"Riven" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ceremonies, which might have convenient occasion of ejecting them (far less to recal them, being once ejected), that they testified plainly their dislike of the same, and wished that those churches wherein they lived, might have some blessed opportunity to be rid of all such rotten relics, riven rags and rotten remainders of Popery. All which, since they were once purged away from the church of Scotland and cast forth as things accursed into the jakes of eternal detestation, how vile and abominable may we now call the resuming of them? Or what a piacular prevarication is it ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... with the lighter cannon; but the British rowed on with steady strokes, for they were seamen accustomed to victory over every European foe, and danger had no terrors for them. With fierce hurrahs they dashed through the shot-riven smoke and grappled the brig; and the boarders rose, cutlas in hand, ready to spring over the bulwarks. A terrible struggle followed. The British hacked at the boarding-nets and strove to force their way through to the decks of the privateer, while the Americans stabbed the assailants ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... was still too dense to be riven by slanting sunbeams. It closed again in solider phalanx. Our gray cell shut close about us. Esquihos and the distance became nowhere. In fact, ourselves would have been nowhere, except that a sluggish damp wind puffed sometimes, and steering into this we could guide our way within ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the riven rock, that wound On either side alternate, as the wave Flies and advances. "Here some little art Behooves us," said my leader, "that our steps Observe the varying flexure of ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... But never yet hath seen, nor e'er shall see The naked eye, thy form, as it should be; The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven Even with its own desiring phantasy, And to a thought such shape and image given, As haunts the unquenched soul—parched—wearied—wrung and riven. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... use were plugged rather like old-fashioned hives. Said the Colonel, removing a plug: "Here are the Boches. Look, and you'll see their sandbags." Through the jumble of riven trees and stones one saw what might have been a bit of green sacking. "They're about seven metres distant just here," the Colonel went on. That was true, too. We entered a little fortalice with a cannon in it, ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... was a glorious battle—this charging of the ship against man's coldest enemy and possibly his oldest, for there is no calculating the age of this glacial ice. Sometimes, as the steel-shod stem of the Roosevelt split a floe squarely in two, the riven ice would emit a savage snarl that seemed to have behind it all the rage of the invaded immemorial Arctic struggling with the self-willed intruder, man. Sometimes, when the ship was in special peril, the Eskimos ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... abrupt, keen-edged contrasts between the black, triangular shadows of the peaks and the gray of the range. Something elusive, awesome, unreal was in the air about them. The rugged mountain-side with its chaos of riven boulders, its forest of splintered rocky spires, silver cold in the twilight, its impassive bulk looming so large, yet a mere segment in the circling range, was as a day-dream of some ancient Valhalla, clothed in the mystic glory of ever-changing light, ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... brow is raised to heaven: The snow streams always, tempest-driven, Like hoary locks, o'er chasms riven ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... made for our present purpose. It will just suffice to carry up our rope, and a small but practically unbreakable grapple of hardened gold. I calculate to send the grapple to the top of the precipice with the balloon, and when it has obtained a firm hold in the riven rock there we can ascend, sailor fashion. You see the rope has knots, and I know your muscles are as trustworthy in such work ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... The more the man thought, the more uneasy he became. He got up and placed the two rifles upon the table close beside him, and returned to his chair where he sat, straining his ears to catch the faintest night sounds. He started violently at the report of a frost-riven tree, and the persistent rubbing of a branch against the edge of the roof set his nerves a-jangle. And so it was that while the captive slept, the captor worried and fretted the ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... the catastrophe itself, so it has remained with its calcined rocks, its blocks of salt, its masses of black lava, its rough ravines, its sulphurous springs, its boiling waters, its bituminous marshes, its riven mountains, and its vast Lake Asphaltite, which is the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the construing and application of its laws and remedies as applied to him, has inflicted intolerable INJUSTICE: Has persecuted more often than blessed. And so and thus, its perusal finished, its pages closed and laid aside, you are shaken and swayed in your feelings, even as a tree, bent and riven before the march and sweep ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... slow moving but apparently irresistible, of Spanish and papistical absolutism was gradually closing over Christendom. The Netherlands were the wedge by which alone the solid bulk could be riven asunder. It was the cause of German, of French, of English liberty, for which the Provinces were contending. It was not surprising that they were bitter, getting nothing in their hour of distress from the land of Luther but dogmas and Augsburg catechisms instead of money and gunpowder, and seeing ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... air was so charged with electricity that the train had to be stopped several times, and the wheels of the cars drenched with water to prevent their taking fire. As night closed in, incessant flashes of white sheet lightning almost blinded us. Each white flash was riven by red forks of flame, until, with the horizon one constant blaze, the plain seemed a vast sea of fire. Over our heads, in great zigzag lines, shot the fire fluid, as the thunder rattled, roared, crashed, and broke ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... thrice-dreaded Artillery. The clamor in the City redoubled. The Hindus had descended into the streets in real earnest and ere long the mob returned. It was a strange sight. There were no tazias—only their riven platforms—and there were no Police. Here and there a City dignitary, Hindu or Muhammadan, was vainly imploring his co-religionists to keep quiet and behave themselves—advice for which his white beard was pulled. Then a native officer of Police, unhorsed but still using his ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... hands hath the Sword been given, Hard are the palms with the kiss of the hilt; Through the trackless waste hath the road been riven For the blade to seek to ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... godless age Trembled for night eternal; at that time Howbeit earth also, and the ocean-plains, And dogs obscene, and birds of evil bode Gave tokens. Yea, how often have we seen Etna, her furnace-walls asunder riven, In billowy floods boil o'er the Cyclops' fields, And roll down globes of fire and molten rocks! A clash of arms through all the heaven was heard By Germany; strange heavings shook the Alps. Yea, and by many through the breathless groves A voice was ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... to make park dykes; and the bonny broomy knowe, where he liked sae weel to sit at e'en, wi' his plaid about him, and look at the kye as they cam down the loaning, ill wad he hae liked to hae seen that braw sunny knowe a' riven out wi' the pleugh in the fashion it is ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... As they issued from the shelter of the wood, a breeze buffeted about them, but only for a moment; then the air grew still, and nothing was audible but a soft whispering among the boughs below. The larches circling this stony height could not grow to their full stature; beaten, riven, stunted, by fierce blasts from mountain or from wave, their trunks were laden, and their branches thickly matted, with lichen so long and hoary that it gave them an aspect of age incalculable. Harvey always looked upon them with reverence, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... identified the brigade. It was of the Missinaibie, the great river whose head-waters rise a scant hundred feet from those that flow as many miles south into Lake Superior. It drains a wild and rugged country whose forests cling to bowlder hills, whose streams issue from deep-riven gorges, where for many years the big gray wolves had gathered in unusual abundance. She knew by heart the winter posts, although she had never seen them. She could imagine the isolation of such a place, and the intense loneliness of the solitary ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... hues! And then that storm which ushers in the story of the Vampyre woman tearing Jane's wedding veil at her bedside, when "the clouds drifted from pole to pole, fast following, mass on mass." And as Jane watches the shivered chestnut-tree, "black and riven, the trunk, split down the centre, gasped ghastly"—a strange but powerful alliteration. "The moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled the fissure; her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... sword, her pen; To her who world-wide entrance gave To the log cabin of the slave, Made all his wrongs and sorrows known, And all earth's languages his own,— North, South, and East and West, made all The common air electrical, Until the o'ercharged bolts of heaven Blazed down, and every chain was riven! ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... filled him with a passionate resentment at the fate that made her what she was and seemingly condemned her to eternal denial. His love for her—Lucy, Hannah, Hannah, Lucy—was intolerably keen. He went to her, bending with a riven hand on the arm ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... man may learn that in Christ's body came The hidden hope of light to mortals given: He is the Rock—'tis His own word—that riven Sends forth to all our race ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... but oh, the maid whose heart Was riven by the little wing-ed god That dipped his arrow in the scarlet stream Of my own life, shall triumph over Art And Time,—my love, whose ardent pulsing blood Shall quicken other lives and ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... the bay when Glaucon came to the last Persian outpost. The pickets saluted with their lances, as he went by them, taking him for a high officer on a reconnoissance before the onset. Next he was on the scene of the former battles. He stumbled over riven shields, shattered spear butts, and many times over ghastlier objects—objects yielding and still warm—dead men, awaiting the crows of the morrow. He walked straight on, while the dawn strengthened and the narrow pass sprang into view, betwixt mountain and morass. Then at last a challenge, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... chin. The wind ran flushed and glorious in, Godlike from hill to frozen hill-top stepp'd, And swiftly upon that bony stature swept. Then a long breath and then quick breaths I heard, In those black caves of stillness music stirred, Those icy heights were riven: From crown to clearing hollow grass was green; And godlike from flushed hill to hill-top leapt Time, youthful, quick, serene, Dew flashing from his limbs, light from his eyes To the sheeny skies. A lark's song climbed from earth and dropped from heaven, Far off ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... foundations. Great stones were thrown up as from a volcano, some of them, great masses of hard stone, squared and grooved with implements wrought by human hands, breaking up and splitting in mid air as though riven by some infernal power. Trees near the house—and therefore presumably in some way above the hole, which sent up clouds of dust and steam and fine sand mingled, and which carried an appalling stench which sickened the spectators—were torn up by the roots and hurled into ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... to cheek o' that king o' men, Kirsty Barclay? Lord, haud me ohn killt her! Little hauds me frae riven ye to bits wi' ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... little temper she had, she rated him soundly, and sent him home saying with the prophet Jonah, "Do I not well to be angry?" for that also he placed to Malcolm's account. Nor was his home any more a harbour for his riven boat, seeing his wife only longed for the return of him with whom his spirit chode: she regarded him as an exiled king, one day to reappear, and justify himself in the eyes of all, ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... all the baser material in the admiral's heart: the pure metal was alone left, and his heart seemed rent asunder, like a crucible which had been riven by the ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... thought of the appointment you had set for me—with the Petition; and the two harked back together upon a question you put to me just now. 'Why was not Brother Bonaday among the signatories?' Between them they turned that question into a suspicion. Guilty men are seldom bold: as the Scots say, 'Riven breeks sit still.' . . . Was not this, or something like ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... watch I keep, Dear heart that wak'st though senses sleep To thee my heart turns gratefully. All it can give to thee is given. From all besides, its heartstrings riven. Could ne'er ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... willing, on Sunday. . . . We left Loch Earn Head last night, and went to a place called Killin, eight miles from it, where we slept. I walked some six miles with Fletcher after we got there, to see a waterfall; and truly it was a magnificent sight, foaming and crashing down three great steeps of riven rock; leaping over the first as far off as you could carry your eye, and rumbling and foaming down into a dizzy pool below you, with a deafening roar. To-day we have had a journey of between 50 and 60 miles, through the bleakest and most desolate part of Scotland, where the hill-tops are still covered ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... actors. What I called touching, just now was the thought that here the human voice, the utterance of a great language, had been supreme. The air was full of intonations and cadences; not of the echo of smashing blows, of riven armor, of howling victims and roaring beasts. The spot is, in short, one of the sweetest legacies of the ancient world; and there seems no profanation in the fact that by day it is open to the good people of Arles, who use it to pass, by no means, in great ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... of the pass to the left gave sight of the points of black fir forest below, round the girths of the barren shafts. Mountain blocks appeared pushing up in front, and a mountain wall and woods on it, and mountains in the distance, and cliffs riven with falls of water that were silver skeins, down lower to meadows, villages and spires, and lower finally to the whole valley of the foaming river, field and river seeming in imagination rolled out from the hand of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... from his ultimate pathway and claimed her his chosen bride; And He that had formed and dowered her with the dower of a royal queen, Decreed her the strength of mighty hills, the peace of the plains between; The silence of utmost desert, and canyons rifted and riven, And the music of wide-flung forests where ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... the solitary misery of his feverish bed. Hard is the heart that cannot feel his sorrows, when, stretched beside the common way, without a human face to look on, he called upon the mother whose brain, had she known his situation, would have been riven—whose affectionate heart would have been broken, by the knowledge of his affliction. It was a situation which afterwards appeared to him dark and terrible. The pencil of the painter could not depict it, nor the pen of the poet describe it, except like a dim vision, ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... to the lightest touch; to see the faces brighten or darken at your bidding; to know that the sources of human emotion and human passion gush forth at the word of the speaker as the stream from the riven rock; to feel that the thought which thrills through a thousand hearers has its impulse from you, and throbs back to you the fuller from a thousand heart-beats. Is there any emotional joy in life more brilliant than this, fuller of ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... course, she would leave Sunrise some time. Her home was in Cambridge-by-the-Sea, not on the Prairie-by-the-Walnut. She belonged to the dead-language scholars, not to crude red-blooded creatures like himself. He turned his face to the west and the threatening sky seemed in harmony with his storm-riven soul. He was so young—less than half an hour older than the big whole-hearted fellow who started up the bluff in picnic frolic with a pretty girl whom Professor Burgess adored. That was one reason why he had brought her up. He wanted to tease the Professor then. ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... comforts and the idle gossip of camp and the ranches he visited, was proving the sincerity of his manifest uneasiness by a watchfulness wholly at variance with his natural laziness. On the other hand, Peppajee loved to play the oracle, and a waving wisp of smoke, or the changing shapes in a wind-riven cloud meant to him spirit-sent prophecies not to ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... her smile and accent. "Or—to drop metaphors, at which I always bungle—it is my belief that it is easy for happy people to be good. All this talk about the sweetness of crushed blossoms, throwing their fragrance from the wounded part, and the riven sandal-tree, and the blessed uses of adversity, is outrageous balderdash, according to my doctrine. A buried thing is but one degree better than a dead one. What it is the fashion of poets and sentimentalists to call perfume, is the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the gipsy, 'ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan; ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram! This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths; see if the fire in your ain parlour burn the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack off seven cottar houses; look if your ain roof-tree stand the faster. Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at Derncleugh; see that the hare does not couch on the hearthstane at Ellangowan. Ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram; what ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... seems almost boundless. Port Isaac Bay lies just below, sweeping far back into the land, half hidden by the Eastern Horn of Pentire. Across the bay Tintagel lies directly opposite, eight miles away over the sea, every crevice and gully of its riven island clearly marked in the translucent air; and beyond it the eye follows leagues and leagues of iron cliffs towering far higher than any others in the west, and point after point of noble jagged promontories, past Boscastle, set ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... drifted by as silently as the winds since the first rock was riven where its foundations were to be laid, and still all day on the clean air sounds the lonely clink of drill and chisel as the blasting and the shaping of the stone goes on. The snows of winters have drifted deep above its rough beginnings; the suns ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... thistle which wars against the fertility of nature, or the grain which is the support of our existence,—to the nightshade with its deadly fruit, or the creeping violet with its sweet perfume. The heart which has throbbed so tumultuously with the extreme of love, and which has been riven with the excess of woe, will shortly pant no more. The mind which has been borne down by the irresistible force of passion,—which has attempted to stem the torrent, but in vain, and, since the rage of it has passed away, has been left like the once fertile valley which has been overflown, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... trodden grass he began to understand something of the unformulated decision that had been slowly growing in him—of the determination, taking shape, to deal more nobly with himself—with this harmless self which had accepted unworthiness and all its attributes, and which riven pride would have flung back at the civilisation which branded him ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... lurid glow. Bright and gigantic through the darkness which closed around it, the mountain shone, a pile of fire! Its summit seemed riven in two; or rather, above its surface, there seemed to rise two monster-shapes, each confronting each, as demons contending for a world. These were of one deep blood-red hue of fire, which lighted up the whole atmosphere; but below, the nether part of the mountain was still dark ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... [207] Atlantis society might have been a heaven upon earth, the whole nation might have consisted of just men, needing no repentance, and yet somebody must starve. Reckless Istar, non-moral Nature, would have riven the ethical fabric. I was once talking with a very eminent physician* about the vis medicatrix naturae. "Stuff!" said he; "nine times out of ten nature does not want to cure the man: she wants to put him in his coffin." And Istar-Nature ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... his doubt-freed saint exclaims. Were He not God, and worthy of our trust, Could He admit such worship from the just? And bless the conscious of his heavenly right, Whose faith demands no evidence of sight? Yet grace divine full evidence has given; Witness! Thou earth! by his dread sufferings riven! Witness! Thou speaking firmament above! When God proclaim'd Him offspring of his love! Pleas'd to that blessed offspring to impart Prerogative divine, dominion of the heart! Exulting angels hail his sovereign sway; Attest his glory, his commands obey; And usher Him, whom e'en ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... lay, tossed about by the waves. The riven decks could ill keep out the water which washed aboard her, while many of the beams gave way, and those of the orlop-deck bent and cracked till several of them fell into the hold. Nothing now seemed to stop the entrance of ...
— True Blue • W.H.G. Kingston
... nor horror nor pity: and in moments of pure pleasure, during some quiet interlude, when larks rained music out of the blue; when he found himself alone with the eerie wonder of dawn over the scarred and riven fields of death; or when he discovered his Oriental genius for scout work that had rapidly earned him distinction and sated his love of adventure to ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... so long ago, The sod had riven two breasts asunder; Daisies throve gaily there, as though No ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... Defiance," especially against things in general, are not the most peaceable inmates; yet can the Psychologist surmise that it was no longer a quite hopeless Unrest; that henceforth it had at least a fixed centre to revolve round. For the fire-baptized soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom, which feeling is its Baphometic Baptism: the citadel of its whole kingdom it has thus gained by assault, and will keep inexpugnable; outwards from which the remaining dominions, not indeed without hard battling, will doubtless by degrees ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... is equally a mystery. Apply intense cold to a drop of water in the centre of a globe of iron, and the globe is shattered as the water freezes. Confine a little of the same limpid element in a cylinder which Enceladus or Typhon could not have riven asunder, and apply to it intense heat, and the vast power that couched latent in the water shivers the cylinder to atoms. A little shoot from a minute seed, a shoot so soft and tender that the least bruise would kill it, forces its way downward into the hard ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven, Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven, Save me! oh, save me! Shall ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... not had my brain seared, my heart riven, Hope sapped, name blighted, Life's life ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... narrowly what shipping was there to be seen. Far beyond the lightship a liner was riding the waves with serene contempt, making for the river's mouth and Tilbury Dock. Nearer in, a cargo boat was standing out upon the long trail, the white of riven waters showing clearly against her unclean freeboard. Out to east a little covey of fishing-smacks, red sails well reefed, were scudding before the wind like strange affrighted water-fowl, and bearing down ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... not our own; Our children and our wives Are riven from us, while we moan And labour out our lives. They prison us in filthy sties Would shame your Christian Hell; No ear there is to heed our cries, No tongue our ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... to work and strove to express nature as they saw her; but each saw her through the eyes of a master. In a short time Philippe Dubois had knocked off in the style of Hubert Robert a deserted farm, a clump of storm-riven trees, a dried-up torrent. Evariste Gamelin found a landscape by Poussin ready made on the banks of the Yvette. Philippe Desmahis was at work before a pigeon-cote in the picaresque manner of Callot and Duplessis. Old Brotteaux who piqued himself on imitating ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... and then they found the stream rushing, bursting, crashing among rent and riven rocks and boulders as if it had gone furiously mad, and was resolved never more to flow and murmur, but always to leap and roar. It was impassable; to walk down its banks or bed was impossible, so the wanderers had to re-ascend the bank, and roam away over black space in search of another ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... by many because the marks of honourable war were yet on us; so that the men spoke of Aldhelm's crushed headpiece, or Wulfhere's gashed shield that bore the mark of the axe that he stopped from me, or my riven mail that Alswythe's scarf would scarcely hide, and Wislac's ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... the monster. "But we can practise that without giving our pledge." True. But until you give it, he will count you his friend and haunt your dwelling. In this cause there is no neutrality. Have you supported this cruel kingdom of darkness and death? Will you do it longer? Shall conscience be riven by the act? Shall the land that bears you be cursed; the young around you be sporting with hell; the awakened sinner be drowning conviction at his bottle; the once fair communicant be disgraced; the once happy ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... in a moment, and without any further warning, the blackness overhead was riven by the most appallingly vivid flash of lightning that I had ever seen, accompanied—not followed—by a crash of thunder that temporarily deafened all hands of us and caused the ship to quiver and tremble from stem to stern. Then, while ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... came near the town the sun was setting. In the west, tempestuous clouds were massed upon one another, and the sun shone blood-red above them; but as it sank they were riven asunder, and I saw a great furnace that lit up the whole sky. The mountains were purple, unreal as the painted mountains of a picture. The light was gone from the east, and there everything was chill and grey; the barren rocks looked so desolate that one shuddered ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... another spoken word she moved away, and left me in the green pleasaunces of the garden, with my heart riven this way and that, scarce knowing what I ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... driven stakes Deep in the loamy bank. Uptorn by strength Resistless in so bad a cause, but lame To better deeds, he bundles up the spoil— An ass's burden,—and when laden most And heaviest, light of foot steals fast away. Nor does the boarded hovel better guard The well-stacked pile of riven logs and roots From his pernicious force. Nor will he leave Unwrenched the door, however well secured, Where chanticleer amidst his harem sleeps In unsuspecting pomp; twitched from the perch He gives the princely bird with all his wives To his voracious bag, struggling in vain, And loudly ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... yawn, the cloudy jaws of heaven, As by a tongue, by forked lightning riven; And to the sky great Indra's fiery bow In lieu of ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... with wedges and maul was a kind of work calling for no special skill; Agathemer taught me all he knew in a day or two. All winter we alternated this work with woodchopping, afterwards chopping the riven lengths into firewood lengths and then splitting these into firewood. Although we worked at riving and chopping and splitting every moment of daylight when we were not busy at something else, we never accumulated any comfortable store of firewood, so as to be able to rest ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... great cataract sends up to heaven Its sprayey incense in perpetual cloud, Thy wings in twain the sacred bow have riven, And onward sailed irreverently proud! Unflinching bird! No frigid clime congeals The fervid blood that riots in thy veins; No torrid sun thine upborne nature feels— The North, the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... and the four thousand dollars would be lost! This was the reflection which overwhelmed the miser. Even death seemed preferable to losing such a vast sum of money. His god appeared to be riven from him, and the revulsion in his mind was terrible. If his hair had not already been gray, the shock was heavy enough to have bleached it out in ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... Heaven has roused the Polish slave and bid him rend his chains, And now we rank among the free—"Our country yet remains:" Again we seek our native rights by God and Nature given— A people's right unto their soil from us unjustly riven. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... very simple maid— Nicknamed a "tweeny"; The cook's and housemaid's riven aid, Christ-named Irene. And when, in lower regions, she Hears hurled request, She laughs or cries: "Oh, right you be, I'll do ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... sullen, thundering river, with its swift, changeful, endless, contending strife—for that was tragic. And she rejected the frowning mass of red rock, upreared, riven and split and canyoned, so grim and aloof—for that was barren. But she accepted the vast sloping valley of sage, rolling gray and soft and beautiful, down to the dim mountains and purple ramparts of the horizon. Lucy did not know what she yearned for, she did ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... furnace of sudden fire. A labourer's cottage had been wrecked; many a stately forest tree had been rent or blighted; the withering havoc had spread far and wide over the hills. On the following morning, the keeper, going his rounds, had found the dead hare beside a riven oak. ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... was brought in royal state down the long, winding road that descends from the rim of the crater to the scorched and chasm-riven plain that lies between the 'Hale mau mau' and those beetling walls yonder in the distance. The guards were set and the troops of mourners began the weird wail for the departed. In the middle of the night came a sound of innumerable voices in the air and the rush of invisible ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... an inner darkness were suddenly riven as by a bolt of lightning—a hundred things, once obscure and incomprehensible, were clear now, terribly clear. She understood now how the Adventurer was privy to all the inner workings of the organization; she understood now how it was, and why, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... in the sky Flashed a swift terror on the dark. In that sharp light the fields did lie Naked and stone-like; each tree stood Like a tranced woman, bound and stark. Far off the wood With darkness ridged the riven dark. ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... freedom strong, rising like some stately palm on the century's verge; but to the highest-mounted minds in Russia, Germany, France, Norway, Italy, man presents himself like some blasted pine, a thunder-riven trunk, tottering on the brink of the abyss, whilst far below rave the darkness and the storm-drift of the worlds. From what causes and by the operation of what laws has the great disillusion fallen upon the heart of Europe? Whither are vanished the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... tomahawks; and in the second place, to chop logs or boughs off a tree was totally against their practice. By sunrise we were upon the summit of the mountain; it consisted of enormous blocks and boulders of red granite, so riven and fissured that no water could possibly lodge upon it for an instant. I found it also to be highly magnetic, there being a great deal of ironstone about the rocks. It turned the compass needle from its true north point to 10 degrees south ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... ore, the gems that few forget; In time the tinsel jewel will be wrought. Stand thou alone, and fixed as destiny, An imaged god that lifts above all hate; Stand thou serene and satisfied with fate; Stand thou as stands the lightning-riven tree, That lords the cloven clouds of gray Yosemite. Yea, lone, sad soul, thy heights must be thy home; Thou sweetest lover! love shall climb to thee Like incense curling some cathedral dome, From many distant vales. Yet thou shalt ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... the carriage at the back. A Cossack and his horse, following the imperial conveyance, were instantly killed. The Czar stepped out from amid the debris on to the torn and riven snow. He stumbled, and took a proffered arm. They found blood on the cushions afterwards. At that moment the only thought in his mind seemed to be anger, and he glanced at the dying Cossack—at the dead baker-boy. ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... of the way a few miles to show us one of the few curiosities of which Barbadoes can boast. It is called the "Horse." The shore for some distance is a high and precipitous ledge of rocks, which overhangs the sea in broken cliffs. In one place a huge mass has been riven from the main body of rock and fallen into the sea. Other huge fragments have been broken off in the same manner. In the midst of these, a number of steps have been cut in the rock for the purpose of descending to the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... boiling and spouting—and, even in a summer calm, in an eternal state of agitation"; and then fancy the calm changing to a storm: "the wind at west; the whole volume of the Atlantic rolling its wild mass of waters on, in one sweeping flood, to dash and burst upon the black and riven promontory of the Dunnet Head, until the mountain wave, shattered into spray, flies over the summit of a precipice, 400 feet above the base it broke upon." But this was precisely what we did not want to see, so we turned to the famous Statistical Account, which also described the difficulty of ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... have been out in the country; down by the sea on my favourite coast between Granton and Queensferry. There was a delicate, delicious haze over the firth and sands on one side, and on the other was the shadow of the woods all riven with great golden rifts of sunshine. A little faint talk of waves upon the beach; the wild strange crying of seagulls over the sea; and the hoarse wood-pigeons and shrill, sweet robins full of their autumn love-making among the trees, made up a delectable concerto ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Mr. Billings found himself standing on the edge of a broad shelf of the mountain,—a shelf covered with huge boulders of rock tumbled there by storm and tempest, riven by lightning-stroke or the slow disintegration of nature from the bare, glaring, precipitous ledge he had marked from below. East and west it seemed to stretch, forbidding and inaccessible. Turning to the sergeant, Mr. Billings directed ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... perilous fear, Born from the monster-worm; and, on the verge Of Earth, the dragon, guarding fruits of gold. These toils and others countless I have tried, And none hath triumphed o'er me. But to-day, Jointless and riven to tatters, I am wrecked Thus utterly by imperceptible woe; I, proudly named Alcmena's child, and His Who reigns in highest heaven, the King supreme! Ay, but even yet, I tell ye, even from here, Where I am nothingness and cannot move, She who hath done this deed shall feel ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Ellangowan! ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram! This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths—see if your own fire burn the blither for that. Ye have riven the roof off seven cottar houses—look if your own roof-tree stand the faster. Ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram! what do ye glower after our folk for? There's thirty hearts there that would have spent their life-blood ere ye had scratched your finger. Yes, there's thirty yonder, ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee! Let the water and the blood From Thy riven side which flowed, Be of sin the double cure, Cleanse me from its ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... most distant corner of the room, where he spent the rest of the evening entirely unaware of any one's presence, and given up to the delight of his eyes. The bud was so far opened that the creamy white of the petals could be seen within the riven sheath, whose strong dark color exquisitely relieved the pallid beauty it had guarded so long. The silky stamens were still curled about the central style, but the splendor of color which was coming was already suggested, and a breath of intoxicating fragrance stole ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... fearful storm. Thunder rolled, lightning flashed, the very earth shook and trembled. There was not a town in all the land but the walls of it were cracked and riven. The sky grew black at midday, rain and hail in torrents swept the land. "It is the end of the world," the people ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... utter, and she threw herself forward on the arm of the couch and sobbed—sobbed with the passion she had only known on the day long ago when she had crawled into the shrubs and groveled in the earth. It was the same kind of passion—the shaken and heart-riven woe of a creature who has trusted and hoped joyously and has been forever betrayed. The face and eyes had been so kind. The voice so friendly! Oh, how could even the wickedest girl in the world have doubted their ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ills that flow From their first fault for Adam's race was won; Sore smitten, since in torment fierce God's son Served servants on the cruel cross below. Heaven showed she knew Thee, who Thou wert and whence, Veiling her eyes above the riven earth; The mountains trembled and the seas were troubled. He took the Fathers from hell's darkness dense: The torments of the damned fiends redoubled: Man only ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... purple couch and the flame of the woman, tall like cypress tree that flames sudden and swift and free as with crackle of golden resin and cones and the locks flung free like the cypress limbs, bound, caught and shaken and loosed, bound, caught and riven and bound and loosened again, as in rain of a kingly storm or wind full ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... bring to me from the ocean's breast No crooning lullaby; But the shout of a bleak storm-riven crest As it shoulders up in the sodden West And hurtles ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... such excellent food could be obtained; and Reynard promised to take him to a garden where he should find more honey-combs than ten bears could eat at a meal. But the treacherous rascal took him to a carpenter's yard, where lay the trunk of a huge oak-tree, half-riven asunder, with two great wedges in it, so that the cleft stood a great way open. "Behold now, dear uncle," said the fox, "within this tree is so much honey that it is unmeasurable." The bear, in great haste, thrust his nose and fore-paws into the tree; and immediately Reynard pulled out ...
— The Comical Creatures from Wurtemberg - Second Edition • Unknown
... might I have invoked in song Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven, Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... sterner aspects of that revelation, which cannot be denied, and ought not to be minimised or softened. Here, on the right hand, are the flowery slopes of the Mount of Blessing; there, on the left, the barren, stern, thunder-riven, lightning-splintered pinnacles of the Mount of Cursing. Every clear note of benediction hath its low minor of imprecation from the other side. Between the two, overhung by the hopes of the one, and frowned upon and dominated by the threatenings of the other, is pitched the little camp of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... climb down there,' said Harry, as they came to where a chasm opened in the line of cliff, with rough steps and ledges of rock standing out in the riven walls. Not a bird was to be seen in the gloomy crevasse; although the skuas and black-backed gulls were flying about and clamouring before the face ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae
... revel, the despond, What pools of innocence, what crystal benison! As through a riven mist that glowers in the sun, A stretch of God's blue calm glassed in ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... of the Arno stream there towers above the pines and giant beeches of the hills a great basalt rock, Alvernia, which looks over Italy, east and west, to the two seas. That rock is accessible by but a single foot-track, and it is gashed and riven by grim chasms, yet withal great oaks and beech-trees flourish atop among the boulders, and there are drifts of fragrant wild flowers, and legions of birds and other wild creatures dwell there; and the lights and colours of heaven play about ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... her lover Until the evening breeze blows, And the shadows disappear (at sunset), Turn, my beloved! Be thou as a young hart Upon the cleft-riven hills! ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... man he remained, until he bowed before the mandate which none may disobey. "Three times," said Bouillaud, "did the apoplectic thunderbolt fall on that robust brain,"—it yielded at last as the old bald cliff that is riven and crashes down into the valley. I saw him before the first thunderbolt had descended: a square, solid man, with a high and full-domed head, oracular in his utterances, indifferent to those around him, sometimes, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... two windows in your tower, Barbara, Barbara, For all between the sun and moon in the lands of Africa. Hath a man three eyes, Barbara, a bird three wings, That you have riven roof and wall to look upon vain things?' Her voice was like a wandering thing that falters, yet is free, Whose soul has drunk in a distant land ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... opened! mark the anxious fear That calls the sigh and starts the bitter tear; The good shall hear a blessed sentence read, All mourning passes—all their griefs are fled. No more their souls with racking pains are riven, Their Lord admits them to the peace of heaven; The sinner there, with guilty crime oppressed, Bears on his brow the fears of hell confess'd. Behold him now—his guilty looks—I see His God condemns, and mercy's God is He; No joy for him, for ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... what shall we say? This much we will say. First, the fearless Christian, fully acquainted with the results of a criticism unsparing as the requisitions of truth and candor, can scarcely, with intelligent honesty, do more than place his hand on the beating of his heart, and fix his eye on the riven tomb of Jesus, and exclaim, "Feeling here the inspired promise of immortality, and seeing there the sign of God's authentic seal, I gratefully believe that Christ has risen, and that my soul is deathless!" Secondly, the trusting philosopher, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... he was completely convinced that he had really been killed, and was damned and would spend all eternity in this fire-riven chaos, the Nemesis began firing red flares and the speakers in all the vehicles were signaling recall. He got aboard the Space Scourge somehow, after assuring himself that nobody who was ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... face; I've known them, too, that consaited they were kind and ready to give away all they had to the poor, when they've been listening to other people's hard heartedness; but whose fists have clench'd as tight as the riven hickory when it came to downright offerings of their own. Besides, Judith, you're handsome—uncommon in that way, one might observe and do no harm to the truth—and they that have beauty, like to have that which will adorn it. Are ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... cabin, and it trembled beneath the heavy fall of the rain. At short intervals a terrible blue light quivered through crevices in the "daubin'" between the logs of the wall, and about the rude shutter which closed the glassless window. Now and then a crash from the forest told of a riven tree. But the storm had no terrors for the inmates of this humble dwelling. Pete and Joe had already gone to bed; Tennessee had fallen asleep while playing on the floor, and Rufe dozed peacefully in his chair. Even Mrs. Dicey nodded ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... the young Swaigder, And he began to call— Riven were wall and marble stone, And the hill ...
— Young Swaigder, or The Force of Runes - and Other Ballads • Anonymous
... commenced to exhibit those celestial weapons in order. And as those celestial weapons had been set, the Earth being oppressed with the feet (of Arjuna), began to tremble with (its) trees; and the rivers and the mighty main became vexed; and the rocks were riven; and the air was hushed. And the sun did not shine; and fire did not flame; and by no means did the Vedas of the twice-born once shine. And, O Janamejaya, the creatures peopling the interior of the earth, on being afflicted, rose and surrounded the Pandava, trembling with joined hands and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and white and elbowed the guelder roses and the elders set with white patens. Cherries fell in the orchard with the same rich monotony, the same fatality, as drops of blood. They lay under the fungus-riven trees till the hens ate them, pecking gingerly and enjoyably at their lustrous beauty as the world does at a poet's heart. In the kitchen-garden also the hens took their ease, banqueting sparely beneath the straggling black boughs ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... and beautiful city, well planted with trees, the houses large and set in ample ground. Two riven meet there to form a third, the Thames, at the head of which is the port or Landing as it is called. At the port of the city I had for the first time seen steamers and sailing vessels. Strange and wonderful creatures they were to me, and I asked a thousand questions ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... I saw the enemy's foreyard was gone and her sides streaked and splintered by our shot, and from our decks rose shouts of fierce exultation, drowned in the answering thunder of their starboard broadside, the hiss of their shot all round about us, the crackle of riven woodwork, the vicious whirr of flying splinters, wails ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... swept out into dreadful magnificences of height and depth, and glow and shadow. Cliffs of black basalt, scarred and riven by the accidents of thousands of years, frowned like eyeless giant faces. One height, with a supernal leap, had risen from the highest, and stood poised a mile aloft, as if it were a feat to stand so for a second, with a craggy head cut out of the sheet of blue. Mountain ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... purpose? Alas, Dido! now thou dost feel thy wickedness; that had graced thee once, when thou gavest away thy crown. Behold the faith and hand of him! who, they say, carries his household's ancestral gods about with him! who stooped his shoulders to a father outworn with age! Could I not have riven his body in sunder and strewn it on the waves? and slain with the sword his comrades and his dear Ascanius, and served him for the banquet at his father's table? But the chance of battle had been dubious. If it had! whom did I fear [604-635]with my death ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... comes, Like the stars that are driven O'er the cloudwrack riven. When it will—to the world it owes no debt, No times, no seasons for it are set. When it will—like all that ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... so often been taken by assault during the last thirty years as to be considered untenable. The harbor appears like a nest scooped out of the mountains, into and out of which the tide ebbs and flows through a double channel riven by an earthquake in the solid rock. Tradition says it once had another entrance, but that an earthquake closed it up and opened the present channel. There is still another opening in the sharp mountain ridge that incloses ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... minstrel swept, The king of men, the loved of Heaven, Which Music hallowed while she wept O'er tones her heart of hearts had given,— Redoubled be her tears; its chords are riven. ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... And as Honora sat at the window of the drawing-room of the sleeping car, life seemed as fantastic and unreal as the moss-hung Southern forest into which she stared. She was happy, as a child is happy who is taken on an excursion into the unknown. The monotony of existence was at last broken, and riven the circumscribing ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... AEschylus,—a dilution? Sophocles is doubtless the better artist, the more complete; but are we to expect anything but glimpses and ruins of the divinest? Sophocles is a pure Greek temple; but AEschylus is a rugged mountain, lashed by seas, and riven by thunderbolts: and which is the most wonderful, and appalling? Or if one will have AEschylus too a work of man, I say he is like a Gothic Cathedral, which the Germans say did arise from the genius of man aspiring up to the immeasurable, and reaching after the infinite in complexity and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... they tell, the helmet's beaten shell, Athene's riven steel, caught over the white skull, Athene sets to heal the few ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... thousand human voices, raised in agonized screams and callings from within the inclosing walls, and the whistling of air through hundreds of open deadlights as the water, entering the holes of the crushed and riven starboard side, expelled it, the Titan moved slowly backward and launched herself into the sea, where she floated low on her side—a dying ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... possible when the scenery is marred by a barrenness of soil, a lack of greenness in the grass, an absence of wild flowers, and a dull uniform and sombre tint upon all the trees. The hills, which look somewhat featureless from the city, are riven in a hundred places by rocky gorges or gullies, and many well-made roads cross the range at various points. The roads to Belair and Mount Lofty, to Green Hill, Marble Hill, Moriatta, and a score of other places, give ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... still could not understand that he was one, and who relied on the confidence that, only yesterday, he still had had the right to exact from all the world. He appeared before her like a fine proud tree struck by lightning, whose riven trunk, trembling to its fall, must be crushed to the earth by the first storm, unless the gardener props it up. She longed to be able to forget all he had brought upon her and to grasp his hand in friendly consolation; but her deeply aggrieved pride helped her to preserve the cold and repellent ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... beech, or birch, or maple or alder is struck. Elms are fairly dangerous, being forty to the beech's one, and pines are less so, their ratio being fifteen. Not only this, boys, but a good deal depends on the way in which a tree is struck. An oak-tree may be riven into splinters, showing the terrible resistance that it gives to the stroke. A beech-tree, usually, is killed outright, yet shows but little outward injury. The oak has resisted the current, it is a bad conductor; the beech has allowed the current to flow directly ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... and feet with nails were riven, The spear into Thy side was driven;— O Christ, when dying on the tree, How great the pain ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... other destruction than that of shell and powder. I do not think that any throb of my heart was unattended by some volley or discharge. Dull, hoarse, uninterrupted, the whole afternoon was shaken by the sound. It was with a shudder that I thought how every peal announced flesh and bone riven asunder. The country people, on the way, stood in their side yards, anxiously listening. Riders or teamsters coming from the field, were beset with inquiries; but in the main they knew nothing. As I stopped ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... YOUNG TWENTY-NINE, who represents Omniscience and Oldham, in drawling voice, hesitating for a word, but having no hesitation in keeping the House waiting for it, settles the question that for two years has riven parties and convulsed continents. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... his father staggered into their pretty log home, bleeding, crushed and dazed. The fate of the mountaineer had met him, for, during one of those sudden tempests that sweep through the canyons, a wind-riven tree had hurled its length down across the trail, its rotting heart and decaying branches falling—providentially with broken force—sparing the galloping horses and only injuring the driver—for how he escaped death was beyond ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... low, level, marshy ground from whence the farm derived its title; a series of flat, productive water-meadows, surrounded partly by thick coppices, partly by the winding Kennett, and divided by deep and broad ditches; a few pollard willows, so old that the trunk was, in some, riven asunder, whilst in others nothing but the mere shell remained, together with here and there a stunted thorn, alone relieving ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... I have invoked in song Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest riven; The massy earth, the sphered skies are given: I am borne darkly, fearfully afar; Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven, The soul of Adonais like a star Beacons from the abode where ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... tattered banner that he loved so well Again unfurled and fluttering in the breeze, And once again we hear the "rebel yell" Triumphant wafted o'er the riven trees! ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... rallying his men, they fire, and Major Taunton has dropped. The encounter closing within ten minutes afterwards on the arrival of assistance to the two Englishmen, "the best friend man ever had" is laid upon a coat spread out upon the wet clay by the heart-riven subaltern, whom years before his generous counsel had rescued from ignominious destruction. Three little spots of blood are visible on the shirt of Major Taunton as he lies there with the breast ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... from the darkened sky The thunderbolts are driven, And wheresoe'er we turn our eye Our earthly hopes are riven; But could we look beyond the storm That threatens all before us, We might observe a heavenly form Guiding ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... bright harp of thousand strings By the spoiler's hand was riven, But the realm seraphic rings With the victor notes of heaven. Over death triumphant—lo! See thy cherished one appear! Mourner, dry thy tears of wo, Trust, believe, and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... momentary interval of suspense was passed in unchanged attitudes and looks of deep attention; and then the rushing of the iron storm was heard hurtling through the air, as it came fearfully on. The crash that followed, mingled, as it was, with human groans, and succeeded by the tearing of riven plank, and the scattering high of splinters, ropes, blocks, and the implements of war, proclaimed the fatal accuracy of the broadside. But the surprise, and, with it, the brief confusion, endured but for an instant. The ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... mind, as quick as his flickering tongue, had caught that panic-born thought. "You are of the blood of this space wanderer. Men from the riven colonies must have escaped to safety. Look at this man, is he not like the men of Memphir—as they were in the olden days of the ...
— The Gifts of Asti • Andre Alice Norton
... Snarley had reached the scene of the picnic. He gazed about him in all directions: nothing was stirring but the peewits. Then he climbed down the gorge with some difficulty, found the kettle, and examined its riven side. Climbing back, he went some distance further up the valley, ascended a little knoll, took out his whistle, and blew a peculiar blast, tremulous and piercing. No response. Snarley blew again, and again. At the fourth attempt the distant barking of a dog was heard, and ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... highway to Paris, and reached another large gateway. Through the railings they had a complete view of the facade of the mysterious house. From this point of view, the dilapidation was still more apparent. Huge cracks had riven the walls of the main body of the house built round three sides of a square. Evidently the place was allowed to fall to ruin; there were holes in the roof, broken slates and tiles lay about below. Fallen fruit from the orchard trees was left to rot on ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... can consecrate the ground, Where mated hearts are mutual bound; The spot, where love's first links are wound, That ne'er are riven, Is hallowed down to Earth's profound, And up ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... the unseen Love which everywhere appeals to him in the visible power of the Creator. Suddenly a mighty spectacle unfolds itself. The rain and wind have ceased. The barricade of cloud which veiled the moon's passage up the western sky has sunk riven at her feet. She herself shines forth in unbroken radiance, and a double lunar rainbow, in all its spectral grandeur, spans the vault of heaven. There is a sense as of a heavenly presence about to emerge upon the arc. Then the ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... little cynical. He was essentially of that order of men who are dwellers in cities, and even the sting of the salt breeze blowing across the marshes—marshes riven everywhere with long arms of the sea—could bring no colour to ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the crash of Sinai's thunders with the rockings of a riven sphere, as in the allegoric ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... fire, the desert seemed to retreat, to fade coldly and gloomily, to lose its great landmarks in dim obscurity. Closer, around to the north, the canyon country yawned with innumerable gray jaws, ragged and hard, and the riven earth took on a different character. It had no shadows. It grew flat and, like the sea, seemed to mirror the vast gray cloud expanse. The sublime vanished, but the desolate remained. No warmth—no movement—no life! Dead stone it was, cut into a million ruts by ruthless ages. Carley ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey |
