for a moment one—'sees clearly'—into the depths—a little way.... And surmises something of what remains unseen. And imagines more, perhaps.... I wonder if ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... quite the hour for his setting, the sun had disappeared behind a heavy bank of wicked slate-coloured cloud, which looked as though it were rising straight up into the western heavens, while the wind whirled along and twisted into quaint shapes a ragged rift of white vapor, which went hurrying by, almost touching the tops of the moaning firs,—altogether an uncanny evening to be keeping tryst at the top of a wild knoll; and so thought our friend with the horses, and showed it, too, clearly enough, had anyone been there to put a ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... Crane, you can't fool me. I'm a mind reader, and I see there's a rift in the lute that you and Carly used ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells

... first 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

... and Primary (with a few modern plutonic outbursts), and chiefly consists of granite, felspar, quartz, gneiss, schists, amphibolite and other Archean rocks, with Primary sandstones and limestones in the basin of Lake Nyasa (a great rift depression), the river Shire, and the regions within the northern watershed of the Zambezi river. Sandstones of Karroo age occur in the basin of the Luangwa (N.E. Rhodesia). There are evidences of recent volcanic activity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... careful, taught-looking writing, and the invariable "God 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 was almost disposed to abandon the pair, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... the little rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... 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 fell incongruously upon ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... 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 into ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... way into the houses. It gathered round the street-lanterns, which looked like dull red balls, and gave no light a yard off. It hung over the river, rolled along the black stream, under the bridge, up the steps, and clung to the wooden pillars of the gallery. At times there would be a rift in its masses, through which the inky stream below became visible, flowing like the river of death along the ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... away. 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

... came a voice from within, "plain drunk." The police arrived just then, and cleared a way; through the rift they made, she saw them lift—Billy Gray, ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin

... themselves resignedly down for the night, while others again were ravenously devouring, no one 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 ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... and energetic guidance knocking his flag 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... friend to lead the way, himself Guiding us all. So 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 clomb the steep; And in brief space ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... hit upon anything else, we resolved to go in a body to the sleighing hill. The town had a right of way to the river for fetching water therefrom, and this road ended at the foot of a good hill down which the sleigh could run, and then up the other side along the ice rift. ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various

... silver pioneer netted in the rift, Leaning over Maori Hill, dreaming in the lift, Dropped her starry memories through the passioned ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... most intently, but no two hands ever forgot themselves so far as to applaud, as the least sign of approbation of Austrian military music would have been looked upon as treason to the Italian Fatherland. All public life in Venice also suffered by this extraordinary rift between the general public and the authorities; this was peculiarly apparent in the relations of the population to the Austrian officers, who floated about publicly in Venice like oil on water. The populace, too, behaved with no less reserve, or one might even say hostility, to the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... 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 as best he could. He was keyed to the ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs

... 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, and his faith ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... 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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... Saturday, and Elnora had secured the order to furnish material for nature 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 ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter

... the boy had: he was often enabled to give a far better recitation than White could. On these occasions a faint look of admiration in Liddy's blue eyes was like a rift of sunshine on a cloudy day to him. When the standing of all pupils was read at the middle of the term, the boy was away ahead of White, and felt almost as proud as the night he walked home with Liddy from his first party. It cheered ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn

... suspense was unrelaxed. The firing from the fleet ceased. The large ships loomed indistinct and silent in the mist. To the west lay the silent fort, the white vapor heavy upon it. With eager eyes Key watched the distant shore, till in a rift over the fort he dimly discerned the flag still proudly defiant. In that supreme moment was written ...
— The Star-Spangled Banner • John A. Carpenter

... and, flinging the curtains behind her, looked out at the night. The moon was just showing through a rift in the driving cloud, and she could see the bluff roll blackly down to the white frothing of the river. She also saw a shadowy object slipping through the gloom of the trees, and fancied it was a woman; but when another figure appeared for a moment in the ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... 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. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various

... 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 of Dubova: there ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... wind 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

... 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 ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous

... Garrison was in the orthodox creed and sound in that creed almost to bigotry, this behavior of a standard-bearer of the church, together with the apathy displayed by the clergy on a former occasion, caused probably the first "little rift within the lute" of his creed, "that by and by will make the music mute, and, ever widening, slowly silence all." For in religion as in love, "Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all." The Rev. Howard Malcolm's arbitrary proceeding had ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... 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 ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood

... than the aged grandame. 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 ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... 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 ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... 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 they dined ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... our Morocco policy is, however, undoubtedly the deep rift which has been formed in consequence between the Government and the mass of the nationalist party, the loss of confidence among large sections of the nation, extending even to classes of society which, in spite of their regular opposition to the ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi

... 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

... Inspector Val were again at the mouth of the drain, the lashing storm had worn itself out. The night was silently serene; the clouds were breaking, and two or three big stars peered down. There was a moon, and having advantage of a rift in the clouds, a ray struck white on Arlington. Over across, one might make out the tall dark Maryland hills. Far away on the river burned the lights of the Zulu Queen; she was holding her best speed down-stream, having reason to think her recent anchorage ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... saying good-night, the fitful moonlight streamed out brightly again through a rift in the clouds. At the same moment a stout old gentleman, smoking a pipe, sauntered past us on the pavement, noticed me as he went by, stopped directly, and revealed himself as Mr. Engelman. "Good-night, Mr. David," said the widow. The moon shone full on her as she gave me her ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins

... one of the ills to which women are heir that they have frequently to pass their whole lives in the society of persons with whom they have no real sympathy. Both these women were conscious of the little rift within the lute, but such rifts are better treated with silence. That which comes to interfere with a woman's friendship ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... greatly 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

... 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 another girl, too—I forget her name—but she ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine

... I was not the only one in Rustum Khan's debt; it was likely his brilliant effort at the critical moment had saved our whole fighting line. Besides, I saw the Turk grinning to himself with satisfaction at the rift ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... in October. There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roots of Yonville, with the gardens at the water's edge, the yards, the walls and the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house, and never had this ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... himself, but Soames as well, so that he was not only 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... 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 gardens and woods came now ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... 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 for this,—neither ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... 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

... moment Bouchier came up, flung himself from his panting steed, and, with his drawn sword in hand, forced himself through a rift in its side into the tree. There was a hollow within it large enough to allow a man to stand upright, and two funnel-like holes ran upwards into the branches. Finding nothing, Bouchier called for a hunting-spear, and thrust it as far as he could into the holes above. The point ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth

... 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, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... what I saw not at the time,—that my weakness came upon me fr-rom my own lack of str-rength to make an effort. I was cr-rushed by a gr-rief when I left my land to come to America. I allowed it to paralyze my will. I let myself dr-rift, not caring enough about what became of me to exert myself to ward off poverty. Poverty never had been mine,—I did not r-realize it, but I did know well the meaning of self-r-respect and honor, and it was base of me to permit ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton

... 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... 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 ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel

... There was a story told By one of Black Beard's men Who had done evil things for gold, That one morning, out at sea, The fog made a sudden lift, And from the high poop, looking through the rift, He saw Twenty canoes, each with six warriors, Paddling straight toward the rising sun, Where the wind made a flaw— He swore he saw And counted twenty hulls, Circled about by screaming gulls— Then such a storm came down ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen

... 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

... aunt, a lingering parting, and I was alone again. The brook went babbling on, but telling no tales, the birds were busy with their own affairs, and the sunbeams winked brightly through the leaves. The little rift, giving a glimpse of the inner life of two souls, had closed and left no outward sign; and yet ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher

... 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, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... moment of her life, prayed though she sought nothing but to thank God—prayed and wept with childish cries of gratitude, until the light at her side went out and left her in darkness, and through a rift in the masonry a single star peered in ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman

... and came out into the soft spring night air. All was silent now. The narrow side-canal had a glimmer of moonlight, the opposite palace was black, with one spot of light where a window shone: overhead in the narrow rift of dark-blue sky a flock of stars flew like bright birds through the soft velvet gloom. The water lapped mournfully against the marble steps, and a gondola lay moored to the posts, gently nodding to its black shadow in ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... difficult connection 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 curtain of ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... things about him. Love and joy, hope and faith, all these are but flickering lights that lure him to destruction. Vultures croak on the rocks. The fountains flow with ink. Danger lurks in the desert. The name of the river is Death." And when they came to the shore of the river they saw no rift in the clouds above it, for their eyes were filled ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan

... memory of its beautiful dome and sculptured detail in our thoughts, let us take leave of our subject; trusting that the Taj itself, like a morning star glittering from a single rift in a darkened sky, may form the prophecy of a fairer dawn for the womanhood of the country in which it is so ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... and Northern Democrats with anti-slavery leanings had voted for the 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 ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... to darken as a premonition of the coming dawn, a veil of vapor was drawn before the stars, trees blended together and the air became chill. Then the vapor was pierced in the east by a lance of light. The rift widened, and the pale light of the first dawn appeared over the hills. Dick, using his glasses, saw a flash which he knew was the Opequan. And with that silvery gleam of water came other flashes of red and rapid crackling reports. The Southern ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Somalia based on unification of ethnic Somalis; 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.) ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... desert plateau in east, highland area in west; Great Rift Valley separates East and West Banks of the ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... of this hidden Yosemite are exceedingly rich in color. On almost every rift and bench, however small, as well as on the wider table-rocks where a little soil has lodged, we found gay multitudes of flowers, far more brilliantly colored than would be looked for in so cool and beclouded a region,—larkspurs, ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir

... 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

... and increasing, culminates at West 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, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... much a normal and intelligent desire, as an attempt to escape from interior discord; and it was the discord which found expression, accordingly, instead of the sense of beauty,—except (as has been said) in fragments. Whatever the cause, his brain had a rift of ruin in it, from the start, and though his delicate touch often stole a new grace from classic antiquity, it was the frangibility, the quick decay, the fall of all lovely and noble things, that excited and engaged him. "I have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns," ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... white village, which lies gleaming upon the edge of the water. On all the foreground lies the river, broad as a bay. The storm is coming down the stream. Over the left spur of the bank, and over the meeting of the banks, it broods black as night. Through a little rift there is a glimpse of serene sky, from which a mellow light streams down upon the edges and angles of a few cliffs upon the farther shore. All the rest is heavily shadowed. The edges of the coming tempest are tortuous and convulsed, and you know that a fierce wind is driving the black billows ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... intently, but no two hands ever forgot themselves so far as to applaud, as the least sign of approbation of Austrian military music would have been looked upon as treason to the Italian Fatherland. All public life in Venice also suffered by this extraordinary rift between the general public and the authorities; this was peculiarly apparent in the relations of the population to the Austrian officers, who floated about publicly in Venice like oil on water. The populace, too, behaved with no ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... 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 marshes ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... that we should be deluged with rain forthwith; but all signs fail in Holland with 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

... fruit which took long to mature ripened at last, and Greece had many of her claims allowed. Thus in reorganizing the communities of the world the personal factor played a predominant part. Venizelos was, so to say, a fixed star in the firmament, and his light burned bright through every rift in the clouds. His moderation astonished friends and opponents. Every one admired his expose of his case as a masterpiece. His statesman-like setting, in perspective, the readiness with which he put himself in the place of his competitor ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... 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 ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... lead the way, himself Guiding us all. So 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 clomb the steep; And in brief space brought what ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... in that compressed air, burst triumphantly from his lips as the light-ray, suddenly piercing a rift of cloud, sparkled dimly on a surface shiny-black as newly ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... direction I 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 telescope, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... 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 ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens

... our Colorado beetle, our potato disease, our Home ruler, our cupboard skeleton, the little rift in our lute. The red-coated chuprassie is a cancer in our Administration. To be rid of it there is hardly any surgical operation we would not cheerfully undergo. You might extract the Bishop of Bombay, amputate the Governor of Madras, put a seton in the pay and ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

... when the wind blows its hardest, but makes no rift anywhere for a star to peep through, that the Golden Drugget, as I approach it, gladdens my heart the most. The distance between Rapallo and my home up yonder is rather more than two miles. The road curves and zigzags sharply, for the most part; but at the end of the first ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... 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 ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart

... 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 ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... 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

... 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

... seemed to burn 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 ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... were reclining on the grass under it, and one of them, a very handsome Christian boy, spoke to us in Italian and English. I scarcely remember a brighter and purer day than that of our departure. The sky was a sheet of spotless blue; every rift and scar of the distant hills was retouched with a firmer pencil, and all the outlines, blurred away by the haze of the previous few days, were restored with wonderful distinctness. The temperature was hot, but not sultry, and the air we breathed was ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... 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 ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... 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 ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... A rift had come in the smoke, and a column of boats, moving with well-timed oars, could for a moment be seen as it ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... 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 looked ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... his son by 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 ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... 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, treading the heaving billows ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... 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

... 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, disengage, disunite, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... tree-shaded pool. Below and to the right were the famed Basins of Venus, shimmering in the sunlight, flanked by trees and banks of the softest green. On their surface swam the great black swans he had heard so much about. Through a wide rift in the trees he could see the great, grey Castle, half a mile away, towering against the dense greens of the nearby mountain. The picture took his breath away. He forgot Hobbs. He forgot that he was; trespassing. Here, at last, was the Graustark he ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... the most promising, the mother's darling, that goes wrong; it is the brilliant students, the men of whom one says, "Ah, what could he not do if he would only try!" is those who trip, and quench their brilliance in the mud. A little rift in the fabric of the will, a little instability of temper, an unlucky week of idleness—these are the things that start a man towards the very gulf of doom. Bob Darbishire, the athlete, the delightful and exhilarating companion, was set gliding on ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman

... 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. She was seated before a machine. He crossed ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... themselves for the final shock. To their unbounded amazement the "Sea Bee," instead of dashing against the cliffs, appeared to pass directly into them as though they were but shadows of a solid substance, and in another minute had shot, like an arrow from a bow, through a rift barely wide enough to ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe

... 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

... 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, ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish

... in this country. They do not realize the aridity of our summer climate, which makes it sometimes as much of a luxury here as it is in the desert. A rill of living water, let it issue from a mossy rift in the hillside or the mouth of a bronze lion, comes to us often like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. We lead fevered lives, too, and this is the natural relief. Fountains are among the first decorations that show themselves in public ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... not common in the work of our minor 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

... nature. Sirocco mists rose upwards, clustering thickly overhead and rolling in billowy formations among the dales. Sometimes a breath of wind would convulse their ranks, causing them to trail in long silvery pennants across the sky and, opening a rift in their gossamer texture, would reveal, far down below, a glimmer of olives shining in the sunlight or a patch of blue sea, framed in an aureole of peacock hues. Stones and grass were clammy with ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... thou holdest somewhat of him in thine hand, Skallagrim, and for the rest, go seek it in yonder rift." ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard

... 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 ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac

... 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 let cunning ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus

... right-hand 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

... 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

... up from the brute— Hath Hope, like a beacon of light, Like a star in the rift of the storm, Been writ by the finger of God On the longing hearts of men. O follow no goblin fear; O cringe to no cruel creed; Nor chase the shadow of doubt Till the brain runs mad with despair. Stretch forth thy hand, O man, To the winds and the quaking earth— To the ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... cleaving the 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 clear ...
— The Field of Clover • Laurence Housman

... have I seen the day Break o'er thy roofs and towers like a dream In mystic silver, mirrored by the Bay, Bedecked with shadow craft ... and then a gleam Of golden sunlight cleaving swiftly sure Some narrow cloud-rift—limning hill or plain With flecks of gypsy-radiance that endure But for the moment and are ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... 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.

... smoke and clouds swift; So down he fell, that th' earth him underneath Did groan, as feeble so great load to lift; So down he fell, as an huge rocky clift Whose false foundation waves have washed away, With dreadful poise is from the mainland rift And rolling down, great Neptune doth dismay, So down he fell, and ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... 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 in his ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... 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 ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... rolled into distincter masses, and the northwest wind still hunted them across the sky, until there came, first a tiny rift for a star, then a gap for a whole constellation, and finally a broad burst of moonlight. Gilbert now saw that the timber to which he clung was lodged nearly in the centre of the channel, as the water swept with equal force on either side of him. Beyond the banks ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor

... "Spit it out, Brenton! 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 ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... 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 familiarity ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant

... at watch, terrified at the thought of staying till the other entered, still more terrified at the idea of bolting across the open clearing. He could see Perris clearly, in outline, for just behind him there was a rift in the circle of trees which fenced the clearing and Red Jim was thrown into somewhat bold relief against the blue-black of the night sky far beyond. He could even make out that a bandage circled the head of Perris and with that sight a new thought leaped into the brain of the ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand

... gathers them in—can it make the shore? Here and there a little smooth water, an occasional rift of light through the clouds—alas! only to be followed by greater darkness—and the pictures cease. But no, there ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell

... 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 cliffs ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse

... 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 ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... 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

... the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and action; to the other, ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... inevitably understood as applying at least to free trade and the conduct of foreign affairs. Both Huskisson and the duke in parliamentary speeches disclaimed the imputation of any bargain; still the rift was not closed, and it was speedily widened by events on which harmony between tories and friends ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... 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 ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... he, and they fearing the voice of the prince ran swiftlier some little while; and presently did the good warrior Antilochos espy a strait place in a sunk part of the way. There was a rift in the earth, where torrent water gathered and brake part of the track away, and hollowed all the place; there drave Menelaos, shunning the encounter of the wheels. But Antilochos turned his whole-hooved horses out of the track, and followed him a little at one ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)

... good sooth, I had to spring, and no mystery about it, ere ever I got to the top of the rift leading into Doone-glade. For the stream was rushing down in strength, and raving at every corner; a mort of rain having fallen last night and no wind come to wipe it. However, I reached the head ere dark with more difficulty than danger, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... 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 in two ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... we are a little prepared to go ahead. The guide-book work 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 people, and ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... But why have charms by me employ'd, Less luck than her's, Medea dread, With which her rival she destroy'd, Great Creon's child, then proudly fled, When the robe bane-imbued, her gift, Enwrapp'd the new-wed bride in flame? But neither herb, nor root from rift Of lone rock ta'en, are here to blame; In every harlot's bed lies he Anointed with oblivion; Ah, ah, 'tis plain he walketh free Protected by some mightier one. But Varus! thou shalt suffer yet! Thou shalt re-seek these longing arms, ...
— Targum • George Borrow

... one? And the address was like this: "Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of 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 Joffre ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... usual, but naturally 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

... all went 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... results ascribed to it by Lamarck, and not the false Charles-Darwinian natural selection that does not correspond with facts, and cannot result in specific differences such as we now observe. But, waiving this, the "my's," within which a little rift had begun to show itself in 1866, might well become as mute in 1869 as they could become without attracting attention, when Mr. Darwin saw the passages just quoted, and the hundred pages or ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... 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)

... joy went out like a ray of moonlight swallowed up by a marauding cloud. She did not in the least understand what had happened, or what were the obligations to which he had committed her; but in any case the lute she had tuned had a rift in it, a big, bad rift, and it could make no music to-night. She felt suddenly at her worst instead of her best, as if she had tumbled off a bank of flowers in her prettiest frock into a bog. She ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... be told. "I favor going in"—on the League of Nations is one. Assuring his supporters that the proposal for separate peace with Germany was "opening their front lines," he drew a word sketch of a gigantic contest in which he as a general had sensed a rift in the opposition ranks and had ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris

... 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 a band of pursuers. The sinuosities, themselves, would enable the last to ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... night came to a halt, the boats were thrown down and Hugh arrived at the conclusion that they were to stop until morning. In this he found himself mistaken, for with the very next moment he heard the splashing of water, seemingly beneath his feet. Up to now he had been looking upward at the rift in the rocks. Instead of a rocky gorge he now saw the shimmering of water, and a fresh exclamation of surprise ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon

... Rafaella Sal dimpling and sparkling at his side, and now quite resigned to the 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 ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... bringing to light the fact that the dog belonged to a Beverly H. Pembroke. Shorty would have the reward. Their lunch boxes and coffee-pot were gathered up, and the climb to the cliff began. The great moon was just lifting her yellow head above a rift of clouds in the eastern sky. Soon the flat top of the crag was reached, and in a moment a roaring fire was kindled. They had filled the coffee-pot with water before leaving the stream in the canyon, and it was now swung on ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley

... the jaws of the canyon where its builder may have fatuously fancied that the timbered and rocky walls on both sides would have protected it from the wintry Colorado winds; but I feared the drift. Even now through the endless, bottomless rift in the hills—the speaking tube of the four winds—came roaring the voice of the proprietor to the little room on the ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry

... 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

... 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 ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... Environment: geologically 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.

... arrangement 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 ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis

... around the office. He went to the window and stared upwards at the crazy patchwork of the sky. For all he knew, in such a sky there might be cracks. In fact, as he looked, he could make out a rift, and beyond that a ... hole ... a small patch where there was no color, and yet the sky there was not black. There were no stars there, though points of light were clustered ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey

... 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, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... long, which was wholly lined with huge flat rocks carved with countless writhing serpents. As Frances passed they seemed to stir and breathe beside her, at her feet, overhead. The cave opened into a sacrificial chamber. The reptiles grew gigantic here, and crowded closer. Through some rift a beam of melancholy light crept in; a smell of death hung in the ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis

... 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 wall to wall, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... 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 they dined together and read Don Quixote in Spanish. ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... life: but when Grim Thorhallson knew thereof he sent Grettir word and bade him beware of himself, so Grettir ever took heed to the goings of men. But one day he saw many men riding who took the way to his abode; so he ran into a rift in the rocks, nor would he flee because he had not seen all the strength of ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris

... great 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 its parent rock to come crashing down to the bottom. Their first impulse ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... 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 ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... furnish material for nature 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 home, she only ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter

... 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, proceeded to ...
— Cad Metti, The Female Detective Strategist - Dudie Dunne Again in the Field • Harlan Page Halsey

... of the periodic droughts in south; Congo River floods (seasonal); in the east, in the Great Rift Valley, there ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... thicker than ever. But the spell was broken. In a moment more Old Phelps was shouting, "The sun!" and before we could gain our feet there was a patch of sky overhead as big as a farm. "See! quick!" The old man was dancing like a lunatic. There was a rift in the vapor at our feet, down, down, three thousand feet into the forest abyss, and lo! lifting out of it yonder the tawny side of Dix,—the vision of a second, snatched away in the rolling fog. The play had just ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... 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 ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... the top of his head a red lock flamed up, licking the air; over its sides the hair tumbled in cataracts, breaking about his ears; then the surging hair lost itself in orderly currents which flowed, waving, from his cheeks, leaving a rift from which sprang a generous nose and a round chin with many folds. His mouth was formed for the enunciation of large words and pompous phrases. From it monosyllables fell like bullets from a cannon. He seldom descended to conversation. He declaimed. He sought to impress on me the importance ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... beyond the beaver marsh and on the farther shore of the lake she saw a little glimmer of light through the rift in the trees. She dared not believe in its reality at first. Perhaps it was a trick of her imagination only, a hallucination born of her starvation, child of her heartfelt prayer. She looked away, then peered again. But, yes—a tiny gleam of yellow light twinkled through the ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... was 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, for he looked up and, during a moment, we were both silhouetted in the radiance ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne

... 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 black ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... 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 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 ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... 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 mind the scene from the Town ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... way acrass the said merin to their own side. Now it so happened that they met exactly at a narrow gap in the ditch behind Rosha Halpin's house. The goats, bein' coupled together, got one on each side of the rift, wid the rope that coupled them extended acrass it. The mare stood in the middle of it, so that the goats were in the way of the mare, an' the mare in the way of the goats. In the meantime they surveyed one another wid great composure, but had neither of them the politeness to stir, ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... split by a river, now frozen to its bed. But, from the hut door, the rift which marks its course in the ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum

... There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roots of Yonville, with the gardens at the water's edge, the yards, the walls and the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house, and never had this poor village where she lived ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert

... felt the monster's heart which he smote so fiercely that he killed him. Anxious to escape from his dark prison, Hiawatha waited till the giant sturgeon drifted on to the shore, then called for aid to his friends the sea-gulls, who worked with their claws and beaks till they made a wide rift in Nahma's side ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman

... a 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

... I was more amazed than ever at the fact of their extraordinary affection for each other, their perfect amity which had lasted so many years without a rift, which nothing could break, as people ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson

... inert body. The torch had hissed itself out. Grantline swung to our building corner, and I leaned down with him to examine it. The torch had fused and scarred the wall, burned almost through. A pressure rift had opened. We could see it, a curving gash in the metal wall-plate like a crack ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings

... 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 ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... fidelity to Catholicism. All this was deeply distressing to the pious James, and all this dated from 1742, that is, from the time of Murray of Broughton's visit to Rome. Indifference to religious strictness was, even then, accompanied by a love of wine, in some slight degree. Already, too, a little rift in the friendship of the princely brothers was apparent; there were secrets between them which Henry must have ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang

... do our duty. Our delay has cost us thousands of lives and 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 ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... 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 ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... that 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 ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer

... 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

... was Flavilla. To see her entire family married by machinery was enough for her; to witness such consummate and collective happiness became slightly cloying. Perfection can be overdone; a rift in a lute relieves melodious monotony, and when discords cease to amuse, one can always have the instrument mended or ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers

... Vaudreuil and her love of the Queen, the Duchesse was in an awkward dilemma. It became necessary to choose between the two rivals; and that Vaudreuil's spell proved the stronger, her increasing coldness to Marie Antoinette soon proved. It was the "rift within the lute" which was to make the music of their friendship mute. The Queen gradually withdrew herself from the Duchesse's salon, where she was sure to meet the insolent Vaudreuil; and thus the gulf gradually widened until the ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall

... their friendship, 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 lay exposed ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... It might be some wild beast with teeth and claws that would rend him if he were the one who seized it, and the longer he waited the more reasonable this seemed to be. It was a creature that lived in a cave, or some deep rift among the rocks by day, and came prowling out by night in search of food. Such a creature as ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn

... and sighed full deep. And as he sighed, lo, in that moment the moon peeped forth of a cloud-rift and he beheld the nun looking up at him with eyes deep and wistful, and, as she gazed, her lips curved in slow and tender smile ere her lashes drooped, and sighing, she hid her face against him in the folds of her mantle, while Beltane must needs bethink him of other eyes so very like, ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... own, including such monsters as the one which I had seen, which may well have been the old 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 this had no doubt been compensated for by nature in other directions. Certainly ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of the rift between them made her more precious because of its affectionate human quality. She had been kinder to Graham, more mysterious about him, to draw Bobby back. Yet ever since his arrival at the Cedars, Graham ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp

... without shadows, Thou who, 'neath the shadow, so long Hast sat with thy white hands close-folded, And lips that could utter no song; Through a rift in the cloud, for an instant, Thine eyes caught a glimpse of that shore, And Earth with its gloom was forgotten, And ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)

... 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 ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory

... the Milky Way is well worth observing, being marked by singular variations of brilliancy. Near Arided (the principal star of Cygnus, and now lying due east—some twenty-five degrees from the zenith) there is seen a straight dark rift, and near this space is another larger cavity, which has been termed the northern Coal-sack. The space between [gamma], [delta], and [beta] Cygni is covered by a large oval mass, exceedingly rich and brilliant. The neighbouring branch, extending from [epsilon] ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor

... who told him that the morning was fair, and, at his bidding, opened a door which admitted to the open terrace overlooking the sea. Having stepped forth, Basil stood for a moment sniffing the cool air with its scent from the vineyards, and looking at the yellow rift in the eastern sky; then he followed a path which skirted the villa's outward wall and led towards the dwelling of Aurelia. Presently he reached the ruined wall of the little garden, and here a voice challenged him, that of a servant ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... us a sparing lunch of thin sandwiches and a frugal flask of modest, blushing brandy, which we diluted at a stingy little fountain spring which dropped economically through a rift in the rock, as if its nymph were conscious that such a delicious drink should not be wasted. As it was, it refreshed us, and we were resting in a blessed repose under the green leaves, when we heard footsteps, and an ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland

... observation even the veriest amateur finds himself recognizing certain shapes or appearances—a narrow dark belt running slopingly across the equator from one of the main cloud zones to the other, or a rift in one of the colored bands, or a rotund white mass apparently floating above the equator, or a broad scallop in the edge of a belt like that near the site of the celebrated "red spot," whose changes of color and aspect ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss

... carrying home her dead sailor's bird; the village schoolmaster, in whom a rift in the clouds revives the memory of his little daughter; the old huntsman unable to cut through the stump of rotten wood—touch our hearts at once and for ever. The secret is given in the rather prosaic apology for not relating a tale about poor ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... 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 of ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... we dig a grave? In such hard ground, knives would make no impression, and the body must be buried deeply, or it would be rooted up by the dingoes, whose howl we could plainly hear around us, as they bayed at the moon. We spread ourselves out in different directions, in the hope of finding some rift or recess that would answer the purpose, but in the imperfect light, we failed to discover anything, so were compelled to wait for dawn. I do not think any of us slept much. One of our little party suddenly snatched away in so unforeseen a manner, gave us all food for reflection—for which ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden

... with the results ascribed to it by Lamarck, and not the false Charles-Darwinian natural selection that does not correspond with facts, and cannot result in specific differences such as we now observe. But, waiving this, the "my's," within which a little rift had begun to show itself in 1866, might well become as mute in 1869 as they could become without attracting attention, when Mr. Darwin saw the passages just quoted, and the hundred pages or ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... and amused himself with the thought of the wonder there would be at home. Suddenly he heard the sound of a horse's hoof, and grasping his rifle, stooped down behind a fallen rock. A moment later a mounted Indian dashed past the mouth of the rift. He was scarce twenty yards away, but Dick noticed the eagle feathers of his head-dress, the rifle slung across his shoulder, and the leggings decorated with tufts of hair. It was but a moment, and then he was gone. Dick waited a minute or two, and then ran in to tell ...
— The Golden Canyon - Contents: The Golden Canyon; The Stone Chest • G. A. Henty

... (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 ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various

... quarters for the most comfortable bed that was ever invented. It was great fun to lie listening to Rocky munching alongside, and to fall asleep with the out-of-door feeling, and the stars looking in from the rift ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant

... 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 of ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... 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

... 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 ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... 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 ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... the final shock. To their unbounded amazement the "Sea Bee," instead of dashing against the cliffs, appeared to pass directly into them as though they were but shadows of a solid substance, and in another minute had shot, like an arrow from a bow, through a rift barely wide enough ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe

... again and as her head went down Wiley stared straight ahead and blinked. He had known the Colonel and loved him well, and his father had loved him, too; but that rift had come between them and until it was healed he could never be a friend of Virginia's. She distrusted him in everything—in his silence and in his speech, his laughter and his anger, in his evasions and when he talked ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge

... open ground to wait for daylight. De Spain was wakeful, and his eyes rested with curiosity on the huge bulk of Music Mountain, rising overwhelmingly above him. Through the Gap that divided the great, sentinel-like front of El Capitan, marking the northern face of the mountain rift, from Round Top, the south wall of the opening, stars shone vividly, as if lighting the way ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman

... 'northeast and by north.' This latter direction I 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 center of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... by 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 ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... stately house one instant showed, Through a rift, on the vessel's lea; What manner of creatures may be those That build upon ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... as though from a great distance, Vaillant's voice saying irritatedly, "Let Paula take care of him, Webber. Look at this—we're going to cross another rift—" ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton

... 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 of sweet and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... sharpshooters flamed against them. Some galloped on and gave the orders. Some threw up their arms and fell, or, crashing to earth with a wounded horse, disentangled themselves and stumbled on through the iron rain. The sun drew close to the vast and melancholy forests across the river. Through a rift in the smoke, there came a long and crimson shaft. It reddened the river, then struck across the shallows to Malvern Hill, suffused with a bloody tinge wood and field and the marshes by the creeks, then splintered against the hilltop and made a hundred guns to gleam. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... 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 them and the ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt

... a story told By one of Black Beard's men Who had done evil things for gold, That one morning, out at sea, The fog made a sudden lift, And from the high poop, looking through the rift, He saw Twenty canoes, each with six warriors, Paddling straight toward the rising sun, Where the wind made a flaw— He swore he saw And counted twenty hulls, Circled about by screaming gulls— Then such a storm came down That some prayed on that hellion ship, But he did not— ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen

... liberal-democratic-socialistic conception of the state but to the concept itself, is to be found in the doctrine of Fascism. For while the disagreement between Liberalism and Democracy, and between Liberalism and Socialism lies in a difference of method, as we have said, the rift between Socialism, Democracy, and Liberalism on one side and Fascism on the other is caused by a difference in concept. As a matter of fact, Fascism never raises the question of methods, using in its political praxis now liberal ways, now democratic means and at times even socialistic ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various

... and the seraphim! Slave of the wheel of labor, 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 aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, Plundered, profaned and disinherited, Cries protest to the judges of the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various

... highways, 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. The chapter on the Brotherhood of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... of the happy, Such the minds of merry maidens: Like the early dawn of spring-time, Like the rising Sun in summer No such radiance awaits me, With my young heart filled with terror; Happiness is not my portion, Like the flat-shore of the ocean, Like the dark rift of the storm-cloud, Like the cheerless nights of winter! Dreary is the day in autumn, Dreary too the autumn evening, Still more dreary is my future!" An industrious old maiden, Ever guarding home and kindred, Spake these words ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.

... 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 ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... round again. The last thing attended to before putting on his coat was always carefully to brush and dispose his hair. Until within two or three years, he had been able to keep up appearances by coaxing a gray rift across the top of the bald place; but it had grown month by month thinner and grayer, and more difficult to keep in position, until at last he had bravely told himself it was a vanity and a delusion, and had consigned it ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... gloomy on either side, and the seething, 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 ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... 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 different beings should be ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... 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 ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... of 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 respiratory ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... But let me go on. I was also told that your information would be in our hands within twenty-four hours, and then, I learned that Ydo was conducting the negotiations. That was the rift within the lute. I immediately became frightened. I did not know what it meant. What I did know was that Ydo stops at nothing to gain her ends. And of course, ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... sun was shining upon him through a rift in the wall. The church was full of smothered sounds—stifled groans from helpless men, stiffened by lying still, and trying to move. Jim managed to raise himself a little, at which Denny Callaghan gave ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce

... 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 ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac

... contrary," said 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, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... hands ever forgot themselves so far as to applaud, as the least sign of approbation of Austrian military music would have been looked upon as treason to the Italian Fatherland. All public life in Venice also suffered by this extraordinary rift between the general public and the authorities; this was peculiarly apparent in the relations of the population to the Austrian officers, who floated about publicly in Venice like oil on water. The populace, too, behaved with no less reserve, or one might even say hostility, to the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner

... 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 ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall

... knowledge as to the physiology and psychology of the sex 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 ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... the cloud-rift broadens, spanning earth that's under, Wide our world displays its worth, man's strife and strife's success: All the good and beauty, wonder crowning wonder, Till my heart and soul applaud ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... supplied in each other's lives a long-felt want—if only, that is, she could control her curious aptitude for jealousy and the sexual impulse to vex. There, he felt, she broke the convention of their relations and brought in serious realities, and this little rift it was that had widened to a now considerable breach. He knew that in every sane moment she dreaded and wished to heal that breach as much as he did. But the deep simplicities of the instincts they had tacitly agreed to bridge over washed the piers of their ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells

... he took the book to the door. Above the tall houses of the narrow street was a rift ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth

... through the shade, and skirting swift The walls of Paradise, through night's dark rift Lilith fled far; nor stopped lest deadly snare Or peril by the wayside lurked. The air Grew chill. Loud beat her heart, as through the wind Echoed, ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier

... the clouds lifting, some islet will be presented standing alone, with the tops of its trees dipping out of sight in pearly gray fringes; or, lifting higher, and perhaps letting in a ray of sunshine through some rift overhead, the whole island will be set free and brought forward in vivid relief amid the gloom, a girdle of silver light of dazzling brightness on the water about its shores, then darkening again and vanishing back into the general gloom. Thus island after island may be seen, singly or ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... office. He went to the window and stared upwards at the crazy patchwork of the sky. For all he knew, in such a sky there might be cracks. In fact, as he looked, he could make out a rift, and beyond that a ... hole ... a small patch where there was no color, and yet the sky there was not black. There were no stars there, though points of light were clustered ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey

... painted mountains of a picture. The light was gone from the east, and there everything was chill and grey; the barren rocks looked so desolate that one shuddered with horror of the cold. But the sun fell gold and red, and the rift in the clouds was a kingdom of gorgeous light; the earth and its petty inhabitants died away, and in the crimson flame I could almost see Lucifer standing in his glory, god-like and young; Lucifer in all majesty, surrounded by his court ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... 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 broken ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... 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 in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... that the Pythagorean doctrine in its entirety was too high a one for its adherents, and a rift between Pythagorean religion and Pythagorean science was inevitable. Those who were capable of appreciating the scientific side of the movement would tend more and more to neglect the religious rule which it prescribed, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... concerned himself so seriously about the affairs of Elizabeth's heart. The very next day the rift ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... 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 ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse

... Without a friend to lead the way, himself Guiding us all. So 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 clomb the steep; And in brief ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... between successive rings of bright matter, which appeared nearly straight, owing to the inclination in which they lay relatively to us. These bright rings surrounded an undefined central luminous mass. Recent photographs by Mr. Russell showed that the great rift in the Milky Way in Argus, which to the eye was void of stars, was in reality ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... 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 instinct ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... 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 Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... clearly what I saw not at the time,—that my weakness came upon me fr-rom my own lack of str-rength to make an effort. I was cr-rushed by a gr-rief when I left my land to come to America. I allowed it to paralyze my will. I let myself dr-rift, not caring enough about what became of me to exert myself to ward off poverty. Poverty never had been mine,—I did not r-realize it, but I did know well the meaning of self-r-respect and honor, and it was base of me to permit my ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton

... are in a maze, in a weltering world of woods; you can see neither the earth nor the sky, but a confusion of the growth and decay of centuries, and must traverse them by your compass or your science of woodcraft,—a rift through the trees giving one a glimpse of the opposite range or of the valley beneath, and he is more at sea than ever; one does not know his own farm or settlement when framed in these mountain treetops; all look ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... to think we are too comfortable in the hut and hope it will not make us slack; but it is good to see everyone in such excellent spirits—so far not a rift in the social arrangements. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... eyes were bright, her lips tremulous. He slipped his hand along the table and touched her fingers. Then she flashed a look at him—appeal, reproach, tenderness, all were expressed in it. Was she expecting him to dance? Did she want to mix with the rift-raff there; wish him to make an exhibition of himself in this hurly-burly? A voice said, "Good-evening!" Before them stood Kasteliz, in a dark coat ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... asked her whether she had heard from Temple latterly. 'No; dear little fellow!' cried she, and I saw in a twinkling what it was that the squire liked in her, and liked it too. I caught sight of myself, as through a rift of cloud, trotting home from the hunt to a glad, frank, unpretending mate, with just enough of understanding to look up to mine. For a second or so it was pleasing, as a glance out of his library ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... by a river, now frozen to its bed. But, from the hut door, the rift which marks its course in the dark ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum

... 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 together. The snow will be trodden ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... apparently broken up, even thus early in the autumn; and for that day, and several days following, we had nothing but wind, rain, and storm. The sky was as dusky as Miss March's grey gown; broken sometimes in the evening by a rift of misty gold, gleaming over Nunnely Hill, as if to show us what September ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... husbands and wives sometimes goes unexplained, and the rift between them widens through life. I know some houses where the wife enters at one door and the husband at another; where if they meet on the stairs, they do not salute each other. Under the same roof they have lived for years and have not spoken. One word would heal all discord, and that ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... 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 ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... that our last meeting in the little restaurant at the Capital had left no traces of embarrassment in me: I was, in fact, rather aggressively anxious to reveal myself to him as one who has thriven on the views he condemned, as one in whose unity of mind there is no rift. He was alone, apparently waiting for someone, leaning against a steam radiator in one of his awkward, angular poses, looking out ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... so the ethereal vault; encroachment none 50 Was there, nor loss; 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, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... and 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 who had caught a glimpse of that vision knew that ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various

... 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 ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne

... 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 risk has ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... P. D. & Q. The caliph merely smiles and talks about Hammerstein and the musical lasses. There is a record of tremendous altercation at breakfast in a "Where-to-Dine-Well" tavern between a magnate and his wife, the rift within the loot being that the wife calculated their fortune at a figure $3,000,000 higher than did her future divorce. Oh, well, I, myself, heard a similar quarrel between a man and his wife because he found fifty cents less in his pockets than he thought he had. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... 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, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... a horrible rift All in the rock's hard side, A bleak and blasted oak o'erspread The ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White

... 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 ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... animal with its young, and, though not unsocial by nature, he was glad to be among strangers for the time. They climbed hither and thither over the rocks, and lifted their streaming faces for the views which the guide pointed out; and in a rift of the spray they really caught one glorious glimpse of the whole sweep of the Fall. The next instant the spray swirled back, and they were glad to turn for a sight of the rainbow, lying in a circle on the rocks as quietly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... none. Memory has softened down all the past into one uniform tone, as the mellowing distance wraps in one solemn purple the mountains which, when close to them, have many a barren rock and gloomy rift, All behind is good. And, building on this hope, he looks forward with calmness, and feels that no ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... try to," 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 ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... 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 was true, and it was my fault; but really it was with difficulty ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • 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 ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley

... 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 ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... convulsion of nature broke the African continent all along its spine, and formed this system of lakes. Another break occurs on the high plateau, from Portuguese East Africa in the south to British East Africa in the north, along the Great Rift Valley, with its magnificent escarpments and weird scenery, prolonged through Lake Rudolf to the Red Sea and on to the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley. Great volcanoes, now mostly extinct, though some to ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... on the grass under it, and one of them, a very handsome Christian boy, spoke to us in Italian and English. I scarcely remember a brighter and purer day than that of our departure. The sky was a sheet of spotless blue; every rift and scar of the distant hills was retouched with a firmer pencil, and all the outlines, blurred away by the haze of the previous few days, were restored with wonderful distinctness. The temperature was hot, but not ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... 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 by the ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox

... steadily down on them; then it swayed violently, as two or three of the brutes immediately in front fell beneath the bullets, while their neighbors made violent efforts to press off sideways. Then a narrow wedge-shaped rift appeared in the line, and widened as it came closer, and the buffaloes, shrinking from their foes in front, strove desperately to edge away from the dangerous neighborhood; the shouts and shots were redoubled; the hunters were almost choked by the cloud of dust, through which they could see the ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... refuge on the foot-pavements of the covered ways, the umbrellas flitting past in the downpour, and the cabs that dashed with increased clatter and speed along the wellnigh deserted roads. Presently there was a rift in the clouds; and a red glow arose in the west. Then a whole army of street-sweepers came into sight at the end of the Rue Montmartre, driving a lake of liquid mud before ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... at Delphi, at the foot of Mount Parnassus. At Dodona it was Zeus who spoke by the rustling of the sacred oaks. At Delphi it was Apollo who was consulted. Below his temple, in a grotto, a current of cool air issued from a rift in the ground. This air the Greeks thought[59] was sent by the god, for he threw into a frenzy those who inhaled it. A tripod was placed over the orifice, a woman (the Pythia), prepared by a bath in the sacred spring, took her seat on the tripod, and received the inspiration. At once, ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos

... 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 ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... 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

... understood that the Rodneys are to be the guests of the Odell-Carneys while in London. It won't be the season, of course, so there won't be much of a commotion in the smart set. It is our dear Edith's desire to slip into the charmed circle through the rift that the Rodneys make. ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon

... pulpit or the class; or it may be 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

... wall, as he turned away from the Pierce car. A little apart from the human current she stood, still and expectant. As if to point her out as the chosen of gods and men, the questing sun, bursting in triumph through a cloud-rift, sent a long shaft of gold to encompass and irradiate her. To the end, whether with aching heart or glad, Hal was to see her thus, in flashing, recurrent visions; a slight, poised figure, all gracious ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... all. Only a journalist. But you perceive the widening rift in the family lute. (A silence.) Pardon this glimpse into the ...
— The Title - A Comedy in Three Acts • Arnold Bennett

... 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 ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles

... Ducs de Valentinois. The 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 ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... resignedly down for the night, while others again were ravenously devouring, no one 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 ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... 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 ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... out, upheaved From his right hip his ponderous other-arm. And hit and harmed had been Amyclae's king; But, ducking low, he smote with one stout fist The foe's left temple—fast the life-blood streamed From the grim rift—and on his shoulder fell. While with his left he reached the mouth, and made The set teeth tingle; and, redoubling aye His plashing blows, made havoc of his face And crashed into his cheeks, till all abroad He lay, and throwing ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus

... 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 by another ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various

... which the enthusiasm of many English critics appears cold and constrained. So unfaltering a note of admiration sounds gratefully in the ears of Shakespeare's countrymen. Yet on closer investigation there seems a rift within the lute. When one turns to the French versions of Shakespeare, for which the chief of Shakespeare's French encomiasts have made themselves responsible, an Englishman is inclined to moderate his exultation ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... 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

... 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 the blessed ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... 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 not touch bottom ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... King gave ear; And Cedd within those mountains passed his Lent, Driving with prayer and fast the spirits accurst With ignominy forth. Foundations next He laid with sacred pomp. Fair rose the walls: All day the March sea blew its thunder blasts Through wide-mouthed trumpets of ravine or rift On winding far to where in wooden cell The old man prayed, while o'er him rushed the cloud Storm-borne from crag to crag. Serener breeze, With alternation soft in Nature's course, Following ere long, great Easter's harbinger, Thus spake he: 'I must keep the Feast at ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... the 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

... brings no melting of her ice-bound heart. The glaciers grow every day. Michael cursed his fate. With all his treasures he can not buy his wife's love. It is all the worse for him that he is rich; splendor and great wealth widen the rift between them. Poverty binds close within its four walls those who belong to each other; laborers and fishermen, who have only one room and one bed, are more fortunate than he. The woodman, whose wife holds the other end of the saw when he is ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... 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 ...
— Harper's Young People, December 2, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... Carmen. Ames had yielded to her previously expressed wish that he refrain from calling at the Hawley-Crowles mansion, or attempting to force his attentions upon the young girl. But in this matter he remained characteristically obdurate. And thereby a little rift was started. For the angry Beaubien, striving to shield the innocent girl, had vented her abundant wrath upon the affable Ames, and had concluded her denunciation with a hint of possible exposure of certain ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... beauty, which, gathering and increasing, culminates at West 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, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... they reached the valley she was quite herself again. It was the middle of the afternoon when they entered the valley, and gazing back at old Snow-Top, with his towering summit piercing the skies, they thanked God for their deliverance. About the snowy peak there clung a rift of vapor, as if some passing cloud had caught upon it and ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick

... father looked. Would I send them one? And the address was like this: "Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of 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 ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... 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 period to be filled up ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... the same contradiction as absolute scepticism has,—in fact, it is only its practical counterpart; for both scepticism and pessimism involve the assumption that it is possible to reach a position outside the realm of being, from which it may be condemned as a whole. But the rift between actual and ideal must fall within the real or intelligible world, do what the pessimists will; and a condemnation of man which is not based on a principle realized by humanity, is a fiction of abstract thought, which lays stress on the actuality of the imperfect ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... 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 ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... we alight, 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 ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... includes Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe; sudden onset of fever, headache, and muscle aches followed by hemorrhaging in the bowels, urine, nose, and gums; mortality rate is approximately 30%. Rift Valley fever - viral disease affecting domesticated animals and humans; transmission is by mosquito and other biting insects; infection may also occur through handling of infected meat or contact with blood; geographic distribution includes eastern and southern Africa where cattle ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... from Byfield, and brought it to focus upon one of these peepshow rifts: and lo! at the foot of the shaft, imaged, as it were, far down in a luminous well, a green hillside and three figures standing. A white speck fluttered; and fluttered until the rift closed again. Flora's handkerchief! Blessings on the brave hand that waved it!—at a moment when (as I have since heard and knew without need of hearing) her heart was down in her shoes, or, to speak accurately, in the milkmaid Janet's. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Less luck than her's, Medea dread, With which her rival she destroy'd, Great Creon's child, then proudly fled, When the robe bane-imbued, her gift, Enwrapp'd the new-wed bride in flame? But neither herb, nor root from rift Of lone rock ta'en, are here to blame; In every harlot's bed lies he Anointed with oblivion; Ah, ah, 'tis plain he walketh free Protected by some mightier one. But Varus! thou shalt suffer yet! Thou shalt re-seek these longing arms, And ne'er from me re-alienate Thy mind, ...
— Targum • George Borrow

... I knew not,) help me as when life begun,— Rift the hills and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... of the skiff incessantly, and its soft patter induced melancholy thoughts, and the wind whistled as it flew down into the boat's battered bottom through a rift, where some loose splinters of wood were rattling together—a disquieting and depressing sound. The waves of the river were splashing on the shore, and sounded so monotonous and hopeless, just as if they were telling something unbearably dull and heavy, which was boring ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... Imagine then our dismay when I reported my view of Mr. Carville in his brushed blue serge and Derby hat, his glazed linen collar and dark green tie, passing sedately down the Avenue, a neat child in each hand. There seemed to be no rift in this man's armour of respectability. He seemed determined to maintain a great and terrible contrast between his inner and outer life. O supreme artist! I stretched myself on my sofa ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... becoming more overshadowed by evening. The misty gloom, usual at twilight, became thicker; it was like a growth of darkness at the bottom of a well. The opening of the creek seaward, a narrow passage, traced on the almost night-black interior a pallid rift where the waves were moving. You must have been quite close to perceive the hooker moored to the rocks, and, as it were, hidden by the great cloaks of shadow. A plank thrown from on board on to a low and level projection of the cliff, the only point on which ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... condemns him. 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

... fiercely that he killed him. Anxious to escape from his dark prison, Hiawatha waited till the giant sturgeon drifted on to the shore, then called for aid to his friends the sea-gulls, who worked with their claws and beaks till they made a wide rift in Nahma's side ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman

... sunset time, and the sky was overcast by dull grey clouds; but just over the Brahman quarter there was a rift in the grey, and the pent-up gold shone through. It seemed as if God were pouring out His beauty upon those Brahmans, trying to make them look up, and they would not. One by one we saw them go to their different courtyards, where the golden glow could not ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... had been roused to activity by Lottie's condition. They could now see a rift in the clouds, and one after another hurried to say that the storm was breaking, and it was not so bad; that boats could be seen, and perhaps they would soon ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose

... lot, let me remark," Jud Elderkin explained. "I do half believe he thinks he can see a rift in the cloud, and that some of these days hopes to get a chance to drag Jud Mabley out ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren

... the cave the roof dipped sharply down, and the sides closed 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, ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... Shif'less Sol, "that after the fall Adam an' Eve left by that rift between the hills, an' thar the Angel stood with the Flamin' Sword to keep 'em out. O' course they might hev crawled back down the hillside here, an' in other places, but I guess they wuz afeard. It's hard to hev had a fine thing an' then to hev lost it, harder than never ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... risk: very high food or waterborne diseases: bacterial and protozoal diarrhea, hepatitis A, and typhoid fever vectorborne diseases: dengue fever, malaria, yellow fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and Rift Valley fever are high risks in some locations water contact disease: schistosomiasis respiratory disease: ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... 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, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... because he could not shout and because he could not loosen himself, there came a rift in his madness. He remembered who he was, and all the old hatreds and bitterness welled ...
— Happy Ending • Fredric Brown

... above shifted a little. To those wrapped in true anticipation their shifting was as the first sign of a descending heaven. Somewhere behind the thick clouds there was a crescent moon, and when in the upper region of the sky a rift was made in the deep cloud cover, though she did not shine through, the sky beyond was lit by her light, and the upper edges of cloud were white ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... 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 ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... Aline's joy went out like a ray of moonlight swallowed up by a marauding cloud. She did not in the least understand what had happened, or what were the obligations to which he had committed her; but in any case the lute she had tuned had a rift in it, a big, bad rift, and it could make no music to-night. She felt suddenly at her worst instead of her best, as if she had tumbled off a bank of flowers in her prettiest frock into a bog. She longed to be cold and snappy and disagreeable, as a wife may ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... 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 more black ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... murmur, and Eustace sulked all the rest of the day; indeed, this has always seemed to me to have been the first little rift in his adherence to his cousin, but at that time his dependence was so absolute, and his power of separate action so small, that he submitted to the decree even while he grumbled; and when he found that Lord Erymanth viewed it as very undesirable for a young ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... came 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 ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... to think 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 ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint

... windowless framework of the railway carriage, watching the valleys drop away, curve by curve, as the train climbed. Far below lay the lake, a blue rift glimmering between pine-clad heights. Then a turn of the track and the lake was swept suddenly out of sight, while the mountains closed round—shoulder after green-clad shoulder, with fields of white narcissus flung across them like fairy ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... his home and his social life in Richmond, it would seem that every need of The Dreamer's being was now satisfied and the days of his life were moving in perfect harmony. But "the little rift within the lute" all too soon made its appearance. It was caused by the alarm of Mr. White, the owner and founder of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... by that time, had become Nazarenes, were "all zealous for the Law"? Was not the name of "Christian" first used to denote the converts to the doctrine promulgated by Paul and Barnabas at Antioch? Does the subsequent history of Christianity leave any doubt that, from this time forth, the "little rift within the lute" caused by the new teaching, developed, if not inaugurated, at Antioch, grew wider and wider, until the two types of doctrines irreconcilably diverged? Did not the primitive Nazarenism, or Ebionism, develop into the Nazarenism, and Ebionism, and ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... sorrow or towards joy you lift The sharpness of your trembling spears? Or do you seek, through the grey tears That blur the sky, in the heart of the triumphing blue, A deeper, calmer rift?" ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley

... 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 ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... 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 ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... comment upon it. Quick as the act was done came the Father's approval. John's crowds were not the only intent lookers-on that day. Jesus stands praying. Since He is going this road it must be a-knee. Then the rift in the upper blue, the Holy Spirit straight from the Father's presence comes upon the waiting Man and the voice of pleased approval. And the heart of Jesus thrilled with the sound of that approving voice. He could go any length, down any steep, if ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon

... 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 ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... convincing explanation of that loss of time. The smoke-stack, buff-coloured underneath, was white with salt, while the whistle- pipe glittered crystalline in the random sunlight that broke for the instant through a cloud-rift. The port lifeboat was missing, its iron davits, twisted and wrenched, testifying to the mightiness of the blow that had been struck the old Tryapsic. The starboard davits were also empty. The shattered ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London

... so. Were I the ghost that walk'd, I'd bid you mark Her eye, and tell me for what dull part in't You chose her: then I'd shriek, that even your ears Should rift to hear me; and the words that follow'd ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare

... well-worn path a short distance above the mine. The eastern sky now was light, and Rathburn saw a stone building above them. He also saw that they were on the steep slope of the big mountain on which the Dixie Queen was located, and that there was a rift in this mountain to the left which indicated the presence ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts

... 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 at their base. All this was plain enough, ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch

... 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 in the western wall. ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... 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 animal's neck lay ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce

... few white 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 back ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... 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. ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather

... is a rift in the clouds for you, too, and the vague something which sometimes loomed up in your horizon is gone.' How glad I am, no words can tell. What a change there will be! The old past shall be sweetened and sanctified by ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson

... exasperated 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 he was reading ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... pretty 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

... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... 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 ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... Then came an unexpected rift in the clouds, the receipt of a very friendly letter from Mr. Zenas Crane, the great paper manufacturer, of Massachusetts, who had contributed to a previous expedition, but whom I had never met. ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... into his bed. But that wouldn't disconcert 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, ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart

... hopeless would be the opening measures of "Tristan and Isolde" without that upward inflection which comes like a sunbeam through a rift in the cloud; with a downward inflection the effect would be that of unrelieved gloom. In the Prelude to "Lohengrin," Wagner pictures his angels in dazzling white. He uses the highest vibrating sounds at his command. But for the dwarfs who live in the gloom ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... leaves nothing for the imagination to desire. The heavens and the earth were both on fire. Silence added its awful and desolate majesty. Infinitude, immensity pressed down upon the soul on every side; not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air, not a rift on the breast of the sand, which was ruffled only with little ridges scarcely rising above its surface. Far as the eye could reach the horizon fell away into space, marked by a slender line, slim as the edge of a sabre,—like ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... 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 could really do something ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... 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

... land without shadows, Thou who, 'neath the shadow, so long Hast sat with thy white hands close-folded, And lips that could utter no song; Through a rift in the cloud, for an instant, Thine eyes caught a glimpse of that shore, And Earth with its gloom was forgotten, And Heaven is ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)

... a first rift of light began to shine in the dark place. But it was not broadened by the letter which he found waiting upon ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle

... a bad 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 ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... Chilkoot 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 ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... rarely seen it sweep except at Enderley. The weather had apparently broken up, even thus early in the autumn; and for that day, and several days following, we had nothing but wind, rain, and storm. The sky was as dusky as Miss March's grey gown; broken sometimes in the evening by a rift of misty gold, gleaming over Nunnely Hill, as if to show us what ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... lungs seemed bursting with the labor, he whirled to the surface again and drew another gasping breath. The storm had torn a rift in the clouds and through it looked the moon as if some god were peering through the curtain of mist to watch the havoc he was working. By this light Harrigan saw that he was being drawn down in a narrowing ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand

... 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

... inadvertent shuffling of a foot; or the sound of breathing. Nothing. Even the night roar of the city was missing; the silence was oppressive. At last he opened his eyes. A pall of gloom encompassed him—a pall without one rift of light. His fingers, moving slowly, explored the limits of the couch ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle

... 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 ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... known that Polly would not follow her, because of the cold wind that was blowing so briskly. A rift in the clouds had let the sunlight through, and when she reached the gate, the garden was bathed ...
— Princess Polly At Play • Amy Brooks

... either tropic now 'Gan thunder and both ends of heaven; the clouds From many a horrid rift abortive poured Fierce rain with lightning mixed, water with fire In ruin reconciled; nor slept the winds Within their stony caves, but rush'd abroad From the four hinges of the world, and fell On the vex'd wilderness; whose tallest pines Tho' rooted deep as high and sturdiest oaks, Bowed their ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... Benevent, Corporal of 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 Joffre might lay his hand on any one of ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... my hounds?" said he; "Draw back the lattice-bar and let them in." Through a cloud-rift the light fell noiselessly Upon the cottage floor; and, gaunt and thin, Leaped in the stag-hounds, bounding as in glee, Shaking the rain-drops from their shaggy skin; And as the maiden closed the spattered glass, A shadow faint over the ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald

... one hundred yards wide, 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. ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse

... ramping and snarling over him, rendering the task of regaining his feet or securing the ladder a matter of considerable difficulty. When he had at last succeeded in both efforts he was just by a hair's-breadth too late to be of any use. The Sheep had definitely disappeared under the ice-rift. ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... reality spaces between successive rings of bright matter, which appeared nearly straight, owing to the inclination in which they lay relatively to us. These bright rings surrounded an undefined central luminous mass. Recent photographs by Mr. Russell showed that the great rift in the Milky Way in Argus, which to the eye was void of stars, was in ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various

... 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

... 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, have cooped up the ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... was the signal for temporary peace. During his second Presidency, however, the little rift within the lute—the rift of insolvency, which eventually wrecked South African independence—began to ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... within those mountains passed his Lent, Driving with prayer and fast the spirits accurst With ignominy forth. Foundations next He laid with sacred pomp. Fair rose the walls: All day the March sea blew its thunder blasts Through wide-mouthed trumpets of ravine or rift On winding far to where in wooden cell The old man prayed, while o'er him rushed the cloud Storm-borne from crag to crag. Serener breeze, With alternation soft in Nature's course, Following ere long, great ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... increasing brilliancy of the sun. The road ran along the bottom of the deep valley, where there was change of scene with every curve of the Dordogne. A field of maize showed how different was the climate here from that of the bleak plateau above the deep rift in the rocks. I stopped beside a little runnel that came down from the wooded heights to pick some flowers of yellow balsam, and while there my eye fell upon a splendid green lizard basking in the sun. Here was another proof of the warm temperature ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... 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 ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... pause. Then his voice rang again, cheery, confident, unexcited, "Hold fast; I'm going to get you out of this. I can't get to you on this side; the rock is sheer. I'll have to leave you now and cross the rift high up and come down to you on the other side by which we ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young

... lads braced themselves for the final shock. To their unbounded amazement the "Sea Bee," instead of dashing against the cliffs, appeared to pass directly into them as though they were but shadows of a solid substance, and in another minute had shot, like an arrow from a bow, through a rift barely wide enough ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe

... are in such close and necessary harmony that even the thought of possible discord has become impossible. In its unity not only cognition and volition, but feeling also, must be blended and united. In some way or another it must have overcome the rift in discursive knowledge, and the immediate must for it be no longer the alien. It must be as direct as art, as ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... the sides closed 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 ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... the words 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 fell ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... one instant showed, Through a rift, on the vessel's lee; What manner of creatures may be those That build ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow

... 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

... westward, over the wet roofs still glimmering in the twilight, one pale green rift divided the heavy clouds, and in that rift the last of the daylight was dying. Across the way, in the house facing him, a woman was lighting a lamp. As a rule the inhabitants of Prospect Place did not draw the blinds of their upper ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... address a manifesto to the people in which he will advise them to give proper obedience to the Church and not to be estranged from her because his adversaries have been insolent and he himself harsh. But all these submissive words do not conceal the rift which already separates his mind from the essential basis of the Church of Rome. It sounds like cold irony when he writes: "What shall I do, Most Holy Father? I am at a complete loss. I cannot endure ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in restricting the mass of floating labour to definite areas of employment, they proved effective in sowing hatred between employer and employed, between rich and poor. But this social rift was not the only rift which was opening amidst the distress and misery of the time. The close of William Langland's poem is the prophecy of a religious revolution; and the way for such a revolution ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... 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, he was ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker

... 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 moon.) You ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... It is nearly always the bright lad of a family, the most promising, the mother's darling, that goes wrong; it is the brilliant students, the men of whom one says, "Ah, what could he not do if he would only try!" is those who trip, and quench their brilliance in the mud. A little rift in the fabric of the will, a little instability of temper, an unlucky week of idleness—these are the things that start a man towards the very gulf of doom. Bob Darbishire, the athlete, the delightful and exhilarating companion, was set gliding on the slope, and now he and his hopes ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman

... melted away, the flames shot up in fiercer volumes, vast 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 ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood

... The clear gap between the hills where he knew Old Forge nestled was gone. The open rift of sky that he had recognised a few moments before was now filled, as though a mountain had suddenly been moved into the gap. He went back to his seat and sat watching the line of the mountains. As he watched, the whole contour of the hills that he had known was changed ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher

... in from the opening; but the place was made bright by the warm glow that came from a kind of rift right at the far end of the cave, and through this was also wafted down the ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn

... connection 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 ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... all was, over and over again: that place he had selected where it was nearly always shaded—in that rift in the kopje where the soft herbage grew, and climbed and laced overhead, while the low murmur of the water gurgling from the rocks in the next rift fell gently upon his ear. He had selected that spot because it was ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn

... been made too; and the day after the steamer sailed we set off on our journey to the south. I do not know much about that journey. The things by the way were like objects in a mist to me and no more clearly discerned. Now and then there came a rift in the mist; something woke me up out of my sorrow-dream; and of those points and of what struck my eyes at those minutes I have a most intense and vivid recollection. I can feel yet the still air of one early morning's start, and hear the talk between my aunt and the hotel people about ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell

... a change more marvelous than before. It was as if the divine in the soul had suddenly been revealed through a rift in the sinful humanity. The whole defiant face became eager, the black eyes danced with question, the brows settled into straight pleasant lines, and the mouth sweetened as with ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill

... 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 ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... down 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

... unregenerate reactionists was Flavilla. To see her entire family married by machinery was enough for her; to witness such consummate and collective happiness became slightly cloying. Perfection can be overdone; a rift in a lute relieves melodious monotony, and when discords cease to amuse, one can always have the instrument ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers

... came up, flung himself from his panting steed, and, with his drawn sword in hand, forced himself through a rift in its side into the tree. There was a hollow within it large enough to allow a man to stand upright, and two funnel-like holes ran upwards into the branches. Finding nothing, Bouchier called for a hunting-spear, and thrust it as far as he could into ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth

... would have then seen might, however, as Hamlet observes, be "to consider somewhat too curiously" for ordinary up-to-date tourists. But even, granting all this to be true, the Palisades were already old, thrown up long ages before, between a rift in the earth's surface, where it cooled in columnar form. The rocky mould which held it, being of softer material, finally disintegrated and crumbled away, leaving the cliff with ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... the southward. A rift in the mist disclosed a two-masted, two-funnelled armoured cruiser about two ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman

... 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 clomb the steep; And ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... 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 recent ban on Somali livestock, because of 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, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... star, bright and scintillating like a floating soap bubble, while a handspan straight above that again a thin, crescent moon lay coldly on its back sending up a reflection of its own streaky, ghostly light from the distant lake which was no more than visible through a rift in the hills. ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... 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. ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various

... increasing, culminates at West 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 though ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... according to the maxim that more prudence and less piety is better than more piety and less prudence. His main desire was that they should always act together, presenting a united front, without a rift or a variation. He suppressed independence of mind, discouraged original thinking and unrestrained research, recommended commonly accepted opinions, and required all to hold without question the theology of St. Thomas. The training he imposed made ordinary men very ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... years ahead of us. I think there are to be many—for us both. The future is so bewildering—like a tangled and endless forest, and very dim to see in.... But sometimes there comes a rift in the foliage—and there is a glimpse of far skies shining. And for a moment one—'sees clearly'—into the depths—a little way.... And surmises something of what remains unseen. And imagines more, perhaps.... I wonder if ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... 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 litter here, A freckled whelp hag-born—not ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare

... 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. The chapter on the Brotherhood of the Misericordia at Florence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... object of a liberal education not only to obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... 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 the ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... 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 careful not to ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... 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 ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... Harkerside Moors, 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 and steeper as ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... him. But he guessed that she knew nothing definite, while suspecting much. She had shown the most acute concern at his own danger, and more than once implored Mark to do nothing but look after his own safety until Peter Ganns was back again. Meantime the rift between her spouse and herself appeared to grow. She was tearful and anxious, yet still chose to be vague, though she did admit that she thought she had glimpsed Robert Redmayne again, one evening. But Brendon did not press her again to confide in him, though Doria showed no ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts

... is astir at Fort Point and the man with the new motor boat over at Hough's Neck is giving it a little run before breakfast, with the muffler off, as usual. A gull goes over, flying low. You do not see but you hear the soft swish of the wings. By and by the sun shows through a rift in the fog and you begin to move before a faint air from the southwest. A half hour more and the shreds of fog are melting upward into the blue of a clear day, the wind fills your sail and you are sweeping eastward with wind and tide ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... Mrs. Brown 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 ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner

... turn defiantly upon the intruders to their domain, and menacingly open their gaping mouths, lined with orange, yellow, or rich blue; but ready to take flight all the same and plunge into the rock rift or ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn

... son by 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, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... 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 ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall

... 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 in two sharp-edged, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... seems, however, to have been regarded as serious enough by the Irish monks. The Synod broke up. Colman, with his Irish brethren, and a few English ones who threw in their lot with them, forsook Lindisfarne, and sailed away for Ireland. From that moment the rift between them and their English brethren grew steadily wider, and was never afterwards ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... were descending the home slope of the mountain they witnessed a rare and beautiful sight. A few light clouds had gathered around the moon, and these at last opened in a rift. The rays of light through the misty atmosphere created the perfect colors of a rainbow, and this phenomenon took the remarkable form of a shield, its base resting upon one cloud, and its point extending into a little opening in ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... good-sized streams which empty into the Merced River. When once started on its downward course, the water seems all spray. At the bottom of the first six-hundred-foot descent it made a mighty shower of mist like escaping steam from a giant rift in some titanic boiler, and soon reached the floor of the valley. The road from El Portal comes up on the north side of the river. We passed El Capitan, which rears its massive head three thousand three hundred feet in ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves

... 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 Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... chestnut-flower the beech, The mountain-ash with pear-bloom whitened o'er, And swine crunched acorns 'neath the boughs of elms. Nor is the method of inserting eyes And grafting one: for where the buds push forth Amidst the bark, and burst the membranes thin, Even on the knot a narrow rift is made, Wherein from some strange tree a germ they pen, And to the moist rind bid it cleave and grow. Or, otherwise, in knotless trunks is hewn A breach, and deep into the solid grain A path with wedges cloven; then fruitful slips Are set herein, and- no long time- behold! To heaven upshot ...
— The Georgics • Virgil

... 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 ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... mountains of a picture. The light was gone from the east, and there everything was chill and grey; the barren rocks looked so desolate that one shuddered with horror of the cold. But the sun fell gold and red, and the rift in the clouds was a kingdom of gorgeous light; the earth and its petty inhabitants died away, and in the crimson flame I could almost see Lucifer standing in his glory, god-like and young; Lucifer in all majesty, surrounded by his ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... Ogaden; independence referendum in Eritrea scheduled for April 1992 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%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... 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

... to 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 day is over, and night has already come on. Darkness follows ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... south the two lines converge and give place to one great valley (occupied by 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 these great valleys are a number of volcanic peaks, the greatest ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... size where it seemed desirable again to stop growing the valley resembled a narrow canon—hardly more than a deep rift in the ground. They were still standing on its floor; above them, the parallel edges of the rift marked the surface of the ring. The side walls of the canon were smooth, but there were still many places where they could ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... 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

... had taken his 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 the clouds ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty

... carpeted with dry rubbish. At long intervals, a lantern guttering above a door showed them a hand's-breadth of the dirty path, a litter of broken withes and basket-weavers' refuse, between the mouldy wall of the town and a row of huts, no less black and silent. In this greasy rift the air lay thick, as ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout

... however, thought he recognized a heap of ruins, to which he drew Barbicane's attention. It was about the 80th parallel, in 30@ longitude. This heap of stones, rather regularly placed, represented a vast fortress, overlooking a long rift, which in former days had served as a bed to the rivers of prehistorical times. Not far from that, rose to a height of 17,400 feet the annular mountain of Short, equal to the Asiatic Caucasus. Michel Ardan, with ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne

... 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. She was seated ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... 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 ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... There was one rift in the lute of lumber trust solidarity in Centralia. Business and professional men had long been groveling in sycophantic servility at the feet of "the clique." There was only ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin

... 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 gardens and woods came now and again ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... absolute stillness may continue for ten or more hours. During this time it is absolutely inert, but at last the sac—for such it is—opens gently, and there is poured out a brownish glairy fluid. At first the stream is small, but at length its flow enlarges the rift in the cyst, and the cloudy volume of its contents rolls out, and the hyaline film that inclosed it is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... general council. But 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 (Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria), ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis

... moment fear 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

... parties, but the theory did not go closely with 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, and patriotism meant sinking ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer

... worked out: the ring could not possibly have got into such a place unless it had been put there by hand. It could not have rolled there, on account of its shape, nor could it have fallen from the bed, because the pillow was closely joined to the head of the bed, round which ran a raised edge with no rift therein. Cardan concludes: "I know that much may be said over this matter, but nothing, forsooth, which will convince a man, ever so little inclined to superstition, that there was no boding sign manifested thereby, foretelling the ruin of my position and good ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... seems Exquisite to the utmost bounds of pain. I cannot live, except as I may be Compelled for love of thee. O let us drift, Frail as the floating silver of a star, Or like the summer humming of a bee, Or stream-reflected sunlight through a rift. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... sensed the makings of a rift between Susan and these young mothers, Lucy and Antoinette, and knowing from her own experience how torn a woman could be between rearing a family and work for the cause, she pleaded with Susan to be patient with them. "Let them rest a while in peace and quietness, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz

... of the two gentlemen that the greater part of the crowd had retired beyond a little ledge of roughened ice and snow which cut the improvised arena into two nearly equal parts from where they could conveniently see Monsieur de St. Aulaire and Mr. Calvert as they skated about. This rift in the smoothness of the ice was some fifteen feet wide and extended far out from the shore, so that those wishing to pass beyond it had to skate out around its end and so get to the other side. Monsieur de St. Aulaire ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe

... There was a 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 ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr

... station, trying the door, 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 over ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower

... home and his social life in Richmond, it would seem that every need of The Dreamer's being was now satisfied and the days of his life were moving in perfect harmony. But "the little rift within the lute" all too soon made its appearance. It was caused by the alarm of Mr. White, the owner and founder of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... descend into its heat and silence. The track is as steep and broken as that which goes up from hence, but not nearly so narrow, and without its elements of terror, for kukuis, lauhalas, ohias, and ti trees, with a lavish growth of ferns and trailers, grow luxuriantly in every damp rift of rock, and screen from view the precipices of the pali. The valley looks as if it could only be reached in a long day's travel, so very far it is below, but the steepness of the track makes it accessible in ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... 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 ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser

... thought but one of dogged perseverance to keep up his quest, with neither hint nor sign that his quest was any nearer the end than it had ever been, he had entered Bristol Bob's, here, in the role of Smarlinghue; and now, as a rift that had opened in the clouds, there had come sudden and amazing joy. It held him now in thrall. It threatened even to make him forget that he was for the moment Smarlinghue—forget what, as Smarlinghue, Smarlinghue dare not forget—the role ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... as the roof of a barn. Cytisus and 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 wish to intrude upon ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... plateau in east, highland area in west; Great Rift Valley separates East and West Banks of ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... gaudily 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 in ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... 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, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... 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 ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard

... 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

... 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 ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... 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 ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... Commons wish that the States-General shall form a single united Assembly, and the other orders wish for three. But on this supreme issue the Commons are all agreed, and the others are not. An ominous rift appears, and we already perceive the minority of nobles and priests, who, in the hour of conflict, were to rule the fate of European society. From all these papers, the mandate of united France, it ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... 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

... the picture. All as yet is sombre 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 they form but the foremost line—the ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King

... of 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, ...
— Burke • John Morley

... 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 ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac

... one mold. But what struck the centurion and his comrades as most remarkable in their appearance were the flash and sparkle from their slender ankles, as the setting sun suddenly shot a fleeting ray through a rift in the heavy clouds. Each of these fellows wore on his legs gold bands set with precious stones, and the rubies which glittered on the harness of Seleukus's horse ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have tried to make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be almost equally adored, and this gave Eug['e]nie great pain, although it did not change her love or make a rift in her belief ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... opportunity of seeing it. The castle is on the very edge of a terrific precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker

... next 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 had left the stable and gone out ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton

... came a 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

... He watched the crowds of people who had taken refuge on the foot-pavements of the covered ways, the umbrellas flitting past in the downpour, and the cabs that dashed with increased clatter and speed along the wellnigh deserted roads. Presently there was a rift in the clouds; and a red glow arose in the west. Then a whole army of street-sweepers came into sight at the end of the Rue Montmartre, driving a lake of liquid mud before ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... became fainter; he heard retreating footsteps, and at last they died away entirely. Through a rift in the trees straight above him the white, cold stars of the night gleamed down on him, and Howland stared up at them fixedly until they seemed to be hopping and dancing about in the skies. He wanted to swear—yell—fight. In these moments that he lay on his back in ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood

... 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 ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman

... spacious gloom. He opened the great doors gently, and came out into the soft spring night air. All was silent now. The narrow side-canal had a glimmer of moonlight, the opposite palace was black, with one spot of light where a window shone: overhead in the narrow rift of dark-blue sky a flock of stars flew like bright birds through the soft velvet gloom. The water lapped mournfully against the marble steps, and a gondola lay moored to the posts, gently nodding to its black ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... 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 ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily

... 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 rear ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles

... 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 ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... hour flew by, and the moon, glinting now and then through a rift in the clouds, whitened the curling waves, but showed no signs of the Brixham, or ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables

... 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, ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott

... ago the good father was away on a holiday, visiting a missionary brother in an adjoining town. In his absence the mission was entered through a rift made in the wall, and three hundred taels of silver, all the money to the last sou that he possessed, were stolen. Suspicion fell upon a Christian, who was not only an active Catholic himself, but whose fathers before ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison

... 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, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... 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 a strange impression,—he ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... confidence, 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 have disputed the suspicions. Possibly some whispers may ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... the murmur, and Eustace sulked all the rest of the day; indeed, this has always seemed to me to have been the first little rift in his adherence to his cousin, but at that time his dependence was so absolute, and his power of separate action so small, that he submitted to the decree even while he grumbled; and when he found that Lord Erymanth viewed it as very undesirable for a young ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the drifting pandemonium of the pavement, was in a sense typical of his own existence in New York. He had given so much of his life into another's hands and now the anchor was dragging. He was suddenly confronted with the possibility of a rift in his relations with Elizabeth; with a sudden surging doubt, not of Elizabeth herself but simply a feeling of insecurity with regard to their future. He only realised in those moments how much he had leaned upon her, how completely she seemed ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... 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 mixed up, and separated from each other ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... course it is; but then their marriage has long had a rift in it, so that the tearing asunder was easier than one would have thought. He himself sees that, after what has occurred, it is ...
— The Live Corpse • Leo Tolstoy

... departure. A breath of fragrant breeze, heavy laden with clover and sweet with the stretch of cool, moist shade through which it had passed, came sweeping across the road, and the sounds of a farm hand whetting his scythe. Through a rift in the trees appeared a patch of delicate blue sky and the edge of a rosy cloud. Mrs. LeMasters came to the wistful end of an alluring and musty reminiscence and gazed regretfully at the tawdry beauties of the present. Then she turned her eyes upon Joe, ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... us note that in Catholicism as early as in Protestantism appeared the sharp rift between intellect and belief. Montaigne, a man of the world, is outwardly a conformist, but a real skeptic. A nominal Catholic, he corresponds to Shakspere, a nominal Protestant. Montaigne reveals the world of one personality as, frankly as Shakspere pictures a world of humanity, and in ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... 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 ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard

... fresh memory 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 ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field

... horse and rode to town. It was still snowing softly, but a rift of blue and a shaft of sunlight overhead gave promise of a let-up, while a wind with a nip in it prophesied a drop in the barometer and a ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... of the cave the dog collar was carefully examined, bringing to light the fact that the dog belonged to a Beverly H. Pembroke. Shorty would have the reward. Their lunch boxes and coffee-pot were gathered up, and the climb to the cliff began. The great moon was just lifting her yellow head above a rift of clouds in the eastern sky. Soon the flat top of the crag was reached, and in a moment a roaring fire was kindled. They had filled the coffee-pot with water before leaving the stream in the canyon, and it was now swung on a cross-pole over the fire. Each fellow put his share of the ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley

... sauntered on, eagerly scanning its face, in the hope of finding a spot where it might be scalable by men carrying moderately heavy burdens. And at length he reached, as he believed, such a spot, where the black rock seemed to have been riven by some mighty natural convulsion, the rift forming a steep and exceedingly narrow gully leading to the summit. Naturally, he at once started to climb this gully, with the object of testing its practicability; and he had traversed nearly two-thirds of its length when, as he scrambled ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... the storm gave signs of having spent its worst fury, and just before supper a rift appeared in the clouds on ...
— The Rushton Boys at Treasure Cove - Or, The Missing Chest of Gold • Spencer Davenport

... 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 ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed

... features of sameness never long the same. If you traverse it on foot or 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 ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... "Christian" first used to denote the converts to the doctrine promulgated by Paul and Barnabas at Antioch? Does the subsequent history of Christianity leave any doubt that, from this time forth, the "little rift within the lute" caused by the new teaching, developed, if not inaugurated, at Antioch, grew wider and wider, until the two types of doctrine irreconcilably diverged? Did not the primitive Nazarenism, or Ebionism, develop into the Nazarenism, and Ebionism, and Elkasaitism ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... this first part of my text: the result of that direct action is complete—'the God of hope fill you' with no shrunken stream, no painful trickle out of a narrow rift in the rock, but a great exuberance which will pass into a man's nature in the measure of his capacity, which is the measure of his trust and desire. There are two limits to God's gifts to men: the one is the limitless limit of God's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... 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, and his ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... 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 ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman

... in this part appeared to have sunk in, forming a great, funnel-shaped depression, which terminated in the centre in a circular rift or opening about forty feet in diameter. It was a whirlpool—a perfect maelstrom of mud, sloping down on every side to this silent and ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Douglas was at war with the Administration, it was not certain that the quarrel might not be made up. There was no other leader who would be so formidable at the head of a reunited Democratic party. Lincoln pondered the question, how could the rift between Douglas and the Democratic machine be made irrevocable? And now a new phase of Lincoln appeared. It was the political strategist He saw that if he would disregard his own chance of election-as he had done from a simpler motive four years before—he ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... boles the storm-wind rolls, Vext of the sea-driv'n rain; And, up in the clift, through many a rift, The voices of torrents complain. The sad marsh-fowl and the lonely owl Are heard in the fog-wreaths grey, When the warrigal wakes, and listens, and takes To the woods that ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... all regard for art. He lifted the axe on high and brought it down on the top of the chest with a blow which made the little room echo. He was a powerful man, and the axe was imbedded to its haft. He worked it out of the tough wood and planted another blow, which widened the rift and made the stout old chest creak like a falling tree. The mutilated wood acted upon Dartmouth like the smell of blood upon a wolf: the spirit of destruction leaped up and blazed within him, a devouring flame, ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... conscientiously performed, from June to December, and round again. The last thing attended to before putting on his coat was always carefully to brush and dispose his hair. Until within two or three years, he had been able to keep up appearances by coaxing a gray rift across the top of the bald place; but it had grown month by month thinner and grayer, and more difficult to keep in position, until at last he had bravely told himself it was a vanity and a delusion, and had consigned it to obscurity and oblivion among the rusty side-locks which still ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... in care and competence. I can speak from personal experience as to their civility and also punctuality, for, towards three o'clock, the silvery waters of the Lynn Canal were disclosed through a rift in the mountains, and an hour later we were steaming into the town of Skagway, within half a ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... picture. The light was gone from the east, and there everything was chill and grey; the barren rocks looked so desolate that one shuddered with horror of the cold. But the sun fell gold and red, and the rift in the clouds was a kingdom of gorgeous light; the earth and its petty inhabitants died away, and in the crimson flame I could almost see Lucifer standing in his glory, god-like and young; Lucifer in ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... in east, highland area in west; Great Rift Valley separates East and West Banks of ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... longs to climb that rock-world and behold the earth at its best; But now mid the maze of the foot-hills he seeth the light no more, And the stars are lovely and gleaming on the lightless heavenly floor. So up and up he wendeth till the night is wearing thin; And he rideth a rift of the mountain, and all is dark therein, Till the stars are dimmed by dawning and the wakening world is cold; Then afar in the upper rock-wall a breach doth he behold, And a flood of light poured inward the doubtful dawning blinds: So swift he rideth thither and the mouth ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris

... companies ahead of us 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 horses ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... followed 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

... sides closed 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 at ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... my child by the hand, and my wife follows after me. Our hands and our feet are torn by the sharp rocks, and our trail is marked by our blood. At last I see a rift in the rocks. A little way beyond there are green prairies. The swift-running water, the Niobrara, pours down between the green hills. There are the graves of my fathers. There again we will pitch our teepee and build our fires. I see the light of the world ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... 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 ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry

... softest tones of human 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 ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles

... 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

... however, was 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

... 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, Knows also how to watch and work ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... with infinite effort, Perry felt himself returning to consciousness, though he had no clear conception of his surroundings. His brain was as yet but a whirling vortex of confused sounds, colors and—yes, odors. A temporary rift came in the mental cloud which fettered his faculties, and things began to take definite shape. He became aware that he was lying upon his back at some elevation from the floor. Again the cloudy incubus closed in and he ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various

... but 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 a heart, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... nimble, gazellelike legs, were all well looking, and might have been cast all in one mold. But what struck the centurion and his comrades as most remarkable in their appearance were the flash and sparkle from their slender ankles, as the setting sun suddenly shot a fleeting ray through a rift in the heavy clouds. Each of these fellows wore on his legs gold bands set with precious stones, and the rubies which glittered on the harness of Seleukus's horse were of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... and walked over to the window. She pressed her face against the pane and looked back to the lake. The sun was sinking in a gray rift of clouds. The lake was a desolate plain of silvery gold touched with great shadows of purple where snow drifts were high. As she looked, the weight on her chest lifted. The trembling in her hands that always came with the mention of money lessened. ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow

... 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 forth from a lake ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier

... like this: "Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of 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

... 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 ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... 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 ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... enchanting breasts, finely plumped out in flesh, but withal so round, so firm, that they sustained themselves, in scorn of any stay: then their nipples, pointing different ways, marked their pleasing separation; beneath them lay the delicious tract of the belly, which terminated in a parting of rift scarce discerning, that modesty seemed to retire downward, and seek shelter between two plump fleshy thighs: the curling hair that overspread its delightful front, clothed it with the richest sable fur in the universe: in short, she was evidently a ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland

... 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

... 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 ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... there is to be told. "I favor going in"—on the League of Nations is one. Assuring his supporters that the proposal for separate peace with Germany was "opening their front lines," he drew a word sketch of a gigantic contest in which he as a general had sensed a rift in the opposition ranks and had ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris

... struggled through a rift in the clouds and fell athwart the dark waters of the harbour. In the far distance, outlined against the sombre hills and lit by the pale sunshine, a thicket of tripod masts rose towering above the grey hulls of the ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... 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 into its roof, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... resigned to the 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 ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... 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 ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley

... 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 ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... have you? To what white heights do you dare climb? You seem literally to push away the clouds and gaze straight through that dome which marks the farthest limit of my imaginings! You seem to tear it with your hands, and look through!—you put your lips to the rift and whisper with the angels!—and you always bring a little something back which does men good! Oh, Jane, Jane! ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... be found worthy Of God's choicest gift, Not by wealth made reckless, Nor by want unkind; Since on thee dependeth That no secret rift Mar the deep ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... ship, threatened to overwhelm them, but which, as she rose on their summits, passed harmlessly under her, hurling, however, tons of water upon her deck. The wind was still blowing fiercely, but a rift in the clouds above, through which the sun threw down a bright ray of light upon the tossing water, showed that the ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty

... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... rushed. Hour after hour passed, but the gale showed no signs of abating. The two young men were weary and disheartened, when, as there came a little rift in the clouds Russ, who stood up to look ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope

... deforestation; 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 - Desertification, Environmental ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency

... Acre The Saracen Maid's Secret The Secret Assassin The Light in the Turret Tower Death at Ragnor's Tower Rowena's Grief Rowena's Lament The Holy Friar's Consolation Rowena Enters a Convent Nigh unto Death The Demon Wrecker Old Ragnor's Dungeons Grim Eric Entombed The Rift in Hell Gate The Crucified One Eric Faithful unto Death Eric to be Crucified To Die or Live Eric Escapes The Smuggler's Den Rowena's Fiery Furnace The Dungeon's Angel Rediviva Convalescent Rowena's Te Deum The Lights of Home The Lamp of Death The Wreck of The "Holy Cross" Grief ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer

... 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 lustre that I never before knew her to wear. She lit up everything about us with the greatest distinctness—but, ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill

... of sunshine 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, ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne

... 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 ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... 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

... the rocky places. They soon found it hard 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 high ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... a black lane, carpeted with dry rubbish. At long intervals, a lantern guttering above a door showed them a hand's-breadth of the dirty path, a litter of broken withes and basket-weavers' refuse, between the mouldy wall of the town and a row of huts, no less black and silent. In this greasy rift the air lay thick, as though smeared into ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout

... 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, and patriotism meant ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer

... possibly have got into such a place unless it had been put there by hand. It could not have rolled there, on account of its shape, nor could it have fallen from the bed, because the pillow was closely joined to the head of the bed, round which ran a raised edge with no rift therein. Cardan concludes: "I know that much may be said over this matter, but nothing, forsooth, which will convince a man, ever so little inclined to superstition, that there was no boding sign manifested thereby, foretelling the ruin of my position ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... ago the celebrated Jewish scholar, Abraham Geiger, charged the Jewish intelligenzia of his day with indifference towards Judaism and Jewish interests. This accusation of Geiger's has since been repeated frequently. But a rift is appearing in the cloud. To-day as never before our intelligenzia as defined by university training and education is identifying itself more and more with Jewish life and aspiration in our country. And I feel that due ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... 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

... hasty words, a call from the aunt, a lingering parting, and I was alone again. The brook went babbling on, but telling no tales, the birds were busy with their own affairs, and the sunbeams winked brightly through the leaves. The little rift, giving a glimpse of the inner life of two souls, had closed and left no outward sign; ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher

... the moment 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 words, a direct hit to the heart. In its struggles ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... touch of his trident a wonder! Virtue to earth from his deity flows; From the rift of the flinty rock, cloven asunder, A dark-watered fountain ebullient rose. Inly elastic, with airiest lightness It leapt, till it cheated the eyesight; and, lo! It showed in the sun, with a various ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... tiny Les Echelles, whence, in the good old days, fair Princess Beatrice of Savoie went away to wed with the famed Raymond of Provence. We whisked through the village, and down the valley to St. Laurens du Pont, and the entrance to that great rift between mountains which leads to the monastery of the ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... 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 ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn

... stealing the produce of the gardens and fields, they will pull off the thatch from the native huts, fling the tiles from the better-built houses and shops to the ground, and we have even seen them try their best to rift the stones from the temples. A native town in one of the zemindary estates was so mutilated by them that it looked as if ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... and extended a hand to each in turn, and then taking the lead, went cautiously onward to get out of the deep rift, and find a place that would enable them to ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn

... mouth of a gorge and the pass was before us. Had the gorge been a rift in the range, a road had been cut by the side of the torrent, and our way, if tortuous, had been as flat as your hand. But the gorge was a cul de sac—a beautiful blind alley, with mountains' flanks for walls. So the road ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... 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 ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... risk of 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 risk has ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... 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

... 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 We may see ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... 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. ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... 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 wall to wall, the approach was similarly ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... shock. To their unbounded amazement the "Sea Bee," instead of dashing against the cliffs, appeared to pass directly into them as though they were but shadows of a solid substance, and in another minute had shot, like an arrow from a bow, through a rift barely wide ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe

... them—everywhere—they could hear the run and drip of water, the weeping of the drenched trees, the gurgle of flooded pools, and the trickle of tiny rivulets that splashed about their feet. Through a rift in the breaking clouds overhead came a passing ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... there, nor loss; 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, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... any rate, was 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 ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel

... 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 marshes ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... In prehistoric time some convulsion of nature broke the African continent all along its spine, and formed this system of lakes. Another break occurs on the high plateau, from Portuguese East Africa in the south to British East Africa in the north, along the Great Rift Valley, with its magnificent escarpments and weird scenery, prolonged through Lake Rudolf to the Red Sea and on to the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley. Great volcanoes, now mostly extinct, though some to the north of Kivu are still active, are a still later ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... 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. So deep and so craggy were these walls that the river a half mile below ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow

... 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 broken arches ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... His brow, His grief was deeper than before. From ravaged field and city now Arose the screams and reek of war. The black smoke parted. Through the rift God's sun fell on the b1oody lands. Christ wept, for still His priceless gift He held ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson

... 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 ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... left 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

... 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, and ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott

... 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 ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... vivid green of the cypresses on the slope below were stained with the red and white of blooming roses. In the distance swam the dome of St. Peter's, across the bend of the Tiber, and through the rift between the crowded palaces one might look down upon the peaceful Forum. The birthplace of the nation! Here it was that the people, the decision having been made to play their part in the destiny of the new world now in the making, came to rejoice. The spirit of the throng was entirely ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... Presently a rift in the clouds gave passage to an oblique ray of light that clearly proved that the sun was setting ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... final loss of all 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 boy, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... secured the order to furnish material for nature 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 home, she only told her mother that the last ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter

... earth, somewhere in the darkness; there was no sun, no moon. It was not a good place in which to live, because of the darkness. After a time came Chunnaai, the Sun, and Klenaai, the Moon. They directed the people to leave the world of darkness, showing the way they were to go by passing up through a rift in the sky. But the sky was so far above that the people knew of no way to reach it, so they made a pile of sand in the form of a mountain, and painted the east side white, the south blue, the west yellow, and the north side all colors.[1] Then they gathered seeds from all the plants they ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis

... imagine her possible marriage. By her own headstrong folly she had ruined all her chances. "The weariful rich" who had got her the post did not spare him this aspect of her deplorable conduct. To-day, however, there was a rift in these dark ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker

... him that his presence there, part of the drifting pandemonium of the pavement, was in a sense typical of his own existence in New York. He had given so much of his life into another's hands and now the anchor was dragging. He was suddenly confronted with the possibility of a rift in his relations with Elizabeth; with a sudden surging doubt, not of Elizabeth herself but simply a feeling of insecurity with regard to their future. He only realised in those moments how much he had leaned upon her, how completely ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Through a rift in the clouds, there beams a star whose brilliancy is increased fourfold in contrast with the darkness. It speaks hope and joy to the faithful, but severity and wrath to the transgressors of God's law. Those who ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... It's only about twenty-five years out of date. There are Japanese fans and bead curtains. They think the bead curtains—instead of folding-doors—quite smart and Oriental—rather wicked. Oh and we have musical evenings on Sundays; sometimes we play dumb crambo. Now, tell me about the little rift within the lute.' ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson

... huge as to weigh tons. On the terrace, moss berries and blue berries were so thick as to make walking slippery. The river grows more magnificent all the time. I took one photograph of the sun's rays slanting down through a rift in the clouds, and lighting up the mountains in the distance. I am feeling wretched over not having more films. How I wish I had brought twice ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)

... 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 on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... Gillenormand's chamber adjoined the drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had been taken, the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the rift of light which he saw under his door, he had risen from his bed, and had ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... spoke, a great brightness fell about him, causing him to look upward, thinking the sun had burst through a rift in the clouds; but there were no clouds. No more than an arm's length away stood a beautiful maiden. So beautiful she was that the flowers about her feet folded their petals in despair and bent their ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce









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