"Rift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is a rift in the clouds for you, too, and the vague something which sometimes loomed up in your horizon is gone.' How glad I am, no words can tell. What a change there will be! The old past shall be sweetened and sanctified by ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... exasperated that he could not avoid the discussions which his father, with a weak man's obstinacy, forced upon him. Some unhappy, baneful power seemed to drive Colonel Parsons to widen the rift, the existence of which caused him such exquisite pain; his natural kindliness was obscured by an uncontrollable irritation. One day he was reading ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... pretty freely as I drove down to Brinkley in the old two-seater that afternoon. The news of this rift or rupture of Angela's and Tuppy's had ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... and the malefactors uplifted upon their crosses behind the altar, and bright with a metallic lustre of many colors. He turns next to the figures close to them of the Virgin and Mary Magdalen; next to the rift in the living rock made by the earthquake at the time of the Crucifixion, and an extension of which he had seen before in the wall of one of the grottoes below; he looks next at the show-case with a figure of the Virgin in it, and is amazed at the princely ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... same sons of Sagara, accepted this command of their father, and once more began to search through the entire world. Now these heroes saw a rift on the surface of the earth. And having reached this pit, the sons of Sagara began to excavate it. And with spades and pickaxes they went on digging the sea, making the utmost efforts. And that same abode of Varuna ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... Then came an unexpected rift in the clouds, the receipt of a very friendly letter from Mr. Zenas Crane, the great paper manufacturer, of Massachusetts, who had contributed to a previous expedition, but whom I had never met. ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... seemed to burn into her face. It was as though she had been walking in an arbour and suddenly, through some rift in the boughs, found herself exposed to the scorching sun. She felt dominated by a force stronger than her own nature. A little afraid, she shrank instinctively away from him, and as she dared not look up, she did not see the ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... into his bed. But that wouldn't disconcert anybody but a tenderfoot. I kept waiting in tense silence to hear them come back with dead or wounded, but there was not a sound. The rain had stopped. Mrs. Louderer struck a match and said it was three o'clock. Soon she was asleep. Through a rift in the clouds a star peeped out. I could smell the wet sage and the sand. A little breeze came by, ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... hopeless would be the opening measures of "Tristan and Isolde" without that upward inflection which comes like a sunbeam through a rift in the cloud; with a downward inflection the effect would be that of unrelieved gloom. In the Prelude to "Lohengrin," Wagner pictures his angels in dazzling white. He uses the highest vibrating sounds at his command. But for the dwarfs who live in the gloom ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... leaves nothing for the imagination to desire. The heavens and the earth were both on fire. Silence added its awful and desolate majesty. Infinitude, immensity pressed down upon the soul on every side; not a cloud in the sky, not a breath in the air, not a rift on the breast of the sand, which was ruffled only with little ridges scarcely rising above its surface. Far as the eye could reach the horizon fell away into space, marked by a slender line, slim as the edge of a sabre,—like ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... protested. "Everything was all right until this political business came up between us. But that opened the rift. I couldn't do as he wanted me to, and my sympathies were with the corporations which I thought he was fighting unjustly. So when Mr. McVickar made me an offer, I accepted in good faith, believing that I could really do something ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... fight? Would the morrow find them smiling and happy as of yore, or driving off in separate cabs to take refuge in the bosoms of their separate families? Darsie opined that all would seem the same on the surface, but darkly hinted at the little rift within the lute, and somehow after that night the glamour seemed to have departed from this honeymoon pair, and the fair seeming was regarded ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... land without shadows, Thou who, 'neath the shadow, so long Hast sat with thy white hands close-folded, And lips that could utter no song; Through a rift in the cloud, for an instant, Thine eyes caught a glimpse of that shore, And Earth with its gloom was forgotten, And Heaven is ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... a first rift of light began to shine in the dark place. But it was not broadened by the letter which he found waiting upon ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... a bad dissembler; his finer instincts told him that he did not possess her full confidence, and he was too proud to ask it. So they lived together a few short weeks after marriage, on outward terms of courtesy and cordiality, but with this little rift of dissatisfaction gradually yet surely widening into a fissure that should rend each of these ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... Chilkoot toyed with men, it wore them out, it stripped them of their strength and their manhood, it wrecked their courage and it broke their hearts. The canon sucked them in and swallowed them. This canon is nothing more nor less than a rift in a great basaltic barrier which lies athwart the river's course, the entrance to it being much like the door in a wall. Above it the waters are dammed and into it they pour as into a flume; down it they rage in swiftly increasing ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... will come a rift in the hitherto perfect lute of our friendship (the rift's name will be DARKEY), but we shall manage to bridge it over—at least TOM RUM SUMMER says so." Here EMILY broke in. He could stand it no longer. "Dash it, you know, this is wewry extwraowrdinawry, wewry extwraowrdinawry indeed," ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... rarely seen it sweep except at Enderley. The weather had apparently broken up, even thus early in the autumn; and for that day, and several days following, we had nothing but wind, rain, and storm. The sky was as dusky as Miss March's grey gown; broken sometimes in the evening by a rift of misty gold, gleaming over Nunnely Hill, as if to show us what ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... lungs seemed bursting with the labor, he whirled to the surface again and drew another gasping breath. The storm had torn a rift in the clouds and through it looked the moon as if some god were peering through the curtain of mist to watch the havoc he was working. By this light Harrigan saw that he was being drawn down in a narrowing ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... gathered on the wood-work of the wharf, and on the burdock leaves that grew between gaps in the planking. High overhead the sky must have been cloudless, for we could see the moon, now and then, like a dim dinner-plate, when there was a moment's rift in the fog. ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... inadvertent shuffling of a foot; or the sound of breathing. Nothing. Even the night roar of the city was missing; the silence was oppressive. At last he opened his eyes. A pall of gloom encompassed him—a pall without one rift of light. His fingers, moving slowly, explored the limits of the couch ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... here some pick out bullets from the side, Some drive old okum through each seam and rift; Their left hand does the calking-iron guide, The rattling mallet with the ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... known that Polly would not follow her, because of the cold wind that was blowing so briskly. A rift in the clouds had let the sunlight through, and when she reached the gate, the garden was bathed ...
— Princess Polly At Play • Amy Brooks
... either tropic now 'Gan thunder and both ends of heaven; the clouds From many a horrid rift abortive poured Fierce rain with lightning mixed, water with fire In ruin reconciled; nor slept the winds Within their stony caves, but rush'd abroad From the four hinges of the world, and fell On the vex'd wilderness; whose tallest pines Tho' rooted deep as high and sturdiest oaks, Bowed their ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... Benevent, Corporal of Infantry 18th Company, 5th Battalion, 299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121." by which you will know the rural free delivery methods along the French front. This address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which hides the individuality of the millions under Joffre. Only the army knows the sector and the numbers of the regiment in that sector. By the same kind of a card-index system Joffre might lay his hand on any one of ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... my hounds?" said he; "Draw back the lattice-bar and let them in." Through a cloud-rift the light fell noiselessly Upon the cottage floor; and, gaunt and thin, Leaped in the stag-hounds, bounding as in glee, Shaking the rain-drops from their shaggy skin; And as the maiden closed the spattered glass, A shadow faint over the ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... one hundred yards wide, two fathoms deep near the mouth, and rapid. From the top of a neighboring cliff, four hundred feet high, it could be seen trending back into the mountains some thirty or thirty-five miles. The mountains, devoid of snow, were seen under favorable circumstances through a rift in the clouds, and appeared brown and naked, with smooth rounded tops. During a tramp of some miles over a muddy way, composed of argillaceous clay and black pebbles, I observed fragments of quartz and granite. ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... ramping and snarling over him, rendering the task of regaining his feet or securing the ladder a matter of considerable difficulty. When he had at last succeeded in both efforts he was just by a hair's-breadth too late to be of any use. The Sheep had definitely disappeared under the ice-rift. ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... reality spaces between successive rings of bright matter, which appeared nearly straight, owing to the inclination in which they lay relatively to us. These bright rings surrounded an undefined central luminous mass. Recent photographs by Mr. Russell showed that the great rift in the Milky Way in Argus, which to the eye was void of stars, was in ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... the revolver remained motionless. Through a rift in the leafy curtain I caught a glimpse of a bulk that was within a yard of our hiding place, and I knew that the youngster was waiting for the brute to speak to make certain that he was covering the right man. The ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... rift which widened and widened and at last opened a great chasm between Roosevelt and the people on one side and the Machine dominators of the Republican Party on the other. For although Roosevelt was the choice of the Republicans ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Henry, as he hastily scanned the note; "a rift in these gloomy clouds. Break we our camp, my lord Westmoreland, and back to Hereford town. We do but spend our strength to little use awaiting a wily foe in these flooded plains. This billet tells me that Sir Harry Percy and my lord of Worcester, with our son the Prince, have cooped up the ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... was the signal for temporary peace. During his second Presidency, however, the little rift within the lute—the rift of insolvency, which eventually wrecked South African independence—began to ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... rift of the massive stone, Most plainly rent by its roots alone, A beautiful peepul-tree ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... within those mountains passed his Lent, Driving with prayer and fast the spirits accurst With ignominy forth. Foundations next He laid with sacred pomp. Fair rose the walls: All day the March sea blew its thunder blasts Through wide-mouthed trumpets of ravine or rift On winding far to where in wooden cell The old man prayed, while o'er him rushed the cloud Storm-borne from crag to crag. Serener breeze, With alternation soft in Nature's course, Following ere long, great ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... increasing brilliancy of the sun. The road ran along the bottom of the deep valley, where there was change of scene with every curve of the Dordogne. A field of maize showed how different was the climate here from that of the bleak plateau above the deep rift in the rocks. I stopped beside a little runnel that came down from the wooded heights to pick some flowers of yellow balsam, and while there my eye fell upon a splendid green lizard basking in the sun. Here was another proof of the warm temperature ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... the wild Peak country, caring for a few sheep, and going down to the village not more than once or twice a week. There was a little spring welling up in a hollow not fifty yards away from the hut, which itself stood in a deep, natural rift among the high hills, so that men might search for it a lifetime and ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... pause. Then his voice rang again, cheery, confident, unexcited, "Hold fast; I'm going to get you out of this. I can't get to you on this side; the rock is sheer. I'll have to leave you now and cross the rift high up and come down to you on the other side by which we ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... lads braced themselves for the final shock. To their unbounded amazement the "Sea Bee," instead of dashing against the cliffs, appeared to pass directly into them as though they were but shadows of a solid substance, and in another minute had shot, like an arrow from a bow, through a rift barely wide enough ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... are in such close and necessary harmony that even the thought of possible discord has become impossible. In its unity not only cognition and volition, but feeling also, must be blended and united. In some way or another it must have overcome the rift in discursive knowledge, and the immediate must for it be no longer the alien. It must be as direct as art, as ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the sides closed in, forming a tunnel about six feet high and five feet wide. This tunnel was three or four yards long, and then it opened out again into a second cave of fair size. The second cave was dimly lighted from a rift in the rock, forty feet above their heads. In two minutes Jack had made the circuit of it, and knew that, except for the fact that it was an inner cave, it offered them no refuge. The walls were smooth and unclimbable, and there was ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... was a rift between the two friends. Paul did not tell Stanley what had happened at the meeting, but left him to find out. He heard all about it ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... the words were borne to the ears of the girl. Bearded men looked, listened, and turned away, shuddering. The sun burst suddenly through a rift in the flying clouds, and his golden radiance fell ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... one instant showed, Through a rift, on the vessel's lee; What manner of creatures may be those That build ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... window. A mild fresh air which seemed to be pouring over the earth through that rift in heaven which the sunset had made, breathed freshly on her face and the yellow light shone on her amber hair, which lay on her shoulders about the length of the hair of an angel in some ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... harsh, discordant notes of the radio signal sounded monotonously in his ears, Bell stared down and, through a rift between two clouds, saw the other plane for an ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... westward, over the wet roofs still glimmering in the twilight, one pale green rift divided the heavy clouds, and in that rift the last of the daylight was dying. Across the way, in the house facing him, a woman was lighting a lamp. As a rule the inhabitants of Prospect Place did not draw the blinds of their upper ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... house's form within was rude and strong, Like an huge cave hewn out of rocky clift, From whose rough vault the ragged breaches hung, Embossed with massy gold of glorious gift, And with rich metal loaded every rift, That heavy ruin they did seem to threat: And over them Arachne high did lift Her cunning web, and spread her subtle net, Enwrapped in foul smoke, and clouds more ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... address a manifesto to the people in which he will advise them to give proper obedience to the Church and not to be estranged from her because his adversaries have been insolent and he himself harsh. But all these submissive words do not conceal the rift which already separates his mind from the essential basis of the Church of Rome. It sounds like cold irony when he writes: "What shall I do, Most Holy Father? I am at a complete loss. I cannot endure ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in restricting the mass of floating labour to definite areas of employment, they proved effective in sowing hatred between employer and employed, between rich and poor. But this social rift was not the only rift which was opening amidst the distress and misery of the time. The close of William Langland's poem is the prophecy of a religious revolution; and the way for such a revolution ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... drums, a bevy of priests came from afar; they made for the market-place and there sold indulgences. The Pragers, distracted by the dissensions that rent the country, took to arms repeatedly. Now and then a rift in the clouds would hold out promise of a serener atmosphere; after two Habsburgs, Albert and his posthumous son, Ladislaus, came a King of their own choosing, of their own race and faith, George Podiebrad. But much as the Pragers venerated this native King of theirs, he was ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... see that little rift? But first permit me! [Lights his torch at ORDONIO'S, and while lighting it. (A lighted torch in the hand Is no unpleasant object here—one's breath Floats round the flame, and makes as many colours As the thin clouds that travel near the moon.) You ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... It is nearly always the bright lad of a family, the most promising, the mother's darling, that goes wrong; it is the brilliant students, the men of whom one says, "Ah, what could he not do if he would only try!" is those who trip, and quench their brilliance in the mud. A little rift in the fabric of the will, a little instability of temper, an unlucky week of idleness—these are the things that start a man towards the very gulf of doom. Bob Darbishire, the athlete, the delightful and exhilarating companion, was set gliding on the slope, and now he and his hopes ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... melted away, the flames shot up in fiercer volumes, vast quantities of red-hot ashes, mingled with huge masses of glowing incandescent rock, were projected far into the air; a terrific storm of thunder and lightning suddenly burst forth to add new terrors to the scene; and to crown all, a new rift suddenly burst open in the side of the hill, out of which there immediately poured a perfect ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... The clear gap between the hills where he knew Old Forge nestled was gone. The open rift of sky that he had recognised a few moments before was now filled, as though a mountain had suddenly been moved into the gap. He went back to his seat and sat watching the line of the mountains. As he watched, the whole contour of the hills that he had known was changed ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... in from the opening; but the place was made bright by the warm glow that came from a kind of rift right at the far end of the cave, and through this was also wafted down the ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... connection between an unseen world of spirit, unconditioned by matter, and our present world of spirit, conditioned by matter. When the pull is strong enough. And what pull could be stronger than England's danger? To Kitchener?" The black-lashed, gray eyes flamed at me, unblinking the rift of light through ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... all was, over and over again: that place he had selected where it was nearly always shaded—in that rift in the kopje where the soft herbage grew, and climbed and laced overhead, while the low murmur of the water gurgling from the rocks in the next rift fell gently upon his ear. He had selected that spot because it was ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... been made too; and the day after the steamer sailed we set off on our journey to the south. I do not know much about that journey. The things by the way were like objects in a mist to me and no more clearly discerned. Now and then there came a rift in the mist; something woke me up out of my sorrow-dream; and of those points and of what struck my eyes at those minutes I have a most intense and vivid recollection. I can feel yet the still air of one early morning's start, and hear the talk between my aunt and the hotel people about ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a change more marvelous than before. It was as if the divine in the soul had suddenly been revealed through a rift in the sinful humanity. The whole defiant face became eager, the black eyes danced with question, the brows settled into straight pleasant lines, and the mouth sweetened as with ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... took it from his lips heard the Tall One's answer; for at that moment his horse reared and sheered away before a spear-prick, and into the rift a handful of English ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... down the valley until the road turned toward the range and an opening which he followed into a steeper and narrower rift beyond. Here there were no clearings in the rocky underbrush until he reached Richmond Braley's land. A long upturning sweep ended at the house, directly against the base of the mountain; and without decreasing his gait he passed ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... unregenerate reactionists was Flavilla. To see her entire family married by machinery was enough for her; to witness such consummate and collective happiness became slightly cloying. Perfection can be overdone; a rift in a lute relieves melodious monotony, and when discords cease to amuse, one can always have the instrument ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... came up, flung himself from his panting steed, and, with his drawn sword in hand, forced himself through a rift in its side into the tree. There was a hollow within it large enough to allow a man to stand upright, and two funnel-like holes ran upwards into the branches. Finding nothing, Bouchier called for a hunting-spear, and thrust it as far as he could into ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... would have then seen might, however, as Hamlet observes, be "to consider somewhat too curiously" for ordinary up-to-date tourists. But even, granting all this to be true, the Palisades were already old, thrown up long ages before, between a rift in the earth's surface, where it cooled in columnar form. The rocky mould which held it, being of softer material, finally disintegrated and crumbled away, leaving the cliff with ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... the southward. A rift in the mist disclosed a two-masted, two-funnelled armoured cruiser about two ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... reached the abrupt Earth-rooted Threshold with its brazen stairs, He paused at one of the converging paths, Hard by the rocky basin which records The pact of Theseus and Peirithous. Betwixt that rift and the Thorician rock, The hollow pear-tree and the marble tomb, Midway he sat and loosed his beggar's weeds; Then calling to his daughters bade them fetch Of running water, both to wash withal And make libation; so they clomb the steep; And ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... rift within the lover's lute Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit, That rotting ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... great natural convulsion awful in its intensity beyond all power of imagination. The rent was roofed in as it were by boulders which thickly hung suspended and jammed in at varying heights between the almost touching walls of the rift; and the adventurous explorers could not repress a shudder as they glanced aloft at these huge masses and thought of the consequences to themselves which would ensue should a projecting corner just then yield and suffer its parent rock to come crashing down to the bottom. ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... life continues, in part because much activity is local and relatively easily protected. Agriculture is the most important sector, with livestock normally accounting for about 40% of GDP and about 65% of export earnings, but Saudi Arabia's recent ban on Somali livestock, because of Rift Valley Fever concerns, has severely hampered the sector. Nomads and semi-nomads, who are dependent upon livestock for their livelihood, make up a large portion of the population. Livestock, hides, fish, charcoal, and bananas are Somalia's principal exports, while sugar, sorghum, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... star, bright and scintillating like a floating soap bubble, while a handspan straight above that again a thin, crescent moon lay coldly on its back sending up a reflection of its own streaky, ghostly light from the distant lake which was no more than visible through a rift in the hills. ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... more sleep than any other human being I have ever known. We took the field auspiciously, Mr. Frederic Villiers, the war artist of the London Graphic, being my campaigning comrade. Thus early I discerned a slight rift in the lute. Andreas did not like Villiers, which showed his bad taste, or rather, perhaps, the narrowness of his capacity of affection; and I fear Villiers did not much like Andreas, whom he thought too familiar. ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... increasing, culminates at West Point, a lofty eminence jutting upon a lake apparently without any outlet. The spurs of mountain ranges which meet here project in precipices from five to fifteen hundred feet in height; trees find a place for their roots in every rift among the rocks; festoons of clematis and wild-vine hang in graceful drapery from base to summit, and the dark mountain shadows loom over the lake-like expanse below. The hand wearies of writing of the loveliness of this river. I saw it on a perfect day. The Indian summer lingered, as though ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... according to the maxim that more prudence and less piety is better than more piety and less prudence. His main desire was that they should always act together, presenting a united front, without a rift or a variation. He suppressed independence of mind, discouraged original thinking and unrestrained research, recommended commonly accepted opinions, and required all to hold without question the theology of St. Thomas. The training he imposed made ordinary men very ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... years ahead of us. I think there are to be many—for us both. The future is so bewildering—like a tangled and endless forest, and very dim to see in.... But sometimes there comes a rift in the foliage—and there is a glimpse of far skies shining. And for a moment one—'sees clearly'—into the depths—a little way.... And surmises something of what remains unseen. And imagines more, perhaps.... I wonder if ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... for thou wast a spirit too delicate To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands, Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, By help of her more potent ministers, 275 And in her most unmitigable rage, Into a cloven pine; within which rift Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain A dozen years; within which space she died, And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans 280 As fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island— Save for the son that she did litter here, A freckled whelp hag-born—not ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... delightful. The Italy of the ancient Romans is a foreign country to us, and must always continue so; but the Italy of the Middle Ages is nearer, not so much in time, as because there is no impassable rift of religious faith, and consequently of ideas and motives, between us and it. Far enough away in the centuries to be picturesque, it is near enough in the sympathy of belief and thought to be thoroughly intelligible. The chapter on the Brotherhood of the Misericordia at Florence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... object of a liberal education not only to obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... upon the craggy clift Bewrayed this herb unto the mountain goat, That when her sides a cruel shaft hath rift, With it she shakes the reed out of her coat; This in a moment fetched the angel swift, And brought from Ida hill, though far remote, The juice whereof in a prepared bath Unseen the ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... that the Professor's domestic relations were defective: they were in fact so complete that it was almost impossible to get away from them. It is the happy husbands who are really in bondage; the little rift within the lute is often a passage to freedom. Marriage had given the Professor exactly what he had sought in it; a comfortable lining to life. The impossibility of rising to sentimental crises had made him scrupulously careful not to ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... and soon they mounted into total darkness, so that the Wizard was obliged to get out his lanterns to light the way. But this enabled them to proceed steadily until they came to a landing where there was a rift in the side of the mountain that let in both light and air. Looking through this opening they could see the Valley of Voe lying far below them, the cottages seeming like toy houses ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... Harkerside Moors, rising one above the other, stand out magnificently. Their huge sides tower up nearly a thousand feet from the river, until they are within reach of the lowering clouds that every moment threaten to envelop them in their indigo embrace. There is a curious rift in the dark cumulus revealing a thin line of dull carmine that frequently changes its shape and becomes nearly obliterated, but its presence in no way weakens the awesomeness of the picture. The dale appears to become huger and steeper as ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... him. But he guessed that she knew nothing definite, while suspecting much. She had shown the most acute concern at his own danger, and more than once implored Mark to do nothing but look after his own safety until Peter Ganns was back again. Meantime the rift between her spouse and herself appeared to grow. She was tearful and anxious, yet still chose to be vague, though she did admit that she thought she had glimpsed Robert Redmayne again, one evening. But Brendon did not press her again to confide in him, though Doria showed no ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... is astir at Fort Point and the man with the new motor boat over at Hough's Neck is giving it a little run before breakfast, with the muffler off, as usual. A gull goes over, flying low. You do not see but you hear the soft swish of the wings. By and by the sun shows through a rift in the fog and you begin to move before a faint air from the southwest. A half hour more and the shreds of fog are melting upward into the blue of a clear day, the wind fills your sail and you are sweeping eastward with wind and tide ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... Mrs. Brown never lets any one sleep, 'n' they got right in on top o' her Hottentot pillow-shams 'n' old Dr. Carter tore a sham with his toothpick. 'N', added to all that, Amelia 's furious 'cause she read in a book 't teaches how to stay married 't a husband's first night out is the first rift in the lute, 'n' she was down town buyin' a dictionary so 's to be sure what a lute is afore she accuses young Dr. Brown. 'N' there's a man over in Meadville down with a sun-stroke, 'n' they want Dr. Carter to hurry, 'n' they can't seem to make him ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... turn defiantly upon the intruders to their domain, and menacingly open their gaping mouths, lined with orange, yellow, or rich blue; but ready to take flight all the same and plunge into the rock rift or ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... son by the hand; his children and their mother were to be wards of the people, for he had despaired of his own life. Many were touched; to some the tribunate of Gracchus seemed like a rift in a dark cloud of oppression which would close around them at his fall, and their hearts sank at the thought of a renewed triumph of the nobility. Others were moved chiefly by the fears and sufferings of Gracchus. Cries of sympathy and defiance were raised in answer to his tears, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... that lie up against the sky, marked off into fields by whin hedges, till they look like sloping chequer-boards. Beyond them, in places, tower up the mountain-tops of dark Donegal, crusted over with black heather, seamed by rift and ravine, bare in places where these rocks, those bones of the mountains, have pushed themselves through the heather, till it looks like a ragged cloak. The sun shines, the rooks flap busily about, as noisy ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... It was a crack, a fissure. Now it was a yard in width, now three, and blackness seemed to well up from within it, blackness that was the very essence of the depths. Steadily the ebon rift expanded; spread suddenly wide open in two sharp-edged, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... seems, however, to have been regarded as serious enough by the Irish monks. The Synod broke up. Colman, with his Irish brethren, and a few English ones who threw in their lot with them, forsook Lindisfarne, and sailed away for Ireland. From that moment the rift between them and their English brethren grew steadily wider, and was never afterwards ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... were descending the home slope of the mountain they witnessed a rare and beautiful sight. A few light clouds had gathered around the moon, and these at last opened in a rift. The rays of light through the misty atmosphere created the perfect colors of a rainbow, and this phenomenon took the remarkable form of a shield, its base resting upon one cloud, and its point extending into a little opening in ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... good-sized streams which empty into the Merced River. When once started on its downward course, the water seems all spray. At the bottom of the first six-hundred-foot descent it made a mighty shower of mist like escaping steam from a giant rift in some titanic boiler, and soon reached the floor of the valley. The road from El Portal comes up on the north side of the river. We passed El Capitan, which rears its massive head three thousand three hundred feet in ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. The rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the married and ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... chestnut-flower the beech, The mountain-ash with pear-bloom whitened o'er, And swine crunched acorns 'neath the boughs of elms. Nor is the method of inserting eyes And grafting one: for where the buds push forth Amidst the bark, and burst the membranes thin, Even on the knot a narrow rift is made, Wherein from some strange tree a germ they pen, And to the moist rind bid it cleave and grow. Or, otherwise, in knotless trunks is hewn A breach, and deep into the solid grain A path with wedges cloven; then fruitful slips Are set herein, and- no long time- behold! To heaven upshot ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... skilful physiologist, would very probably obtain the desired production of mutually more or less infertile breeds from a common stock, in a comparatively few years; but still, as the case stands at present, this "little rift within the lute" is not to ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... mountains of a picture. The light was gone from the east, and there everything was chill and grey; the barren rocks looked so desolate that one shuddered with horror of the cold. But the sun fell gold and red, and the rift in the clouds was a kingdom of gorgeous light; the earth and its petty inhabitants died away, and in the crimson flame I could almost see Lucifer standing in his glory, god-like and young; Lucifer in all majesty, surrounded by his ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... Ogaden; independence referendum in Eritrea scheduled for April 1992 Climate: tropical monsoon with wide topographic-induced variation; some areas prone to extended droughts Terrain: high plateau with central mountain range divided by Great Rift Valley Natural resources: small reserves of gold, platinum, copper, potash Land use: arable land 12%; permanent crops 1%; meadows and pastures 41%; forest and woodland 24%; other 22%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... without the knowledge of the First Consul, a peace treaty with the Portuguese, which he cunningly had ratified by the French ambassador, Lucien Bonaparte. This greatly annoyed the First Consul, and caused, from that day, a rift between the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... to the south, across the plain, lies the town of Talbot; and beyond it the forest seems to extend to the foot of the Pyrenees, standing up blue in the distance some forty miles away. The clouds hang over the mountain summits, and slowly the monarch of day descends seemingly into a dark rift, leaving a track of golden light behind him. The greeny-blue sky above shines and glows for a few minutes longer, and then all is suffused in a soft and mournful grey. The change is almost sudden. The day is over, and night has already come on. Darkness follows ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... south the two lines converge and give place to one great valley (occupied by Lake Nyasa), the southern part of which is less distinctly due to rifting and subsidence than the rest of the system. Farther north the western depression, sometimes known as the Central African trough or Albertine rift-valley, is occupied for more than half its length by water, forming the four lakes of Tanganyika, Kivu, Albert Edward and Albert, the first-named over 400 m. long and the longest freshwater lake in the world. Associated with these great valleys are a number of volcanic peaks, the greatest ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... size where it seemed desirable again to stop growing the valley resembled a narrow canon—hardly more than a deep rift in the ground. They were still standing on its floor; above them, the parallel edges of the rift marked the surface of the ring. The side walls of the canon were smooth, but there were still many places where they could ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... everyday aspects. The sun concentrated its rays on my head through a rift in the jungle, and the stone, stained dull red, lay in its cell, while rootlets fringed with ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... had taken his glass with him, Fairclough did not attempt to use it, at present; but stood gazing fixedly ahead. A quarter of an hour later there was a sudden rift in the clouds, and a low shore was visible, some five or six miles ahead; and a dark mass, much farther off, rising into the cloud. Fairclough instantly unslung the telescope, and adjusted it. A minute afterwards the clouds ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... carpeted with dry rubbish. At long intervals, a lantern guttering above a door showed them a hand's-breadth of the dirty path, a litter of broken withes and basket-weavers' refuse, between the mouldy wall of the town and a row of huts, no less black and silent. In this greasy rift the air lay thick, as ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... however, thought he recognized a heap of ruins, to which he drew Barbicane's attention. It was about the 80th parallel, in 30@ longitude. This heap of stones, rather regularly placed, represented a vast fortress, overlooking a long rift, which in former days had served as a bed to the rivers of prehistorical times. Not far from that, rose to a height of 17,400 feet the annular mountain of Short, equal to the Asiatic Caucasus. Michel Ardan, with ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... he felt he had blundered. It was the first real shadow on his courtship—perhaps the little rift within the lute. He turned back to Becky for sympathy. There was no Becky. She had taken advantage of the conversation to slip away. He found her again in a moment though, at the other end of the room. She was seated ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... pitiful and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with all things with a name or ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... There was one rift in the lute of lumber trust solidarity in Centralia. Business and professional men had long been groveling in sycophantic servility at the feet of "the clique." There was only ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... drizzling rain. The arch of the clouds seemed to get higher and lighter; and suddenly a long oblique sunbeam fell on the fields. Through the break in the clouds a streak of blue sky could be seen, and then the rift got bigger as though a veil were being drawn back, and a beautiful sky of a pure deep blue spread itself out over the world. There was a fresh mild breeze like a happy sigh from the earth, and from the gardens and woods came now and again ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... absolute stillness may continue for ten or more hours. During this time it is absolutely inert, but at last the sac—for such it is—opens gently, and there is poured out a brownish glairy fluid. At first the stream is small, but at length its flow enlarges the rift in the cyst, and the cloudy volume of its contents rolls out, and the hyaline film that inclosed it is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... general council. But of these tribunals the former was unsatisfactory, as its decisions were of merely local validity and might be overruled by the voice of the universal Church. The general council was hard to convene, particularly after a rift had opened between the Eastern and the Western Churches. It was easier to select as the final arbiter a bishop whose knowledge of tradition was derived from an apostolic predecessor. In the East there were three such sees (Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria), ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... the astute Redell discovered a rift in Cappy's armor—two rifts, in fact. The first was that Cappy feared and loathed old age and fiercely resented even the most shadowy intimation that with age he was, to employ a sporting phrase, "losing ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... moment fear almost overpowered him; then the old Psalm whispered, "He that keepeth thee will not slumber nor sleep." A sweet consciousness of the absolute safety of God's children stole over the youth; and catching, from a rift in the roof, one glimpse of the stars struggling through the tree tops, he turned over and fell asleep as peacefully as if ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... parties, but the theory did not go closely with fact, for he made no concealment of his fundamental Federalism, and every one saw that, in spite of his formal neutrality, in great matters he almost always sided with Hamilton instead of with Jefferson. When he himself recognized that the rift was spreading between his two chief Cabinet officers, he warned them both to avoid exaggerating their differences and pursuing any policy which must be harmful to the country. Patriotism was the chief aim of every one, and patriotism meant sinking ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... worked out: the ring could not possibly have got into such a place unless it had been put there by hand. It could not have rolled there, on account of its shape, nor could it have fallen from the bed, because the pillow was closely joined to the head of the bed, round which ran a raised edge with no rift therein. Cardan concludes: "I know that much may be said over this matter, but nothing, forsooth, which will convince a man, ever so little inclined to superstition, that there was no boding sign manifested thereby, foretelling the ruin of my position and good ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... A rift had come in the smoke, and a column of boats, moving with well-timed oars, could for a moment be ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... heron, and the crane Through the clear realms of azure drift, And on the hillside I can see The villages of Imari, Whose thronged and flaming workshops lift Their twisted columns of smoke on high, Cloud cloisters that in ruins lie, With sunshine streaming through each rift, And broken ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... seems Exquisite to the utmost bounds of pain. I cannot live, except as I may be Compelled for love of thee. O let us drift, Frail as the floating silver of a star, Or like the summer humming of a bee, Or stream-reflected sunlight through a rift. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... as I watch thee, all unfettered sweeping High o'er the rift that weighs my pinion here, I yearn like thee my plume in ether steeping, To soar away through ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... sensed the makings of a rift between Susan and these young mothers, Lucy and Antoinette, and knowing from her own experience how torn a woman could be between rearing a family and work for the cause, she pleaded with Susan to be patient with them. "Let them rest a while in peace and quietness, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... of the two gentlemen that the greater part of the crowd had retired beyond a little ledge of roughened ice and snow which cut the improvised arena into two nearly equal parts from where they could conveniently see Monsieur de St. Aulaire and Mr. Calvert as they skated about. This rift in the smoothness of the ice was some fifteen feet wide and extended far out from the shore, so that those wishing to pass beyond it had to skate out around its end and so get to the other side. Monsieur de St. Aulaire ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... There was a sudden rift in the fog that gave a moment's hope, but it closed down again. A minute afterwards, with a suddenness that was strange, the whole blue ocean lay before us. Then full steam ahead. The fog still ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... station, trying the door, waiting around for a few minutes and then going back the way she had come, did not strike Jack as being a tourist come to view the scenery. So far as he had been able to judge as he peeped out through a narrow rift in the ledge, she had paid very little attention to the scenery. She seemed chiefly concerned with the station, and her concern seemed mostly an impatience over ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... home and his social life in Richmond, it would seem that every need of The Dreamer's being was now satisfied and the days of his life were moving in perfect harmony. But "the little rift within the lute" all too soon made its appearance. It was caused by the alarm of Mr. White, the owner and founder of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... descend into its heat and silence. The track is as steep and broken as that which goes up from hence, but not nearly so narrow, and without its elements of terror, for kukuis, lauhalas, ohias, and ti trees, with a lavish growth of ferns and trailers, grow luxuriantly in every damp rift of rock, and screen from view the precipices of the pali. The valley looks as if it could only be reached in a long day's travel, so very far it is below, but the steepness of the track makes it accessible in ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... there as they sit: And in his falsed fancy he her takes To be the fairest wight that lived yit; 265 Which to expresse he bends his gentle wit, And thinking of those braunches greene to frame A girlond for her dainty forehead fit, He pluckt a bough;[*] out of whose rift there came Small drops of gory bloud, that ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... thought but one of dogged perseverance to keep up his quest, with neither hint nor sign that his quest was any nearer the end than it had ever been, he had entered Bristol Bob's, here, in the role of Smarlinghue; and now, as a rift that had opened in the clouds, there had come sudden and amazing joy. It held him now in thrall. It threatened even to make him forget that he was for the moment Smarlinghue—forget what, as Smarlinghue, Smarlinghue dare not forget—the role ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... as the roof of a barn. Cytisus and thyme and juniper grew rank, but above all the place was strewn with rocks, leg-twisting boulders, and great cliffs where eagles dwelt. Being a seaman, Atta had his bearings. The path to Delphi left the shore road near the Hot Springs, and went south by a rift of the mountain. If he went up the slope in a beeline he must strike it in time and find better going. Still it was an eerie place to be tramping after dark. The Hellenes had strange gods of the thicket and hillside, and he had no wish to intrude upon ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... plateau in east, highland area in west; Great Rift Valley separates East and West Banks of ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... gaudily trimmed with fanciful trappings, their coarse hair so trained as to stand almost erect, were two aged men, who, with wild gesticulations, and solemn chanting, were apparently paying adoration to the setting sun, the last beams streaming over them through a rift in ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... I, lying in the snow that melts all around us in the fierce, scorching glare. Through the lurid rift of smoke I can see the friendly stars. Against that curtain of blaze, strangely beautiful in its sinuous strength, I watch the black silhouettes of men running hither and thither like rats, gutting the houses, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... eyes of any other man. Then I grew sick at heart, my father—ay, though I loved my people little, and they had driven me away, I grew sick at heart. Now we had come to a spot where there is a great rift of black rock, and the name of that rift is U'Donga-lu-ka-Tatiyana. On either side of this donga the ground slopes steeply down towards its yawning lips, and from its end a man may see the open country. Here Chaka sat down at the end of the rift, pondering. Presently he looked up ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... is altered, and we are steaming over the obliterated banks far in the interior. Once or twice black objects loom up near us,—the wrecks of houses floating by. There is a slight rift in the sky towards the north, and a few bearing stars to guide us over the waste. As we penetrate into shallower water, it is deemed advisable to divide our party into smaller boats, and diverge over the submerged prairie. I borrow a pea-coat ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... unto her, from her palms she will not lift The dark face hidden deep within them like the moon in cloudy rift. ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... They admit that their remote ancestors, in other words, that they themselves in former incarnations, possessed certain marvellous powers to which in the present degenerate days they can lay no claim; and in this significant admission we may detect a rift, a real distinction of kind, between the living and the dead, which in time might widen out into an impassable gulf. In other words, we may suppose that the Central Australians, if left to themselves, might come to hold that the dead ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... ringing flies apart, Suddenly cracks the vaulted hall; And through the rift, the wild flames start; The guests in dust are scattered all, With the ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Commons wish that the States-General shall form a single united Assembly, and the other orders wish for three. But on this supreme issue the Commons are all agreed, and the others are not. An ominous rift appears, and we already perceive the minority of nobles and priests, who, in the hour of conflict, were to rule the fate of European society. From all these papers, the mandate of united France, it ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... same evening. Sheep and goats, as it were, one dinner to the Allied representatives, the next to the representatives of the Central powers. Much nice sorting is required, and they tell us that in consequence of the war Peking society is rift in twain. This is all very well when it happens in a big community, but when it happens in such a limited little society as Peking, all walled in together within the narrow inclosure of the legation quarter,—walled in literally, also, in the fullest sense, with ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... the picture. All as yet is sombre in tone, black, dark green, and brown and gray. The mist hangs heavy over everything, and the twinkle of an occasional camp-fire is but the sodden glow of ember whose life is long since burned out. But, see! Through the deep, jagged rift where runs the Potomac, along the rock-bound gorge through which in ages past the torrent burst its way, there creeps a host of tiny shafts of color—the skirmishers, the eclaireurs, of the irresistible array of which they form but the foremost line—the ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... of the Russian armament was still occupying the minister, an event of signal importance happened in the ranks of his political adversaries. The alliance which had lasted between Burke and Fox for five and twenty years came to a sudden end, and this rift gradually widened into a destructive breach throughout the party. There is no parallel in our parliamentary history to the fatal scene. In Ireland, indeed, only eight years before, Flood and Grattan, after fighting side by side for many years, ...
— Burke • John Morley
... a few gleams of sunlight struggled through a rift in the clouds, and a shower of colored light fell over the wild garden. The brown tiles of the roof glowed in the light, the mosses took bright hues, strange shadows played over the grass beneath the trees; the ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... one mold. But what struck the centurion and his comrades as most remarkable in their appearance were the flash and sparkle from their slender ankles, as the setting sun suddenly shot a fleeting ray through a rift in the heavy clouds. Each of these fellows wore on his legs gold bands set with precious stones, and the rubies which glittered on the harness of Seleukus's horse ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have tried to make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be almost equally adored, and this gave Eug['e]nie great pain, although it did not change her love or make a rift in her belief ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... opportunity of seeing it. The castle is on the very edge of a terrific precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... next morning by trampling noises in the stable below, and starting up could not at first make out where she was. The sun was shining through a rift in the loft door, Tib was gone, cocks were crowing outside, all the world was up and busy. She could hear Ben's gruff voice and the clanking of chains and harness, and soon he and the three horses had left the stable and gone out ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... came a slight rift in the clouds. Coming back one morning after a conference with the Chancellor, ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... He watched the crowds of people who had taken refuge on the foot-pavements of the covered ways, the umbrellas flitting past in the downpour, and the cabs that dashed with increased clatter and speed along the wellnigh deserted roads. Presently there was a rift in the clouds; and a red glow arose in the west. Then a whole army of street-sweepers came into sight at the end of the Rue Montmartre, driving a lake of liquid mud before ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... became fainter; he heard retreating footsteps, and at last they died away entirely. Through a rift in the trees straight above him the white, cold stars of the night gleamed down on him, and Howland stared up at them fixedly until they seemed to be hopping and dancing about in the skies. He wanted to swear—yell—fight. In these moments that he lay on his back in ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... destination. He was going farther, where the ordinary traveller would fare worse, and hurried along without looking to the left or right. A half-moon was peeping through an occasional rift in those heavy clouds which precede the autumn rains in these latitudes, and gather with such astonishing slowness and deliberation. It was not a dark night, and the air was still. The abbe had mounted considerably since leaving the cross-roads. His path ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... spacious gloom. He opened the great doors gently, and came out into the soft spring night air. All was silent now. The narrow side-canal had a glimmer of moonlight, the opposite palace was black, with one spot of light where a window shone: overhead in the narrow rift of dark-blue sky a flock of stars flew like bright birds through the soft velvet gloom. The water lapped mournfully against the marble steps, and a gondola lay moored to the posts, gently nodding to its black ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... wet place on the cliff had sufficed for the three men who accompanied the stag-hound. They had marked the spot carefully in memory by its distance from a certain stunted pine growing above it and a rift in the precipice to one side. Then they had ascended a furlong to the north, where the ascent was gradual and broken. When they had made sure that they were at the proper level, they searched for an approach to the desired ledge. The dog found the scent ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... removed with his family to that place. Dewley Burn, at this day, consists of a few old-fashioned low-roofed cottages standing on either side of a babbling little stream. They are connected by a rustic wooden bridge, which spans the rift in front of the doors. In the central one-roomed cottage of this group, on the right bank, Robert Stephenson lived for a time with his family; the pit at which he worked standing in the rear ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... left? Was there no hope, no outlook for the future, no rift in the black curtain, no glimmer through the night? Was good to be thus overthrown? Was evil thus to be strong and ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... hour flew by, and the moon, glinting now and then through a rift in the clouds, whitened the curling waves, but showed no signs of the Brixham, or ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... again and as her head went down Wiley stared straight ahead and blinked. He had known the Colonel and loved him well, and his father had loved him, too; but that rift had come between them and until it was healed he could never be a friend of Virginia's. She distrusted him in everything—in his silence and in his speech, his laughter and his anger, in his evasions and when he talked straight—it was better ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... furnish material for nature work for the grades. Life suddenly grew very full. There was the most excitingly interesting work for every hour, and that work was to pay high school expenses and start the college fund. There was one little rift in her joy. All of it would have been so much better if she could have told her mother, and given the money into her keeping; but the struggle to get a start had been so terrible, Elnora was afraid to take the risk. When she reached home, she only told her mother that the last of the ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... As the last letter reached its bright perfection, a long waft of wind broke over me like a universal sigh of hope from human hearts. For far away on the horizon's edge all saw a line of light that widened as they looked, and through that rift, between the dark earth and the darker sky, rolled in a softly flowing sea. Wave after wave came on, so wide, so cool, so still. None trembled at their approach, none shrunk from their embrace, but all turned toward that ocean with a mighty rush, ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... ago the good father was away on a holiday, visiting a missionary brother in an adjoining town. In his absence the mission was entered through a rift made in the wall, and three hundred taels of silver, all the money to the last sou that he possessed, were stolen. Suspicion fell upon a Christian, who was not only an active Catholic himself, but whose fathers before ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... inferior stars Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light In the clear presence of the full-orbed Moon, Who, from her sovereign elevation, gazed Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay 55 All meek and silent, save that through a rift— Not distant from the shore whereon we stood, A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing-place— Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice! 60 Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour, For so it seemed, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... ached with the radiance in which everything seemed drenched as with flame, and turning his gaze once more toward the sun, he saw that it had nearly disappeared. Only a blood-red rim peered spectrally above the gold and green horizon-and immediately overhead, a silver rift in the sky had widened slowly in the centre and narrowed at its end, thus taking the shape of a great outstretched sword that pointed directly downward at the busy, murmuring, glittering city beneath. It was a strange effect, and made on the mind of Theos a strange impression,—he ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... confidence, out of tenderness to his feelings. Their friendship, then, was notorious, and, indeed, was an element in Saul's dread of David, who seemed to have some charm to steal hearts, and had bewitched both Saul's son and his daughter, thus making a painful rift in the family unity. It does not appear how David came to be so sure of Saul's designs. The incident at Ramah might have seemed to augur some improvement in his mood; and certainly there could have been no overt acts, or Jonathan could not have disputed the suspicions. Possibly some whispers may ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the murmur, and Eustace sulked all the rest of the day; indeed, this has always seemed to me to have been the first little rift in his adherence to his cousin, but at that time his dependence was so absolute, and his power of separate action so small, that he submitted to the decree even while he grumbled; and when he found that Lord Erymanth viewed it as very undesirable for a young ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the drifting pandemonium of the pavement, was in a sense typical of his own existence in New York. He had given so much of his life into another's hands and now the anchor was dragging. He was suddenly confronted with the possibility of a rift in his relations with Elizabeth; with a sudden surging doubt, not of Elizabeth herself but simply a feeling of insecurity with regard to their future. He only realised in those moments how much he had leaned upon her, how completely she seemed ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of a bluish colour, and various marine objects are found there. And if the earth of our hemisphere is indeed raised by so much higher than it used to be, it must have become by so much lighter by the waters which it lost through the rift between Gibraltar and Ceuta; and all the more the higher it rose, because the weight of the waters which were thus lost would be added to the earth in the other hemisphere. And if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been mixed up, and separated from each other ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... course it is; but then their marriage has long had a rift in it, so that the tearing asunder was easier than one would have thought. He himself sees that, after what has occurred, it is ...
— The Live Corpse • Leo Tolstoy
... departure. A breath of fragrant breeze, heavy laden with clover and sweet with the stretch of cool, moist shade through which it had passed, came sweeping across the road, and the sounds of a farm hand whetting his scythe. Through a rift in the trees appeared a patch of delicate blue sky and the edge of a rosy cloud. Mrs. LeMasters came to the wistful end of an alluring and musty reminiscence and gazed regretfully at the tawdry beauties of the present. Then she turned her eyes upon Joe, ...
— Stubble • George Looms |
