"Chasm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... just revealed it to them. When the lightning bolt had torn away a great portion of the mountain it had cut sheer down for a great depth and when the earth and stones fell away they left a narrow pathway, winding around the mountain, but so near the edge of a great chasm, that there was room but for one person at a time to walk on that footway. The uncertain trail up Phantom Mountain ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... but the best he could do, and Jack breathed a sigh of relief as he found the hind wheels going over the brink of the chasm. ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... stories of enthralling interest where we least expected them, but, most of all, and best of all, texts that long afterward in time of trouble should come to us, as it were the voice of one that also had eaten the bread of affliction, calling to us across the chasm of the centuries and saying: "O, tarry thou the Lord's leisure: be strong and He ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... Edward Pellew's Group. Coast from thence westward. Cape Maria found to be an island. Limmen's Bight. Coast northward to Cape Barrow: landing on it. Circumnavigation of Groote Eylandt. Specimens of native art at Chasm Island. Anchorage in North-west Bay, Groote Eylandt; with remarks and nautical observations. Blue-mud Bay. Skirmish with the natives. Cape Shield. Mount Grindall. Coast to Caledon Bay. Occurrences in that bay, with remarks on the ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... this state of things continued Dorothy could not even guess, she was so greatly bewildered. But bye and bye, as she stared ahead into the black chasm with a beating heart, she began to dimly see the form of the horse Jim—his head up in the air, his ears erect and his long legs sprawling in every direction as he tumbled through space. Also, turning her head, she found that she could see the boy beside her, ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... enter'd told me that himself And Merlin ever served about the King, Uther, before he died; and on the night When Uther in Tintagil past away Moaning and wailing for an heir, the two Left the still King, and passing forth to breathe, Then from the castle gateway by the chasm Descending thro' the dismal night—a night In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost— Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps It seem'd in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof A dragon wing'd, and all from stem to stern Bright with a shining people on the decks, And ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... you realize that the thing is actually moving, that the bosses on the belt have managed to find a grip on the slime—and presently you come to the brink of what appears, to your exaggerated sense of perception, a bottomless chasm, with distant steep banks on the farther side that look unattainable and insurmountable. It is an old German trench which the rains have worn and widened. You brace yourself, you grip desperately a pair of brass handles in front of you, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the natural and the supernatural, and it would be a contradiction to say that mere nature can span the chasm separating the two orders. To assume the existence of a strict meritum naturae for it, would be to deny the gratuity as well as the supernatural character of grace. To deny these would be to deny grace itself and with it the whole supernatural order that forms the groundwork ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... her world upon a single chance. Whereas a man might have missed love and still have retained life, with a woman love and life were interchangeable terms. That one emotion represented not only her sole opportunity of joy, it constituted as well her single field of activity. The chasm between marriage and spinsterhood was as wide as the one between children and pickles. Yet so secret was this intense absorption in the thought of romance, that Mrs. Pendleton, forgetting her own girlhood, would have been startled had she penetrated that lovely head and discovered ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... serpent. I knew the irresistible effect upon nervous temperaments of this magnetic attraction toward an abyss. I seized her by the arm, the suddenness of the movement made her drop her staff and flowers, which fell into the depths of the chasm. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... handed to Bill o' th' Hoylus End for his services in the "strike literature department." This suggestion was embodied in a motion, but the proposer got no seconder, and thus there remained wanting a bridge over the chasm existing between the money and myself; but the bridge is ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... hour of joy or of sorrow,—a time when his thoughts were mine, and mine were his;—till something, I know not what,—a mysterious influence, a nameless cloud, passed between him and me, and threw a cold shade over the spirit of our affection; each succeeding year has widened the chasm, has seared the wound, without healing it, and loosened without breaking the links which bound us together. Hush, dear Ellen I do not attempt to speak to me on the subject; there has been a secret sympathy between us lately, which has supplied the place of those unreserved communications, which ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... luster of that magnetic beauty I can not think of even now without an upblazing of the fire which is to the heart what the sun is to a blind man dreaming of sight. There she was on my side of the chasm that had separated us—alone with me—mine—mine! And my heart dilated with pride. But a moment later came a sense of humility. Her beauty intoxicated me, but her youth, her fineness, so fragile for such rough hands as mine, awed and ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... papers published a few years ago will remember how at the end of one chapter the hero would be left hanging by a slender vine over a yawning chasm, "one thousand feet deep." The next chapter, instead of continuing the logical sequence of action and explaining how he was rescued—or rescued himself—would begin: "Let us now return to Captain Barlow and Professor Whipple, whom we left facing ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... partly cut by the colonists, they cannot escape; for this valley is in every other part surrounded by perpendicular cliffs, and eight miles lower down, it contracts, from an average width of half a mile, to a mere chasm impassable to man or beast. Sir T. Mitchell states, that the great valley of the Cox river with all its branches contracts, where it unites with the Nepean, into a gorge 2,200 yards wide, and about one thousand feet in depth. (Idem volume 2 page ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... veritable floods. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the sea destroyed a part of a fertile peninsula near the mouth of the Ems, and swallowed up more than thirty villages. In the course of the same century, a series of inundations opened an immense chasm in northern Holland, and formed the Zuyder Zee, causing the death of more than eighty thousand persons. In 1421 a tempest swelled the Meuse, so that in one night the waters overwhelmed seventy-two villages and one hundred thousand inhabitants. In 1532 the sea burst the dikes of Zealand, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the waters of a stream which there rolled foaming and roaring between the hills and over and against the rocks of its precipitous bed, or, plunging down some frightful precipice, lay as if stunned or exhausted by the fall in the chasm below, mirroring in its still bosom with a gloomy reflection the craggy steeps rising majestically above it—in this dark and lonely pass, we say, was a party of human beings, to whom the proper development of our story now ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... Skirting the pathless precipice, where throng Wild forms of danger; as he onward creeps If, chance, his anxious eye at distance sees The mountain-shepherd's solitary home, Peeping from forth the moon-illumin'd trees, What sudden transports to his bosom come! But, if between some hideous chasm yawn, Where the cleft pine a doubtful bridge displays, In dreadful silence, on the brink, forlorn He stands, and views in the faint rays Far, far below, the torrent's rising surge, And listens to the wild impetuous roar; Still eyes the depth, still shudders on the verge, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... day, two miles further up at the cascade, when the whole body of the limpid stream of the Nerbudda, confined to a narrow channel of only a few yards wide, falls tumultuously down in a beautiful cascade into a deep chasm of marble rocks. This fall of their sacred stream the people call the 'Dhuandhar', or 'the smoky fall', from the thick vapour which is always seen rising from it in the morning. From below, the river glides ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... standing, dizzy, bewildered, and speechless, upon the brink of a yawning chasm. Then appears a light beyond, beckoning me to ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... the best of our philosophy we who are well are unable to command at will the feelings of those who are ill. We lie on a bed, racked with the pains of some passing affliction, and the chasm which separates us from the hale and hearty seems prodigious. We are led down the stairs, out into the sunlight. The very rays themselves sit heavily upon our shoulders, and nearly crush us to the earth. With those vivid impressions of the terrors of illness, we feel that our brains will remain ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... we are confronted with the wholly impossible, the inconceivable. How remote is this alike from his principles of art and from the consistent, unvarying practice of his better years! So great is the chasm between John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken that one could almost suppose his mental breakdown to have preceded instead of followed the writing of the latter play. Certainly it is one of the premonitions of the coming end. It is Ibsen's Count Robert of Paris. To ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... guide not much to be relied on. The stream itself had narrowed until it was at this point not more than twenty feet wide, and the hungry wanderers determined to cross it, with the hope of finding beyond it a country yielding more food. A bridge was constructed by felling great trees across the chasm, the water here running through vertical walls several hundred feet in depth. Over this rude bridge men and horses made their way, only one Spaniard being lost by ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... the picturesque Deerfield Hills, a beginning of the scenic highlands which stretch away towards the Adirondack Mts. Fifteen miles north of Utica on West Canada Creek, are Trenton Falls,* which descend 312 feet in two miles through a sandstone chasm, in a series of cataracts, some of them having an 80-foot fall. The falls are reached on the branch line of the New York Central leading from Utica to ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... mighty flood, foaming along a rocky channel, frequently obstructed by protuberances, and exasperated by reverberation, at last precipitated with a sudden descent, and lost in the depth of a gloomy chasm. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... around all the world. Behind them roared the waterfall swollen with autumn rains and hurrying to pour itself into the rocky basin that lay boiling below, there to leave its legacy of shattered trees, then to dash itself into a deeper chasm, soon to be haunted by a tragic legend and go glittering away through forest, field, and intervale to join the river rolling slowly to the sea. Won by the beauty and the grandeur of the scene, Pauline forgot she was not alone, till turning, she suddenly ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... which could be thrown over in a moment. Osgod had closed the gate, and had fastened a rope from the top of the turret to the plank, so that this could be hauled up, without those engaged in the operation being exposed to missiles from the other side of the chasm. ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... value of indulgences here and in the other world he meant no more and saw no farther. But now he saw the chasm, and possessed a principle on which to found his theology, his ethics, his politics, his theory of Church and State, and he proceeded to expound his ideas thoroughly in three celebrated works, known as his Reformation Tracts, which appeared in 1520. Luther's fundamental doctrine had come to ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... inventory of people and things. He remarked, for instance, that Palford's manner of speaking to a servant was totally different from the manner he used in addressing himself. It was courteous, but remote, as though he spoke across an accepted chasm to beings of another race. There was no hint of incivility in it, but also no hint of any possibility that it could occur to the person addressed to hesitate or resent. It was a subtle thing, and Tembarom wondered how ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... example, and stood in a moment within fifty feet of a slowly widening chasm which seemed to run from east to west across the entire moraine. They had just reached the timber line when the disturbance began, and now they saw trees a hundred feet in height and from six to eight inches in diameter dropping like matches into the great ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... square chasm yawned in the very centre of the pathway, the bushes on either side were buried under the earth which the diggers of wells had flung up, and piled one on the other, a writhing, struggling confusion of shining bodies, ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... only a few feet away, was a dark chasm lying between us and that shore for which we had been striving so earnestly. It was a fathom wide; and there flowed the dark waters of the river, gloomily, warningly, menacingly! To me, that chasm was nothing; but ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... having made up their minds that the Wolf Rock should cease to give its warning, they combined together and carted boulders from the beach to the top of the rock, with incredible labor, and after a month's hard work filled up the entire lower part of the chasm and then shoveled ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... though the best in the sense of being Monotheists. The worst are in a much grosser sense materialists, and have motives very different from the dry idealism of men like Mr. Macdonald, which is probably sincere enough in its way. But with whatever motives, these intermediaries everywhere bridge the chasm between creeds as they do the chasm between countries. Everywhere they exalt the minority that is indifferent over the majority that is interested. Just as they would make an international congress out of the traitors of all nations, so they would make an ecumenical council out ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... mechanical way as she had acted before, she settled herself in the saddle, struck the pony with her hand, and raced him at the chasm. He cleared it with little to spare. Edith's took it next with less. Then my turn came. Before I could shake up my tired horse, Mademoiselle ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... the tremendous STRID. This chasm, being incapable of receiving the winter floods, has formed on either side a broad strand of naked gritstone full of rock-basins, or "pots of the Linn," which bear witness to the restless impetuosity of so many Northern torrents. ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Sometimes they skirted a little cove where, hundreds of feet below, the fishermen sat before their tiny huts busily mending their nets. From that distance the boats drawn upon the sheltered beach seemed like mere toys. Then they would span a chasm on a narrow stone bridge, or plunge through an arch dividing the solid mountain. But ever the road returned in a brief space to the edge of the sea-cliff, and everywhere it was solid as the hills themselves, and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... a great iron beam which had struck on a stone foundation and left a zone of safety beneath. Eager hands gripped it, dragging it aside, and there was hardly a sound as the stranger lowered himself into the chasm. A minute later he reappeared, and a shout broke from the on-lookers. He was carrying a little form in ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... wear them down so that they would become like the rounded hills of the Appalachian Mountain chain, yet this is what will happen unless nature's ways suddenly change to something which they are not now. A visitor to the Grand Canon of the Colorado sees a magnificent chasm over a mile in depth and two hundred miles long which has actually been carved through layer after layer of solid rock by the rushing torrents of the river. Perhaps it is easier to estimate the geological effects of a river in such a case as Niagara. ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... furious. Yonder, close to the fragments of the bridge, stand the Tyrolese; here, near the fragments on this side of the river, are the soldiers and the French engineers advancing to construct a temporary bridge across the chasm, and thereby unite again the disrupted ends ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... shop-windows, the deeper glitter of paint and colored glass, and the thin veneering which barbarism takes upon itself in such localities, what infinite relief was theirs! The last heap of ragged rock and clay passed, the last unsightly chasm crossed,—how the waiting woods opened their long files to receive them! How the children—perhaps because they had not yet grown quite away from the breast of the bounteous Mother—threw themselves face downward on her brown bosom ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... I could see some of the dim shadows of the plain moving, and some in the chasm of the wood, and everywhere! Affected by terror and a sense of my huge responsibility, I could hardly stifle a cry of anguish. But they did not move. The fearful preparations of the shades vanished before my eyes and the stillness of lifeless ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... separated the two great districts. The low lands along the Vlie, often threatened, at last sank in the waves. The German Ocean rolled in upon the inland Lake of Flevo. The stormy Zuyder Zee began its existence by engulfing thousands of Frisian villages, with all their population, and by spreading a chasm between kindred peoples. The political, as well as the geographical, continuity of the land was obliterated by this tremendous deluge. The Hollanders were cut off from their relatives in the east by as dangerous a sea as that which divided them from their Anglo-Saxon ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... occasions, every reader should remember the diffidence of Socrates, and repair by his candour the injuries of time: he should impute the seeming defects of his author to some chasm of intelligence, and suppose that the sense which is now weak was once forcible, and the expression which ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... I crept along the gloom and saw They had hewn the drawbridge down into the river. It roll'd as black as death; and that same tide Which, coming with our coming, seem'd to smile And sparkle like our fortune as thou saidest, Ran sunless down, and moan'd against the piers. But o'er the chasm I saw Lord William Howard By torchlight, and his guard; four guns gaped at me, Black, silent mouths: had Howard spied me there And made them speak, as well he might have done, Their voice had left me none to tell you this. What shall ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... ducking from whip-like twigs that cut us across the face, until at last we emerged above the stream, and upon a scene as grandly desolate as the most morbid misanthrope might wish. A mass of boulders of all sizes, from a barn to a cobblestone, completely filled a chasm at the base of a semicircular wall of castellated clay cliffs. Into the pit we descended. The pinnacles above were impressively high, and between them were couloirs of debris that looked to us to be as perpendicular as the cliffs. Up ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... lies between two contradictory extremes," Sir William Hamilton defended with his wide learning those theories of the Conditioned and the Unconditioned, the Knowable and Unknowable, which banish religion from the realm of reason and knowledge to that of faith, and cleave an impassable chasm between the human and the divine intelligence. From this unfavorable ground his orthodox followers, Mansel and Mozley, defended with ability but poor success their Christianity against Herbert Spencer and his disciples, who also accepted the same theories, but followed them out ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... years more for a biography of Allston, because something of his gracious presence yet lingers among us; but we can touch Scheffer only with the burin or the pen. So we shall throw in our mite to fill up this chasm. A few gleanings from current French literature, a few anecdotes familiarly told of the great artist, and the vivid recollection of one short interview are all the aids we can summon to enable our readers to call up in their own minds a living image which will answer to the name that has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... of which ran a river, sweeping into sight up there round the bend from the deep green of the bush—running placidly enough until it struck the foaming rapids above the trestle—then smoothing into quiet current and swinging back through the chasm to disappear into the unknown behind ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... The chasm might lead to the center of the earth, it was suggested, and, after thinking the matter over, on their return from the Antarctic, Professor Henderson decided to build a craft in which they ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... ultimately assumed the form of a cone. A similar appearance had been observed in 1820. More recently, in May 1855, a great stream of glowing lava, about two hundred feet in breadth, flowed towards a vast ravine nearly a thousand feet in depth. The first descent into this chasm is a sheer precipice, over which the lava dashed heavily, forming a magnificent cascade of ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... space explorer named Murchison. Two others went with him but he returned alone. Claims they fell into a chasm." ...
— Daughters of Doom • Herbert B. Livingston
... appetite, which is the first thing to leave a woman, is the last to leave a man; and when it has left every other part of his frame, it sometimes has a repulsive survival in his eyes. The only bridge that can really cross this fathomless chasm between man and woman ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... eyes, Ocean's nursling, Venice lies,— A peopled labyrinth of walls, Amphitrite's destined halls, Which her hoary sire now paves With his blue and beaming waves. Lo! the sun upsprings behind, Broad, red, radiant, half-reclined On the level quivering line Of the waters crystalline; And before that chasm of light, As within a furnace bright, Column, tower, and dome, and spire, Shine like obelisks of fire, Pointing with inconstant motion From the altar of dark ocean To the sapphire-tinted skies; As the flames of sacrifice From the marble ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... incapacity to thoroughly enjoy it, tormented him. He sent for his landlady's canary, and the ready shrill song of the bird persuaded him that much of the charm of music is wilfully swelled by ourselves, and can be by ourselves withdrawn: that is to say, the great chasm and spell of sweet sounds is assisted by the force of our imaginations. What is that force?—the heat and torrent of the blood. When that exists no more—to one without hope, for instance—what is music ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Schiller listened with seeming comprehension and then shook his head, saying: 'But that is not an experience; that is an idea.' Goethe was disappointed, perplexed. All his labor had gone for naught, and the awful chasm was still yawning. He replied that he was glad if he had ideas without knowing it and could actually see them with his eyes, Schiller defended himself suavely as a good Kantian, and the men separated, each in a docile mood with respect to ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... beds of the torrents, and dreamed away hours at the feet of the cataracts. One spot in particular, from which she had at first shrunk with terror, became by degrees her favourite haunt. A path turning and returning at acute angles, led down a steep wood-covered slope to the edge of a chasm, where a pool, or resting-place of a torrent, lay far below. A cataract fell in a single sheet into the pool; the pool boiled and bubbled at the base of the fall, but through the greater part of its extent, lay calm, deep, and black, as if the cataract had plunged through it to an unimaginable ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... brethren laid a tree across a chasm, and St. Francis hid himself in a more lonely place, where no one might hear him when he cried out; and a falcon, which had its nest hard by his cell, woke him for matins, and according as he was more weary or sickly at one time ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... tenderness of a midsummer's night, to whose moonlight they bared their shirt-sleeves or their tulle dresses, came from thousands of miles away to calculate the height of this rock, to observe the depth of this chasm, to remark upon the enormous size of this unsightly tree, and to believe with ineffable self-complacency that they really admired Nature. And so it came to pass, that, in accordance with the tastes or weaknesses of the individual, the more prominent ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... quite appalling, and it was rendered more so by the slow rate at which the train moved—not more, I should think, than at the rate of two miles an hour—certainly not nearly so fast as we could have walked, so that we had full leisure to contemplate the chasm into which we should have been plunged headlong had the slightest slip of the wheels occurred. How they can ever venture to pass it at night is quite surprising. The curve is like a horse shoe, and goes round the face of a rock which has been cut away to make room for the road. Another ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... a later period a wide chasm formed diagonally from south-west to north-east, through which was gradually forced out the trachyte which was to form a mountain chain. No violence accompanied this change; the matter thrown out was in vast quantities, and the liquid material oozing out from ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... over which they cantered forward, gathering speed as the horses recovered their wind till the pace grew fast. Suddenly the stallions threw themselves on to their haunches and stopped, as well they might, for they were on the verge of a chasm, at whose far foot a river brawled in foam. For a moment they stood; then, at some word from the Arab, wheeled round, and, bearing to the left, began to gallop back across the tableland, until they approached the edge of the mountainside, where the brethren ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... fancy its own opinions placed between us. As for birth, my own family was too respectable, and my education had been too good, to leave me now any very keen regrets on such a subject, in a state of society like ours; but there was truly a wide chasm between the heiress of Mrs. Bradfort and a penniless mate of a ship. Lucy understood me; and, slipping her arm through mine, she walked into the library, saying archly, as she drew ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... a slight viscidity, cling for a moment to the wire-gauze; they swarm, wriggle, release themselves and leap into the chasm. It is a nine-inch drop at least. When this is done, the mother makes off, knowing for a certainty that her offspring will shift for themselves. If they fall on the meat, well and good; if they fall elsewhere, they can reach the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... terms it one of the grandest spectacles of the world. Twenty years later, one Kennedy, also an employe of the Hudson Bay Co., persuaded an Iroquois Indian, who did not share the superstitious dread of them common among the Labrador Indians, to guide him to the thundering fall and misty chasm. He left no account of his visit, however, and in fact, though one other man reached them, and Mr. Holmes, an Englishman, made the attempt and failed, no full account of the falls has been given to the world, until Cary ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... and therefor have neglected the duties and broken the rules of your Order, you are now sentenced to read your books for ever and ever in the fires of Hell.' Immediately, a roaring noise filled the air, and a flaming chasm opened in which friars, and asses and ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... a chasm is the last thing I should have expected to find in this gently undulating country. That it is artificial I was no more prepared to hear than I was ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... that, and every Indian boy knows a fact which the white engineers of the Pacific Railway found out for themselves—that is, that a herd of buffaloes will always find the best passes through mountain ranges, and then they will go over them by the best and easiest grades. Only by bridging a chasm, or blasting rocks, or by much digging, did the railway men ever improve upon the paths pointed out by ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... the crest of the range, came into view. It was an eighth of a mile in length and the narrow width rapidly increased until there was a rent or yawn of several hundred feet, zigzagging from one side to the other. The dark color of this chasm was due to rocks and ground, and marked the break between the two sections or divisions of the avalanche. The upper portion caught and held, while the remainder swept downward without check. Thus a huge gap was opened, through which the ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... for a forlorn hope, his grinning little Goorkhas gallantly and intrepidly following wherever he would lead, and he saw the awful darkness down which his feet had stumbled, a terrible chasm that had yawned ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... plunge in a series of cascades into the awful depths of the glen. The deeper it descends, the ranker and denser grows the vegetation, which, sprouting from the crannies and fissures of the rocks, spreads a green veil over the roaring or murmuring stream in the tremendous chasm below. There is something delicious, almost intoxicating, in the freshness of these tumbling waters, in the sweetness and purity of the mountain air, in the vivid green of the vegetation. The temple, of which some ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... everywhere before him, and thinking his young, exultant thoughts. The maples were set so thick along the main street that they stood like a high, dark wall on either side, and he looked up at the sky as from the bottom of a chasm. The village houses lurked behind their door-yard trees, with breadths of autumnal bloom in the gardens beside them. Within their shadowy porches, or beside their ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... useful result; many men are led by pride to conceal the nature of their efforts, and only make them known at the moment of success. When the day of triumph came, surely domestic happiness would return, more vivid than ever when Balthazar became aware of this chasm in the life of love, which his heart would surely disavow. Josephine knew her husband well enough to be certain that he would never forgive himself for having made his Pepita less ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... first bore the Apostolic commission to this nation, was an ordination—not of seven indeed, but of four—to the diaconate. The authority, the ministration, and the order imparted were in both cases the same, separated though the acts were by the great chasm of seventeen centuries. It is good to commemorate such an event. It is right to commemorate it in the place in which it occurred. Such a commemoration fitly ends the series of centenary observances which we began in Woodbury in the spring-tide of 1883. For ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... the regular promenade which presented many contrasts. A pretty bride from the Blue Grass Region of Kentucky walked with her young husband whom she had first met at a New England seaside. She was glad to aid in bridging the chasm between north and south. Her traveling dress of blue was appropriately ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... ledge of rock, looking towards the sea, at the base of a [141] cliff of upheaved limestone, of singular steepness and regularity of surface, the spot presents indications of volcanic disturbance, as if a chasm in the earth had opened here. It was this character, suggesting the belief in an actual connexion with the interior of the earth (local tradition claiming it as the scene of the stealing of Persephone), which probably gave rise, as in other cases ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... harmonized herself with her surroundings, it flashed on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation must indeed be desperate. She was on the edge of something—that was the impression left with him. He seemed to see her poised on the brink of a chasm, with one graceful foot advanced to assert her unconsciousness that the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... out of the palace, followed by Vathek, the court, and the whole city, and, after passing through all the public places, rolled onwards to the Plain of Catoul, traversed the valley at the foot of the mountain of the Four Fountains, and bounded into the chasm formed there by the continual fall of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... forward to it, could I resolve on such a thing. You will think me far gone, and much bankrupt in hope and heart;—and indeed I am; as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily serious, silent, and sad old man; gazing into the final chasm of things, in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides!), not caring to discourse with poor articulate-speaking fellow creatures on their sorts of topics. It is right of me; and yet also it is not right. I often feel that I had better be ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... waved above the snide Bungalow, and it was now a Queen Anne Chateau dripping with Dew-dads of Scroll Work and congested with Black Walnut. The Goddess took her Mocha in the Feathers, and a Music Teacher came twice each week to bridge the awful chasm between Dorothy and Chopin. Dinner had been moved up to Milking Time. Sweetbreads and Artichokes came into the Lives of the Trio thus ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... different the internal, the real Jupiter, that governing power of the spirit that hurls defiance at unjust authority, the cruelty and tyranny of the world. The soul sees the light beyond, and, emerging from the dark chasm of matter, knows the battle that must be fought against wrong. It is the awful—yea, terrible—symbol of defiance to gods and men who oppose its onward, upward march to the shining goal of light. Make way, then! Make way! For Earth has given birth to her giant son—the Spirit. ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... itself, yet it was not to be viewed without surprise and even terror. When he emerged from the devious path which conducted him through the thicket, he found himself placed on a ledge of flat rock projecting over one side of a chasm not less than a hundred feet deep, where the dark mountain-stream made a decided and rapid shoot over the precipice, and was swallowed up by a deep, black, yawning gulf. The eye in vain strove to see the bottom of the fall; it could catch but one sheet of foaming ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... beside such a pool that I paused at last, and seated myself with infinite content. Before me the glen narrowed into a rocky chasm, over which the adventurous trees that clung to the precipitous hillsides spread a dense roof of foliage. The dark pool at my feet was full of mysterious shadows and seemed to cover epochs of buried history. As I studied its motionless surface the old mediaeval legends of black, fathomless ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... instincts told them that all was scarcely well. They had gone three days along that narrow ledge: mountain quite smooth, incredible, above them, and precipice as smooth and as far below. It was chilly there in the mountains; at night a stream or a wind in the gloom of the chasm below them went like a whisper; the stillness of all things else began to wear the nerve—an enemy's howl would have braced them; they began to wish their perilous path were wider, they began to wish that ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... descent, through a chasm between perpendicular cliffs some hundreds of feet in height, leads from Krogkleven to the level of the Tyri Fjord. There is no attempt here, nor indeed upon the most of the Norwegian roads we travelled, to mitigate, by well-arranged curves, the steepness of the hills. Straight down ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... life; and those principles gradually undermined everything that was noble and generous in character; just as those deep under-ground currents, noiseless in their course, work through fine-grained rock, and produce a chasm. Everything with Chesterfield was self: for self, and self alone, were agreeable qualities to be assumed; for self, was the country to be served, because that country protects and serves us: for self, were friends to be sought and cherished, as useful auxiliaries, or ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... is alien to her; her greatness—but also her limitation—lies in the simplicity and infallibility of her instinct, which has had no evolution and is consequently not liable to produce atavisms and aberrations. She is hardly conscious of the chasm between sexual instinct and personal love. Wherever this is not so, we may find intellectual greatness (as for instance in the case of the Empress Catherine of Russia), but as a rule we find only morbidness, despondency and callousness. To the normal woman the phenomena of dualistic ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... every now and then the wind wafted a little of the condensed vapor over it, and kept the soil in a state of moisture, which caused a sward of grass, growing as green as on an English lawn. I selected a spot—not too near the chasm, for there the constant deposition of the moisture nourished numbers of polypi of a mushroom shape and fleshy consistence, but somewhat back—and made a little garden. I there planted about a hundred peach and apricot stones, and a quantity of coffee-seeds. I had attempted fruit-trees ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... Rome. The level land between the Palatine and the Capitoline is said to have become suddenly a yawning gulf, without any preceding earthquake or other phenomenon such as usually takes place in nature on the occasion of such developments. For a long time the chasm remained in statu quo, and neither closed up in the slightest degree nor was to be filled, albeit the Romans brought and cast into it masses of earth and stones and all sorts of other material. In the midst of the Romans' uncertainty an oracle was given them to the effect that the ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... the road and up among the bushes. There is a well-worn pathway, and it toils easily skyward, doubling back on itself to rest and unrolling wider and wider vistas of the valley. The Gourzy across the chasm enlarges its proportions as we rise. Here comes a peasant or two posting valley-ward, going to his world-centre, the metropolis of Eaux Chaudes, or perchance even on to the universe-hub,—Laruns. Birches and beeches mingle everywhere with the darker, green of the fir-trees; alders and oaks and ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... curves round the ledge of a precipice 2,500 feet in depth, it is correct to be frightened, and a fashion of holding the breath and shutting the eyes prevails, but my fears were reserved for the crossing of a trestle bridge over a very deep chasm, which is itself approached by a sharp curve. This bridge appeared to be overlapped by the cars so as to produce the effect of looking down directly into a wild gulch, with a torrent raging along it at an immense ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... the philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense. Absolute existence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothing remain unmediated to our understanding. One philosopher only has pretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm. Hegel, by trying to show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by a series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivable into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotary circulation of the mind within its bounds. Since such unchecked ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Bart then set out, and forced their way through the dense alder bushes, until at length they found themselves near the place. Here there was a chasm in the line of cliff, reaching from the top to the bottom. The sides were precipitous, and they could see perfectly well all the way down. At the bottom the water was rolling and tossing; and this, together with the precipitous cliffs, showed them plainly that no one could ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... Orleans. To the right hand is seen Point Levi, and the almost perpendicular banks of the St. Lawrence; on the left the more gradually sloping shore presents a long line of intrenchments and redoubts, reaching to a distance of seven or eight miles, ending at the great chasm into which the Montmorency River hurls down its waters in a fall of two hundred and fifty feet. Ranges of lofty mountains on every side form the fitting background ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... about me just the same." She looked at the small bookcase below the mantel in a perfect rage of envy. Elizabeth was surrounded by the things which befitted Elizabeth, and Sadie realized as she had never done in their childhood the chasm which separated them, and knew nothing of the anguish of the young wife as she laboured with the disfigured pies, nor that Elizabeth thought of the look of love she had seen Sadie receive with something very like ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... them, before beginning their monologue. The song merely by its melody and rhythm helps to dim the vividness of impression left by the preceding act and gives the audience time to quiet down, serving to bridge the psychic chasm in the human mind that lies between the relinquishing of one impression and the reception of ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... has fallen bleeding and broken into a cave; who after a time gathers himself together and crawls toward a faint and far distant gleam of light; who suddenly sees the light no more and at the same instant lurches forward and down into a deeper chasm. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... to the holy, the inexpressible, the mysterious Night. Afar off lies the world, buried in some deep chasm: desolate and lonely is the spot it filled. Through the chords of the breast sighs deepest sorrow. I will sink down into the dewdrops, and with ashes will I be commingled. The distant lines of memory, desires of youth, the dreams of childhood, a whole ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... thing of course, that I will be bold to say, if in any ancient history, the Roman for instance, (supposing that in Rome the matter of such a detail could have been furnished,) a consul had gone through such a long train of proceedings, and that there was a chasm in the manuscripts by which we had lost the conclusion of the speech and the subsequent part of the narrative, all critics would agree that a Freinshemius would have been thought to have managed the supplementary business of a continuator most unskillfully, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... framework of them all, from eels to elephants. The identity reaches still further,—across a mighty gulf of being,—but bridges it over with a line of logic as straight as a sunbeam, and as indestructible as the scymitar-edge that spanned the chasm, in the fable of the Indian Hades. Strange as it may sound, the tail which the serpent trails after him in the dust, and the head of Plato, were struck in the die of the same primitive conception, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... of the little cemetery on the slope above the village. One by one that rocky patch was absorbing family and familiars. Life appeared to be a stumbling procession winding through Greenstream over the rise and sinking into that gaping, insatiable chasm. He was conscious of an invisible force propelling him into that sorry parade, toward those unpretentious stones marked with the shibboleth of names and dates. A desperate anxiety to evade this fate set his soul cowering ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer |
