"Cleft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... applies particularly to the natives of what is called Saddle Mountain, the part of the range which advances nearest to the coast and rises to the height of about three thousand feet. It is a rough, broken country, cleft by many ravines and covered with forest, bush, or bamboo thickets; though here and there at rare intervals some brown patches mark the clearings which the sparse inhabitants have made for the purpose of cultivation. Water is plentiful. Springs gush forth everywhere ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... up, and always the light grew brighter. But when he was nearly at the top, and would have bounded on, he could not, for Odin stood there with his spear across the way. The fire glowed and flashed around them, but the sword gleamed brighter than anything that ever shone, as Siegfried cleft the mighty spear and leaped into the flame. And there at last, in the great shining, this Siegfried beheld a mortal like himself. He stood still in wonder. He saw the light glinting on armor, and he ...
— Child Stories from the Masters - Being a Few Modest Interpretations of Some Phases of the - Master Works Done in a Child Way • Maud Menefee
... to turn away this wrath by repentance, and amendment of life? Behold the Lord cometh forth out of his place, and will come down and tread upon the places of the earth, and the mountains shall be molten under him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the fire, and as the waters that are poured down a steep place. But what is the cause of all this?—For the transgression of Jacob is all this, and for the sins of the house of Israel. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Hugh's bit into his thigh, but like a flash I saw Bryde recover, and a lightning stroke and Hugh's cutlass was clattering on the cobbles, and then I saw Bryde whirl his sword round his head, and raise himself uplifted for a dreadful blow that would have cleft his cousin to the chest, and the cruel smile was still on both faces, and ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... such a beast," she responded calmly, watching his work with her round cleft chin in the shell of her hand. "That's not bad, you know. That nearest girl sitting on the grass is almost felt. But if you show it to the English they will be so shocked that they will use lorgnettes to hide their ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... speak, by the crowd. The desire to exclude the nobility from all office and all dignity was obvious, at half a glance. My spirit was ulcerated at this; I saw approaching the complete re-establishment of the bastards; my heart was cleft in twain, to see the Regent at the heels of his unworthy minister. He was a prey to the interest, the avarice, the folly, of this miserable wretch, and no remedy possible. Whatever experience I might have had of the astonishing weakness of M. le Duc ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... sail the horizon was visible but, more often, there was nothing to be seen but the broad back of a wave, on which, for a time, the boat tossed before sinking down once more. The roll was scarcely noticeable, for the boat kept at the same angle all the time and cleft her way through the waves. The motion was comfortable and soothing to the mind; quite unlike the violent ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... him insistently as darkness fell, and Siena grew vocal with that shrill diversity of sounds that breaks, on summer nights, from every cleft of the masonry in old Italian towns. Then the moon rose, unfolding depth by depth the lines of the antique land; and Ralph, leaning against an old brick parapet, and watching each silver-blue remoteness disclose itself between the dark masses of the middle distance, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... up and die. But, of all men living, a sailor is the least apt to think his case hopeless, however dark it may appear. Having just been saved from apparently certain death, the stout-hearted seamen were in no mood to despair so easily; and settling themselves snugly in a sheltered cleft of the rock, they ate their scanty meal (a good share of which had been reserved for Mrs. Petersen) as cheerily as if they were lying at ...
— Harper's Young People, January 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... ship, and set mixing bowls brimmed with wine, and poured drink offering to the deathless gods that are from everlasting, and in chief to the grey eyed daughter of Zeus. So all night long and through the dawn the ship cleft ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... and his feelings warm with the anticipated pleasure of meeting and entertaining him, a man of common appearance approached along the road, and when he came to where the farmer was, stood still and looked at him until he had finished cutting the log, and was preparing to lift the cleft pieces ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... as if the very earth was being cleft in two, and our windows rattled in their sockets. It is not a pleasant sensation to have steady old Mother Earth rocking like an "ashpan" leaf ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... Rhone thus hath cleft his way, The mightiest of the storms hath ta'en his stand: For here, not one, but many, make their play, And fling their thunder-bolts from hand to hand, Flashing and cast around: of all the band, The brightest through these parted hills hath forked ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... thunder. They set out and travelled north, and came to high mountains. These mountains drew back and forth, and then closed together very quickly. One of the men said to the other, "I will leap through the cleft when it opens, and if I am caught you can follow and try to find the origin of thunder." The first one passed through the cleft before it closed, and the second one was caught. The one that went through saw, in a large plain below, a group of wigwams, and a number ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... front of a precipice overhung with brushwood and copse. Here a cave, as narrow in its entrance as a fox-earth, was indicated by a small fissure in the rock, screened by the boughs of an aged oak, which, anchored by its thick and twisted roots in the upper part of the cleft, flung its branches almost straight outward from the cliff, concealing it effectually from all observation. It might indeed have escaped the attention even of those who had stood at its very opening, so uninviting was the portal at which the beggar entered. But within, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... this cleft in the rockwork, however, he found awaiting him there the person who had summoned him—the so-called General Von Zoesch. Calabressa was somewhat startled, but he said, "Your humble servant, Excellenza," ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... iron chest, called a hatch, in which the Corporation of Yarmouth kept their charters and valuable documents. Among the contents are the tallies or cleft sticks upon which the accounts were formerly kept, the stick being notched according to the amount of money advanced, one part being given to the creditor, and the other to the debtor. The same plan is used in the present day by the hop-pickers in Kent, ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... waves of the sea, He called upon Moses, and said: "My beloved are in danger of drowning, and thou standest by and prayest. Bid Israel go forward, and thou lift up thy rod over the sea, and divide it." Thus it happened, and Israel passed through the sea with its water cleft in twain. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... ran down its now sloping and grassy sides. In close proximity was a deep well, over the top of which had been placed a huge, flat stone. Overshadowing both cellar and well were three ancient elms, storm-beaten and lightning-cleft, but still standing as if to guard the very solitude which was unbroken save by the tinkling bell, which told whither the farmer's flock was straying. From Mr. Thompson I learned the history ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... Gale River, named after one of his forefathers, and in his mind's eye he followed the stream back up its course to the little station where he and Deborah were to get off. There the narrowing river bed turned and wound up through a cleft in the hills to the homestead several miles away. On the dark forest road beside it he pictured George, his grandson, at this moment driving down to meet them in a mountain wagon with one of the two hired men, a lantern swinging under the ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... Blunt, shaking the reins of his steed, and galloping forward. A few strides brought them to the other side of the knoll, where, scattered upon the torn and bloody turf, they discovered the scalped and mangled remains of about twenty or thirty human beings. Their skulls had been cleft by the tomahawk and their breasts pierced by the scalping-knife, and from the position in which many of them lay it was evident that they had been ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... in the mouth with the pitiless brass; and the brazen weapon passed right through from the opposite side down under the brain, and then cleft the white bones. And his teeth were dashed out, and both eyes were filled with gore, which, gaping, he forced[522] out from his mouth and from his nostrils; and the black cloud of death enveloped him. Thus these leaders of the Greeks ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... for a time along the frontier. Their spear seemed broken, their buckler cleft in twain: every border town dreaded an attack, and the mother caught her infant to her bosom when the watch-dog howled in the night, fancying it the war-cry of the Moor. All for a time seemed lost, and despondency even found its way to the royal breasts of Ferdinand ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... made good and extended their lodgments, capturing all the Boer trenches of their first defensive line along the edge of the plateau. To the east of 'Bastion Hill' there runs a deep re-entrant, which appeared to open a cleft between the right and centre of the Boer position. The tendency of General Hildyard's action, with five battalions and two batteries, on the British left this day was to drive a wedge of infantry into this cleft and so split the Boer position in two. But as the action developed, ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... travellers entered the town, and the clatter of the mules slipping and stumbling on the cobble stones brought but few to the doors of the low-built houses. To enter Ronda from the south the traveller must traverse the Moorish town, which is divided from the Spanish quarter by a cleft in the great rock that renders the town impregnable to all attack. Having crossed the bridge spanning the great gorge into which the sun never penetrates even at midday, the party emerged into the broader streets of the more modern town, and, turning to the right through a high ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... window resembled a cleft in the rocks, and looked out upon the road. Blocks of stone, flung one upon another without regard to order, formed steps from which to look out ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Milan, the gay and brave young men, after marching in the pride of their strength to hold the Alpine passes and bar Austria from Italy while the fight went on below, were struck by a sudden paralysis. They hung aloft there like an arm cleft from the body. Weapons, clothes, provisions, money, the implements of war, were withheld from them. The Piedmontese officers despatched to watch their proceedings laughed at them like exasperating senior scholars examining the accomplishments of a lower form. It was manifest that Count Medole ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is in the cleft of the rock—the riven side of our Lord. There is comfort and security there. It is also in the secret places of the stairs. It loves to build its nest in the high towers to which men mount the winding stairs for hundreds of feet above the ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... I caught sight of a little flower growing out of the cleft of one of the stones. I knelt down and bent over to reach it. I slipped, I know not how, and should have fallen, had not Thornton sprung to my ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the axe home with powerful blows. He was a strong, handsome youth, with face and arms healthily bronzed with work in the open air. He laid a big junk of the oak across the chopping-block, swung the axe, and cleft the stick with a single blow that sent the halves ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... the coast of Malekula southward. There are immense coral reefs attached to the coast, so that often the line of breakers is one or two miles away from the shore. These reefs are a solid mass of cleft coral stones constantly growing seaward. Their surface is more or less flat, about on a level with the water at low tide, so that it then lies nearly dry, and one can walk on the reefs, jumping over the wide ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... asleep and the house oppressively still, took her book and went out to a little nook back of her cottage, where she was in the habit of going to study, and where Chi Lu had built a rustic seat for her beneath a great pine tree that grew out of a cleft in the mountain. ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Richard; "my side had been pierced with a lance, a Welsh two-handed sword had broken through my helmet, and well-nigh cleft my skull; and the men-at-arms, riding over me I suppose, must have broken my leg, for I could not move: and oh! I felt it hard that I had yet to die. Then, Lady, came lights and murmuring voices. They were Mortimer's plundering Welsh ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... back again, running as madly as if a troop of demons was after him. A flash cleft the darkness; a deep detonation thundered and echoed against the hills; the building against which Hetty leaned shook as if an earthquake had seized it, and Thursday Smith was thrown flat on his face and rolled almost to the terrified girl's ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... at 7.7; at 7.18 went half a mile north-north-west to a cleft hill on the left bank of the river; at 7.35 went three-quarters of a mile north; at 7.52 went half a mile north-east; at 8 went quarter of a mile east-north-east to where we got any quantity of figs from trees like the Moreton ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... full of the morning sunlight, which lit to the westward the mass of fallen mountain that closed the descending gorge. Below him it seemed there was a precipice equally steep, but behind the snow in the gully he found a sort of chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water down which a desperate man might venture. He found it easier than it seemed, and came at last to another desolate alp, and then after a rock climb of no particular difficulty to a steep slope of trees. He took his bearings and turned his ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... worse, but it will be a troublesome one; it is a sabre cut, and has cleft right through your shoulder bone. ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... the breach, couched in the great cleft that split the Barrier, darkness within darkness. Unseen, I felt the glare of Its hate beat upon me. From It emanated deathly cold, like the nearness of an iceberg in the night, with an odor ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... three miles of hills which sweep in an arc round the town, is the noble Montagne Pelee lying several miles to the north of the city, a mass of dark rock some four thousand feet high, with jagged outline, and cleft with gorges and ravines, down which flow numerous streams, gushing from the crater ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... the tall waterbutt, he reconnoitred the back of the inn. The upper part of the house was shrouded in darkness, but a broad beam of light from a half-open door and a tall window on the ground floor cleft the pall of fog. The window showed a snug little bar with Strangwise standing by the counter, a glass in his hand. As Desmond watched him, he heard a muffled scream from somewhere within the house. Strangwise heard it too, for Desmond saw him put his glass down ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... beheld beheld bid bade, bid bidden, bid bind bound {bound, {[adj. bounden] bite bit bitten, bit blow blew blown break broke broken chide chid chidden, chid choose chose chosen cleave clove, clave (cleft) cloven (cleft) climb [clomb] climbed climbed cling clung clung come came come crow crew (crowed) (crowed) dig dug dug do did done draw drew drawn drink drank {drunk, drank {[adj. drunken] drive drove driven eat ate, eat eaten, eat ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... text. Some months ago at a social gathering held in connection with the annual meeting of the churches of Shikoku, one of the comic performances consisted in the effort on the part of three old men to sing through to the end without a break-down the song which to us is so sacred, "Rock of Ages, cleft for me." Only one man succeeded, the others going through a course of quavers and breaks which was exceedingly laughable, but absolutely irreverent. The lack of reverence which has sometimes characterized the social side of the Christmas ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... soars on high, Flies from her cleft the dove so shy, And seeks the woodland shadow; The nightingale with song so rare Delights and fills the ev'ning air O'er mountain, ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... has been said that the point of resemblance between a cow and a comet, that both have tails, was quite enough for the primitive word-maker: it was certainly enough for the primitive myth-teller. [46] Sometimes the pinnate shape of a leaf, the forking of a branch, the tri-cleft corolla, or even the red colour of a flower, seems to have been sufficient to determine the association of ideas. The Hindu commentators of the Veda certainly lay great stress on the fact that the palasa, one of their lightning-trees, is trident-leaved. The mistletoe ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... and find me at my toil, When all Life's day I had, tho' faintly, wrought, And shallow furrows, cleft in stony soil Were all my labour: Shall I count ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... that there can be no doubt as to what you intend them to modify. Have regard to the sound also. They seldom stand between to and the infinitive. [Footnote: Instances of the "cleft, or split, infinitive"—the infinitive separated from its to by an intervening adverb—are found in Early English and in English all the way down, Fitzedward Hall ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... who had themselves received many and mysterious reinforcements, which seemed to spring up like magic from the bosom of the earth—so suddenly and unexpectedly had they emerged from copse and cleft in that mountainous and entangled neighbourhood—were not unprepared for a fresh foe. At the command of the vigilant Muza, they drew off, fell into order, and, seizing, while yet there was time, the vantage-ground which inequalities of the soil and ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the station was almost treeless, and Mr. Lee was doing a good deal of planting, and had a very fine garden under formation. Some two miles to the rear of the station, in a deep cleft of the hills, lay a considerable black and white pine forest. It is a peculiarity of New Zealand that the pine forests indigenous to that country (and which bear no similarity to European pines) are invariably found in more or less accurately defined patches, growing ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... beyond which, in a huge semicircle, rose a thousand nameless mountains, summit over summit, snow-flecked or snow-clad, in boundless fields—a grim, lonely, desolate horror of rugged, barren peaks, of dark gray for the most part, cleft by deep shadows, and right in face of us one superb slab of very pale gray buttressed limestone, perhaps a good thousand feet high. I thought it the most savage mountain-scenery I had ever beheld, while the almost feminine and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... brighter now. I pulled myself up by two fingers with scarcely an effort, though on earth I weigh twelve stone, reached to a still higher corner of rock, and so got my feet on the narrow ledge. I stood up and searched up the rocks with my fingers; the cleft broadened out upwardly. "It's climbable," I said to Cavor. "Can you jump up to my hand if I hold ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... The blessed minister his wings display'd, And like a shooting star he cleft the night: He charged the flames, and those that disobey'd He lash'd to duty with ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Tartar, when he spies A man that's handsome, valiant, wise, If he can kill him, thinks t' inherit 25 His wit, his beauty, and his spirit As if just so much he enjoy'd As in another is destroy'd For when a giant's slain in fight, And mow'd o'erthwart, or cleft down right, 30 It is a heavy case, no doubt; A man should have his brains beat out Because he's tall, and has large bones; As men kill beavers for their stones. But as for our part, we shall tell ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... a long time. He had already learned from Boyd not to advance an opinion until he had something with which to buttress it, and he kept his glasses glued upon the great cleft in the mountains, where the trees grew so thick and high. At last he saw a column of grayish vapor rising against the green leaves, and, following it with the glasses to its base, he thought he was able to trace the outlines of tepees. Another and longer ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler
... stopped at the water’s edge as usual in the lakes of hilly countries. The memory of the lake is preserved in the fables contained in the books of the natives, which mention the deity by whom the mountain was cleft to drain off the water, together with numerous circumstances connected with this event. The following is an account of these fables that was communicated to me by Colonel Crawford. When the valley ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... know from whence his change proceeds; Some frantic augur has observed the skies; Some victim wants a heart, or crow flies wrong. By heaven, 'twas never well, since saucy priests Grew to be masters of the listening herd, And into mitres cleft the regal crown; Then, as the earth were scanty for their power, They drew the pomp of heaven to wait on them. Shall I go publish, Hector dares not fight, Because a madman dreamt he talked with Jove? What could the god see ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... and, too impatient to walk, I hailed a droschky, and drove through the wide, cheery streets of Berlin. It was a balmy June evening. The pavements were thronged. Through the vast open fronts of the cafes one saw agglutinated masses of people just cleft here and there by white-jacketed waiters darting to and fro with high-poised trays of beer and coffee. Save these and the folks in theatres all Berlin was in the streets, taking the air. A sense of gaiety pervaded the place, organised and recognised, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... were steadily approaching this, and all the time going deeper and deeper. Once Mona turned her eyes searching to the right and left; whereupon Billie was still further mystified to see that, although the cleft was fifty or sixty miles in length, yet its extreme ends seemed entirely open to the world. Nothing but a deep "V" of blue sky was to be ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... no longer revolving, but wavering aimlessly in the midst of the basin. Ridiculous! This must be seen to! In the down of dark hairs that connected her eyebrows there was a marked deepening of that vertical cleft which, visible at all times, warned you that here was a young woman not to be trifled with. Her brain despatched to her hand a peremptory message—which miscarried. The spoon wabbled as though held by a baby. ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... faint breaths as 'twere in sooth The halo of some saint, a glowing light Of purest gold streams through the darkened sky, A light more wondrous than the dawn of youth— For 'tis a flame cleft out the veil of night From that eternal dawn that ne'er ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... have no memory—but they left A record in the desert—columns strown On the waste sands, and statues fallen and cleft, Heaped like a host in battle overthrown; Vast ruins, where the mountain's ribs of stone Were hewn into a city; streets that spread In the dark earth, where never breath has blown Of heaven's sweet air, ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... hours' time the sea had fallen so, that a fishing-lugger came round a headland from a mile farther west, to where the "Flash" lay fast wedged in a cleft, and amidst the cheers of the great crowd, now gathered, Captain Trevor was taken from his dangerous position, while the news was brought, that the three boats had reached the great bay to the east, without the ...
— The Little Skipper - A Son of a Sailor • George Manville Fenn
... the shout, the tramp of heavy feet, the creaking of capstans, and the thump of bulky oars, and the crush of ponderous rollers. Away went these upon their errand to the sea, and then came back the grating roar and plashy jerks of launching, the plunging, and the gurgling, and the quiet murmur of cleft waves. ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... a range of purpling hills; a vision of a cluster of small white human homes; a shining, murmuring little river spanned by a wooden bridge; a towering background of bald, steep rock, cleft at its base into a shadowy cavern,—such is the first of my memories of the Vaucluse. At the entrance of the little town stands a low white-walled building, over the door of which is a tablet inscribed thus: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... on which Gentiles could be received into Christian communion had already been raised by the case of Cornelius, but it became more acute after Paul's missionary journey. The struggle between the narrower and broader views was bound to come to a head. Traces of the cleft between Palestinian and Hellenist believers had appeared as far back as the 'murmuring' about the unfair neglect of the Hellenist widows in the distribution of relief, and the whole drift of things since had ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... little village planted in a cleft in the rocks, two leagues from Grandport. A fine sandy beach stretches in front of the huts lodged half-way up in the side of the cliff like shells left there by the tide. As one climbs to the heights of Grandport, ...
— The Fete At Coqueville - 1907 • Emile Zola
... proportion of the long barrows I have opened, the skulls exhumed have been found to be cleft apparently with a blunt weapon, such as a club or stone axe." — ARCHAEOLOGIA, ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... Kennon said. "There seems to be a path here." He pointed to a narrow cleft in the black rock. "Let's ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... in a spot worth looking at. Some old-time convulsion of nature had cleft the mountain barrier at that place so that giant walls of rock arose on either side of him for hundreds of feet, almost perpendicularly. For some distance ahead the cleft was nearly straight, and its gravelly bottom was from ten to thirty yards wide. ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... to bless boatman and senator. In the divine figure of the Republic with which Tintoret filled the central cartoon of the Great Hall every Venetian felt himself incarnate. His figure of 'Venice' in the Senate Hall is yet nobler; the blue sea-depths are cleft open, and strange ocean-shapes wave their homage and yet more unearthly forms dart up with tribute of coral and pearls to the feet of the Sea Queen as she sits in the silken state of the time with the divine halo around ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... this high mountain, which has risen up so suddenly, will soon be cleft for us or levelled to a plain, if we wait patiently and ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... Then a great Angel past along the highest Crying 'the doom of England,' and at once He stood beside me, in his grasp a sword Of lightnings, wherewithal he cleft the tree From off the bearing trunk, and hurl'd it from him Three fields away, and then he dash'd and drench'd, He dyed, he soak'd the trunk with human blood, And brought the sunder'd tree again, and set it Straight on the trunk, that thus baptized in blood ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... pure white, and their pendent habit adds not a little to their beauty, as also does the leafy involucre. The leaves are three-parted, the two lower lobes being deeply divided, so that at a first glance the leaves appear to be five-parted; each of the five lobes are three-cleft, and also dentate, downy, and veined; the leaf stalks are radical, red, long, slightly channelled, and wiry; in all respects the leaves of the involucre resemble those of the root, excepting the size, which is smaller, and the stalks are green, like ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... heart in Norway burst, when Krummedike's hirelings struck him down. Methinks I still can see the long procession that passed into the banquet-hall, heavily, two by two. There he lay on his bier, white as a spring cloud, with the axe- cleft in his brow. I may safely say that the boldest men in Norway were gathered there that night. Lady Margrete stood by her dead husband's head, and we swore as one man to venture lands and life to avenge this last ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... bone, also termed the Wings, are two projections directed backwards. Each is divided by a cleft into an upper, the Basilar Process, and a lower, the Retrossal Process. In old animals the posterior portion of the cleft separating the two processes gradually becomes filled in with bony deposit, thus transforming ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... track it flew like a living thing, a red glow marking its passage as it cleft the darkness, its freight of human souls contentedly sleeping, or smoking, or reading, as the fancy took them. And half a mile ahead on the permanent way, Death stood watching—watching and waiting where, by some hideous accident of fate, a faulty coupling-rod ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... against the corpse of him whom Carthoris had slain. The fellow stooped and his hand came in contact with the cleft skull. He saw about him the giant figures of other green men, and so he jumped to the only conclusion that was ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sometimes the thin membranous inner wall but at length fissured and gaping as in the more usual phase figured by authors, where the plasmodiocarp is simply compressed but not extravagantly thin. Both types occur in the western mountains, forms with and without calcium, fissured by wider or narrower cleft, from the same plasmodium; forms bilabiate and forms opening at first to display an inner peridium; forms globose with narrow base, but apex cleft, and forms ellipsoidal, yet compressed, opening like the gaping of some ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... master, but it cost only another of those irresistible strokes to stretch Gaston beside Sir Reginald, and Eustace was left alone to maintain the struggle. A few moments more, and the Lances would come up—but how impossible to hold out! The first blow cleft his shield in two, and though it did not pierce his armour, the shock brought him to his knee, and without the support of the staff of the pennon he would have been on the ground. Still, however, he kept up his defence, ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is a narrow cleft in the rocks which he calls the Fat Woman's Misery. It received its name several years ago from a circumstance that happened while he was conducting a party of tourists along the rim trail. To obtain a better view the party essayed to squeeze through the opening, in which ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... "clapboards," for the escape of the smoke. The roof, however, was a more effectual covering, than Mr. Birkbeck had generally experienced, as it protected him and his party very tolerably from a drenching night. Two bedsteads, formed of unhewn logs, and cleft boards laid across; two chairs, (one of them without a bottom,) and a low stool, were all the furniture possessed by this numerous family. A string of buffalo-hide, stretched across the hovel, was a wardrobe for their ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... Three fathoms from the sea my Cid rode at King Bucar's side; Aloft his blade a moment played, then on the helmet's crown, Shearing the steel-cap dight with gems, Colada he brought down. Down to the belt, through helm and mail, he cleft the Moor in twain. And so he slew King Bucar, who came from beyond the main. This was the battle, this the day, when he the great sword won, Worth a full thousand marks of ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... call Llamas, the Chilese, Chilihneque, and the Spaniards, Carneros de la tierra, or native sheep. The heads of these animals are small in proportion to their bodies, and are somewhat in shape between the head of a horse and that of a sheep, the upper lips being cleft like that of a hare, through which they can spit to the distance of ten paces against any one who offends them, and if the spittle happens to fall on the face of a person, it causes a red itchy spot. Their necks are long, and concavely ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... cloud with that long purple cleft Brings fresh into my mind A day like this, which I have left ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... waves to the black seam of the sky. The land lay like a crumpled mass of silver velvet, heaped to tinselled brightness here, hollowed to velvety shadow there. Over both arched the mammoth silver tent of the sky. In the cleft in the rock on the southern reef sat Julia and Billy. Under a tree at the north sat Peachy and Ralph. Scattered in shaded places between sat the others. The night was quiet; but on the breeze came murmurs ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... as we whip white of egg, in order to make it rise and stiffen. The extremity of the abdomen opens in a long cleft, forming two lateral ladles which open and shut with a rapid, incessant movement, beating the viscous liquid and converting it into foam as it is secreted. Beside the two oscillating ladles we see the internal ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... without the compliment of shells or shot, seems a dreadful task—what would it be when all those mysterious lines of batteries were vomiting fire and brimstone; when all those dark guns that you see poking their grim heads out of every imaginable cleft and zigzag should salute you with shot, both hot and cold; and when, after tugging up the hideous perpendicular place, you were to find regiments of British grenadiers ready to plunge bayonets into your poor panting stomach, and let out ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... some breakfast also fire to cook same, eat hearty. You will find a frying-pan in a cleft of the ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... finding what she desired in the way of a quiet corner returned for Katherine. They passed down flights of steps, through halls, and came to a large corridor that opened upon a gallery which encircled the ballroom, save where it was cleft by a great stairway. As they stood looking over the railing, 'twas like looking down upon an immense concave opal, peopled by the gorgeously apparelled. Myriad tints seeming to assimulate and focus wherever the eyes rested. Gilt bewreathed ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... stratification or dislocation. When the mighty rift occurred, no change of level took place in the two parts of the bed of the river thus rent asunder, consequently, in coming down the river to Garden Island, the water suddenly disappears, and we see the opposite side of the cleft, with grass and trees growing where once the river ran, on the same level as that part of its bed on which we sail. The first crack is, in length, a few yards more than the breadth of the Zambesi, which by measurement we found to be a little over 1860 yards, but this number we resolved to ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... folded around him with much care, confining it to his waist with a girdle of soft cotton, but he would not wear any kind of shoes. The method he adopted to prevent any one from approaching him when they brought him food, was to fix an earthen pot into the cleft of a stick prepared for that purpose, and in this vessel he would receive such fruits as the season presented. He would not eat flesh or fish; nor would he drink anything but the water of the river, which he lapped from ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... flashing, the blue swords were gleaming, The helmets were cleft, and the red blood was streaming, The heavens grew black, and the thunder was rolling, As in Wellwood's dark muirlands the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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, Fears to return, nor dares ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... most frightful ailments, her wounds festered, and worms bred in her putrefying flesh. Erysipelas, that terrible malady of the Middle Ages, consumed her. Her right arm was eaten away, a single muscle held it to the body, her brow was cleft in two, one of her eyes became blind, and the other so weak that it ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... and leaping on an enemy, with a single, well-directed blow of his tomahawk, cleft him to the brain. Heyward tore the weapon of Magua from the sapling, and rushed eagerly toward the fray. As the combatants were now equal in number, each singled an opponent from the adverse band. The rush and blows passed with the fury of a whirlwind, and the swiftness of lightning. ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... and the remnants of his regiment darted into a little wood just in time. There was a sudden rush of hoofbeats on their flank, and a cloud of Southern cavalry swept down, shearing away the entire side of the Northern division as if it had been cleft with the slash of a mighty sword. Besides the fallen a thousand prisoners and seven cannon fell into the hands of the cavalrymen, who rushed on in search ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... this vast and awful silence, but rarely was a human figure visible. As they approached the city, marshy ground and stagnant pools lay on either hand, causing them to glance sadly at those great aqueducts, which for ages had brought water into Rome from the hills and now stood idle, cleft by the Goths during the siege four ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... cleft for me! Let me hide myself in thee: Let the water and the blood, From thy side a healing flood, Be of sin the double cure; Save from wrath and ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... piece of pointed stick which he had been using in the search after Singapore oysters, and sent it spinning out upon the open sand beach. Then following, he took out his knife, and inserting the blade among its thickly set spines, cleft it open, ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... are from thirty to fifty feet in height, and produce large crimson campanulate flowers, composed of five large stiff petals, about two inches long; stamens numerous, all joining at the base, and divided again into five parcels; the filaments are the same length as the petals; five cleft stigma; large five-celled capsule, many-seeded cells, the seeds being wrapped in a white silky cotton. This tree was deciduous, the leaves being palmate, and grew on stiff soil: its large ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... less respect than that of the noblest Agrippina that ever trod the French stage since the days of Racine: on the contrary, it evoked a vulgar joy. In 1816 the Rabouilleuse saw Maxence Gilet, and fell in love with him at first sight. Her heart was cleft by the mythological arrow,—admirable description of an effect of nature which the Greeks, unable to conceive the chivalric, ideal, and melancholy love begotten of Christianity, could represent in no other way. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... the Prince now found himself was very peculiar. A high rocky wall, seemingly inaccessible, stood up solemnly in front of him, and extended out, on each side, far into the sea. Directly before him was a great cleft or tunnel in the rock, which extended so far back that its other extremity was not visible from where he stood. This rocky avenue was the only passage, in any direction, that the Prince could perceive, and ...
— Ting-a-ling • Frank Richard Stockton
... glimmered on The shining way he went. He whispered to the trees strange tales Of wondrous sweet intent, When, suddenly, his witching voice With timbre rich and rare, Rang through the woodlands till it cleft Earth's silent solitudes, and left A ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... first man to reach the bottom of the cleft, and he set off immediately round the base of the rock to the beach, the rest of us following him as we made safe our footing in the valley. I was the third man down; but, being light and fleet of foot, I passed the second man and caught up with the bo'sun just as he ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... they sailed, and, as he was the ship, the Gille Mairtean sailed where he would, and ran himself into the cleft of a rock, high on to the land. Then, he commanded Ian Direach to go up to the king's palace, saying that he had been wrecked, that his ship was made fast in a rock, and that none had ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... more wonderful than safe or pleasing, you are led on a ridge of mountains to the lofty cell of St. Onofre. It stands in a cleft in one of the pine heads, six and thirty feet (I was going to say) above the earth; its appearance is indeed astonishing, for it seems in a manner hanging in the air; the access to it is by a ladder ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... until we reached the headquarters of the guerillas, which lay in a cleft close to the summit of the mountain. There was the beacon which had cost me so much, a square stack of wood, immediately above our heads. Below were two or three huts which had belonged, no doubt, ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was like the night- frost; it melted at the first sunbeam. When he looked back there were redeeming ties that held the whole together in spite of all the evil; and now the old librarian had brought him close up to the good in the other side of the cleft too. He had settled down to his shoemaking again and refused to be roused by the others' impatience; but he looked as if he had an eternity in which to unravel ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... sent their dead down here for many thousand years and as they came they were frozen in, the bands and zones in which they sat indicating perhaps alternating seasons. Then after Nature had been storing them like that for long ages some upheaval happened, and this cleft and lake opened through the heart of the preserve. Probably the river once ran far up there where the starlight was crowning the blue cliffs with a silver diadem of light, only when this hollow opened did it slowly deepen a lower course, spreading out in a lake, and eventually tumbling ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... hand to her cunt, she opened her thighs, and I saw the cleft, with a pair of lips on each side like sausages, a dark vermillion strong clitoris sloped down and hid itself between the lips, in the recesses of the cock-trap; the strong light from the window enabled me to see it as plainly as if under a microscope. I pushed my finger up, then my cock knocked ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... the Ladies' Wishing Chair, composed of blocks in the Great Causeway, wishes made while seated here being certain of realization. To the west of the Wishing Chair a solitary pillar rises from the sea, the "Gray Man's Love." Look to the mainland, and the mountain presents a deep, narrow cleft, with perpendicular sides, the "Gray Man's Path." Out in the sea, but unfortunately not often in sight, is the "Gray Man's Isle," at present inhabited only by the Gray Man himself. As the island, however, appears but once in seventeen years, and the ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... marched through the province of Babylon, which immediately submitted to him, and was much surprised at the sight in one place where fire issues in a continuous stream, like a spring of water, out of a cleft in the earth, and the stream of naphtha, which, not far from this spot, flows out so abundantly as to form a sort of lake. This naphtha, in other respects resembling bitumen, is so subject to take fire, that before it touches the flame, it will kindle at the very ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... cliffs, and the Vaarsti, as it is called, was then reckoned one of the most difficult and dangerous roads in the country. Now it is one of the safest and most delightful. We went down the pass on a sharp trot, almost too fast to enjoy the wild scenery as it deserved. The Driv fell through the cleft in a succession of rapids, while smaller streams leaped to meet him in links of silver cataract down a thousand feet of cliff. Birch and fir now clothed the little terraces and spare corners of soil, and the huge masses of rock, hanging over our heads, were tinted with black, warm brown, and russet ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... remarkable from the fruit terminating in a long sharp point; its leaves are glandless and widely dentate.[676] The Emperor of Russia peach is a third singular variety, having deeply and doubly serrated leaves; the fruit is deeply cleft with one-half projecting considerably beyond the other; it originated in America, and ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... on high ground. Soft and velvety and green lay that great upward sweep in the sunshine, shaded in some places by a dark patch of pines, or gleaming with a heap of fallen snow. Here and there some deep rugged cleft would be filled from top to bottom with the gleaming whiteness, while above, crowning the steep and barren height, the snow reigned supreme, unmelted as yet even ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... a baseball bat with him—I regarded baseball at that time as a sort of cricket gone mad—and a round visored cap on his thick fair hair. His chin was deeply cleft, his eyes grey-blue, his skin very fair. To me he was an upper-form demi-god and I, seeing nothing odd in his actions, for he was what I called the cock of the ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... united, and cannot be swept away by the storm, so long as it stands unmoved. I have seen a thin hair-stemmed flower growing on the edge of a cataract and resisting the force of its plunge, and of the wind that always lives in its depths, because its roots are in a cleft of the cliff. The secret of strength for all men is to hold fast by the 'strong Son of God,' and they only are sufficient in whatsoever state they are, to whom this loving and quickening voice has spoken the charter 'My grace ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... labor to dislodge the boat from its position between the cleft branches of shrubbery which also held other debris, and furthermore the boat was full of all sorts of rubbish. This was ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... ready for it with their hastily donned masks. But there was no need of the precaution. By one of the sudden wind—freaks so common in the story of the war, the gas-cloud was cleft in two by a swirling breeze, and it rolled dankly on, to right and left, leaving the central ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... room is rude, but it overhangs a lovely little river, with its hedge of willows. Opposite is a large and rich vineyard; on one side a ruined tower, on the other an old casino, with its avenues of cypress, give human interest to the scene. A cleft amid the mountains full of light leads on the eye to a soft blue peak, very distant. At night the young moon trembles in the river, and its soft murmur soothes me to sleep; it needs, for I have had lately a bad attack upon the nerves, and been obliged ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... midsummer-time, and the hay and white clover and warm winds that breathe hotly, like one that has been running uphill. With the paler hawkweeds, whose edges are so delicately trimmed and cut and balanced, almost as if made by cleft human fingers to human design, whose globes of down are like geometrical circles built up of facets, instead of by one revolution of the compasses. With foxglove, and dragon-fly, and yellowing wheat; with green cones ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies |
