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Cleft   Listen
adjective
Cleft  adj.  
1.
Divided; split; partly divided or split.
2.
(Bot.) Incised nearly to the midrib; as, a cleft leaf.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cleft" Quotes from Famous Books



... sudden the dense foliage was cleft; there opened a broad alley between drooping boughs, and in the deep hollow, bordered with sand and stones, a flood rolled eastward. This river is now called Sinno; it was the ancient Sins, whereon stood the city of the same name. In the seventh century before Christ, Sins was lauded ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... affliction! I must roam about abandoned since I left the shelter in the cleft of my rock. Around me rages the storm, alone and forsaken I fly to the forest to seek safety in its thickets. My Friend has abandoned me! His anger was kindled, because faithless to Him I permitted the stranger to seduce me, and now my enemies harry me without respite. Since my Friend deserted ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... Ge Olympia we learn[130] that she had a precinct within the enclosure of the later Olympieum. Pausanias by his mention of the cleft in the earth through which the waters of the flood disappeared and of the yearly offerings of the honey-cake in connection with this, shows the high antiquity of certain rites here celebrated. It is indeed most probable that these ceremonies formed a part of the ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various

... also found the rhinoceros, an animal less than the elephant but larger than the buffalo. It has a horn upon its nose, about a cubit in length; this horn is solid, and cleft through the middle. The rhinoceros fights with the elephant, runs his horn into his belly,[53] and carries him off upon his head; but the blood and the fat of the elephant running into his eyes and making him blind, he ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous

... a narrow cleft in the mass of the granite, called by geologists a 'fault,' and caused by the unequal cooling of the globe of the earth. If it had at one time been a passage for eruptive matter thrown out by Snfell, I still could not understand why no trace was left of its passage. We kept going ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... Doon, Kyle, the central district of the shire of Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly. On the Carrick side of the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, cleft with shallow dells, and sown here and there with farms and tufts of wood. Inland, it loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great herd of similar hills that occupies the centre of the Lowlands. Towards the sea it swells out the coast-line ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... are caused by witches (A. Wuttke, Der deutsche Volksaberglaube,*[2] Berlin, 1869, p. 149 Sec. 216). The Scotch Highlanders thought that a witch could destroy the whole of a farmer's live stock by hiding a small bag, stuffed with charms, in a cleft of the stable or byre (W. Grant Stewart, The Popular superstitions and Festive Amusements of the Highlanders of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1823, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... read my 'L'Allegro' under the boughs, with breezes blowing between the lines. I can show you some little field-mice like unfledged birds, and a nest that protrudes now and then glittering eyes and cleft fangs." ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... the other bank, above a fount that boils and pours down through a cleft that proceeds from it. The water was far darker than perse;[1] and we, in company with the dusky waves, entered down through a strange way. A marsh it makes, that is named Styx, this dismal little stream, when it has descended ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... past, we will find many instances of British cavalry not being called upon in vain to make a sacrifice. At Talavera, the 23d Light Dragoons, supported by the 1st Hussars of the German Legion, advanced against the French squares. In their impetuous rush they came upon a hollow cleft covered with long grass, eight feet deep, and eighteen feet broad. Too late to pull up, the foremost rode headlong into it, some tumbled in, others over it, some rode boldly at it and gained the other side. Still they ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various

... rolled his enraptured eyes and now his quid, spat freely on the rich carpet, beat time on one big palm with the other and on the floor with one vast foot, while through the song like a lifeboat through waves, undisturbed and undisturbing, cleft the steady speech of the nurse to the boy. Regardless of the precaution just urged for Ramsey, her arm ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... accessories, also bits of pottery, but smaller, both globes; one in guise of an apple flushed with red and gold to the life, and, through a cleft at top, you saw it was hollow. This was for the ashes. The other, gray, with wrinkled surface, in the likeness of a wasp's nest, was the match-box. "There," said the stranger, pushing over the cigar-stand, "help ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... Samosata is responsible for the strange story of Minerva—how Jupiter commanded Vulcan to split open his skull with a sharp axe, and how the warlike virgin leaped in full maturity from the cleft in the brain, thoroughly armed and ready for deeds of martial daring, brandishing her glittering weapons with fiery energy, and breaking at once into the wild Pyrrhic dance. We refer to this myth, bearing, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... The cleft which separates two worlds is recognizable in his very parentage. Thomas Mann was born in Luebeck in 1875, the son of a merchant and senator of the ancient Hanseatic city; his mother is a Creole from South America. In his elder brother Heinrich Mann, perhaps a ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... desired to find the origin of thunder. They set out and travelled north, and came to high mountains. These mountains drew back and forth, and then closed together very quickly. One of the men said to the other, "I will leap through the cleft when it opens, and if I am caught you can follow and try to find the origin of thunder." The first one passed through the cleft before it closed, and the second one was caught. The one that went ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes

... mostly short mountain torrents, besides the Upper Angara, which enters its north-east extremity, the Barguzin, on the east, and the Selenga on the south-east. Its only outflow is the lower Angara, which issues through a rocky cleft on the west shore. The Irkut no longer reaches the Baikal, though it once did so. After approaching its south-west extremity it abandons the broad valley which leads to the lake, and makes its way northwards through a narrow gap in the mountains and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... young man, tall and broad-shouldered, with gray eyes, wide apart under straight black brows, and black hair brushed straight back from a wide forehead. She saw a rugged nose, a likeable mouth, and an abrupt and aggressive chin, saved somehow from grimness by a deep cleft in the blunt end of it.... She thought he was a very stirring looking young man. Undoubtedly he was a very sudden young man—if he meant one bit of ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley

... fold of these valleys. She became infatuated with sea bathing. When she was well out from shore, she would float on her back, her arms crossed, her eyes lost in the profound blue of the sky which was cleft by the flight of a swallow, or the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... where I had encountered Ben Gunn, the maroon; and I walked more circumspectly, keeping an eye on every side. The dusk had come nigh hand completely, and as I opened out the cleft between the two peaks, I became aware of a wavering glow against the sky, where, as I judged, the man of the island was cooking his supper before a roaring fire. And yet I wondered, in my heart, that he should show himself so careless. ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson

... with her than converse with one or a thousand dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the multitude of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was amid numberless minarets and golden domes, she had only to think and the mountain cleft its shadow in ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... a dozen / their march will they begin; And if thy friends be valiant, / let that full quick be seen, To help thee keep in safety / thy castles and thy land: Full many a shield and helmet / shall here be cleft by warrior's hand. ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler

... this cleft in the rockwork, however, he found awaiting him there the person who had summoned him—the so-called General Von Zoesch. Calabressa was somewhat startled, but he said, "Your humble servant, Excellenza," and ...
— Sunrise • William Black

... had been languid and who had never known a woman with a fling, a perfume, or a moue (there had been only a common-sense-heeled co-ed of his law-school days and the rather plump little sister-in-law of Leo's), the dawn of Josie cleft open something in his consciousness, releasing maddened perceptions that stung his eyeballs. He sat in the imitation cheap frailty of her apartment like a young bull with threads of red in his eyeballs, his head, not unpoetic with its shag of black hair, ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... the sheltering rocks. Prone, he inched forward to peer cautiously through a V-cleft between two jagged spires. Heat-blaster in hand, ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen

... beds with walks between. The planting has been "make believe,"—a different kind of seed in each bed; but the children have named them all, and labeled the various plats with pieces of paper, fastened in cleft sticks. A gardener's house, made of blocks, ornaments one corner, and near it are his tools,—watering-pot, hoe, rake, spade, etc., all made ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... be a bridge," he called, and ran along the cleft a distance. "It is here," he cried, and remounting, led the way. In a few moments Armstrong, heard a sound as though a thunderous drum were beating somewhere in the dark. It was the falling of the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... country they bore steadily up into grew more and more forbidding. The rugged slopes bore no resemblance to the kindly, peaceful land where the cabin stood. Swamps and reedy lakes lurked in low places. The hills stood forth grim and craggy, gashed with deep-cleft gorges, and rising to heights more grim and desolate at the uttermost reach of her vision. And into the heart of this, toward a far-distant area where she could faintly distinguish virgin snow on peaks that pierced the sky, they traveled day ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... farther, examined the wall, apparently in search of a familiar spot, then, having found it, inserted the tip of his boot in a cleft between two stones. He sprang up like a man mounting a horse, seized the top of the wall with the left hand, and with a second spring seated himself astride the wall, from which, with the rapidity of lightning, he lowered himself on the other side. All this was done with such rapidity, such ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere

... towards him laughing. Her pearls, nestling in the white cleft of her bosom, gleamed dully, shaken by her quiet merriment. In the short time that he had known her, she had become extraordinarily girlish—almost girlish enough to put back the hands of time for the proper man. "It won't. It won't be wiser. It's never wiser to turn your back on ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... quickly round ready to cry with disappointment; but at sight of Pinney with his blue eyes, and his brown fringe of moustache curling closely in over his lip, under his short, straight nose, and a funny cleft in his chin, she felt more like laughing, somehow, as she had since told him a hundred times. He wrote back to her from Boston, on some pretended business; and they began to correspond, as they called it; and they were engaged before the ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... strength of all the testimony which modern science has wrested from the unwilling records of the past, that the earliest inhabitants of the islands of the Seine were contemporary with the mammoth, the cave-bear, the auroch, and the rhinoceros with cleft nostrils. ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... rite accomplished: Twice a year sea-water is brought to the temple. This is not only done by the priests, but numerous pilgrims come from the whole of Syria and Arabia, and even from beyond the Euphrates, bringing water. It is poured out in the temple and goes into the cleft, which, narrow as it is, swallows up a considerable quantity. This is said to be in virtue of a religious law instituted by Deucalion to preserve the memory of the catastrophe, and of the benefits ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... let that so promising communicant go so far astray, and I never to go after him? And that other. And that other. And that other. Till we can read no more. O God of mercy, when Thou inquirest after blood, let me be hidden in the cleft of that Rock so deeply cleft for ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte

... elapsed, and I am able to sit out once more in the sunshine. Just opposite me is the steep hillside, grey with shaly rock, and yonder on its flank is the dark cleft which marks the opening of the Blue John Gap. But it is no longer a source of terror. Never again through that ill-omened tunnel shall any strange shape flit out into the world of men. The educated and the scientific, the Dr. Johnsons and the like, may smile at my narrative, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... watched thy wings of white That cleft thy waveward way — Past the evening and swift into the night, Out of the calm, bright day — And thou didst teach me, bird of the sea, More ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)

... head of the Alberni Canal, a wonderful cleft or fjord which almost splits Vancouver Island in two. This fjord has its outlet in Barkley Sound on the west side of the island. The Alberni Canal was named by the Spaniards after Don Pedro Alberni, captain of infantry ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael

... tolerably good-looking, noticeably well set up. When they have good features, a cleft chin and a generous nose, clean-shaven men are good to look at. He had fine eyes, in the corners of which always lurked mirth and mischief; for he possessed above all things an inexhaustible fund of dry humor. His lines seldom provoked ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath

... later her child came, and was welcomed as though it were the first to bear his name. It was a boy, and their satisfaction was so great that I looked to see their old affection revive. But it had been cleft at the root, and nothing could restore it to life. They loved the child; I have never seen evidence of greater parental passion than they both displayed, but there their feelings stopped. Towards each other ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green

... entreatingly to 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

... good of answering the dashed thing at all?" said Sir Mallaby. "Brigney, Goole and Butterworth know perfectly well that they have got us in a cleft stick. Butterworth knows it better than Goole, and Brigney knows it better than Butterworth. This young fool, Eggshaw, Sam, admits that he wrote the girl twenty-three letters, twelve of them in verse, and twenty-one specifically asking her to marry him, and he comes to ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse

... the Lightning, and with one swift blow the Lightning cleft the Prairie to the heart. And the Prairie rocked and groaned in agony, and for many a day moaned bitterly over its black, ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... after an oblique valley had cleft the range, an elm-hedge ran along the crest, till there looked down a grey church with a squinting spire and grey-black yews set about it, and something white like a monument standing up on a mound beside it. Woods appeared and receded, leaving the hilltop bare, and returned; there was a ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... last faint breaths as 'twere in sooth The halo of some saint, a glowing light Of purest gold streams through the darkened sky, A light more wondrous than the dawn of youth— For 'tis a flame cleft out the veil of night From that eternal ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones

... transverse. Maxillary palpi with the terminal joint dilated, rather blunt at the tip, depressed above, and hollowed out at its base. Legs rather thick, the outer of the two tarsal claws of the third pair of legs, cleft at the end, anterior tibiae externally sub-tridentate. Thorax with the sides somewhat angulated and narrowly margined, rounded behind, but the sides of the posterior margin are straight, the surface is minutely punctured and covered with brown hairs, the sternum ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... a loud various noise, like that of paper-mills (or women bucking of linen); so with all speed we went to the place whence the noise came, where we found a diminutive, monstrous, misshapen old fellow, called Hearsay. His mouth was slit up to his ears, and in it were seven tongues, each of them cleft into seven parts. However, he chattered, tattled, and prated with all the seven at once, of different matters, and ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... many spirits Under the Great Spirit. Him I know not. Him I only feel With closed eyes. Or when I look from my bed of moss by the river At a sky of stars, When the leaves of the oak are asleep. I will fill this birch bark full of writing And hide it in the cleft of an oak, Here where Black Eagle fell. ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters

... ravines on the Peninsula. From my place I could see the gully floor, which was the dry bed of a water-course, winding away between high walls of perpendicular cliffs or steep, scrub-covered slopes, as it pursued its journey, like some colossal trench, towards the firing line. Down the great cleft, while I looked, a horseman came riding rapidly. He was an officer, with a slight open wound in his chin, and he rode up to our door and said: "Hardy's hit. A hole ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond

... Beaubourg, Arnauld de l'Ariege to that of Rue de Petit-Repisoir, Viguier to that of the Rue Pagevin, Versigny to that of the Rue Joigneaux; Dupont de Bussac to that of the Carre Saint Martin; Carlos Forel and Boysset to that of the Rue Rambuteau. Doutre received a sword-cut on his head, which cleft his hat; Bourzat had four balls in his overcoat; Baudin was killed; Gaston Dussoubs was ill and could not come; his brother, Denis Dussoubs, replaced him. ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo

... wings outshaken for a headlong flight. Anger, revenge, but more than all the thirst, The glorious emulation to be first, Stung me like fire, and filled each quivering plume. With tenfold speed our sharp beaks cleft the gloom, A swarm of arrows singing to the mark, We hissed to pierce the foe ere ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various

... meant Well, but I think there was some mistake. He just pottered round in his garden, bent On growing things; we were so awake In those days for the New Republic's sake. He's gone, and the garden is all that's left Not in ruin, but the currants and apricots, And peaches, furred and sweet, with a cleft Full of morning dew, in those green-glazed pots, Why, Mademoiselle, there is never an eft Or worm among them, and as for theft, How the old woman keeps them I cannot say, But they're finer than any grown this way." Jeanne Tourmont drew back the filigree ring Of her striped ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell

... whose sources run Turned by a pebble's edge, Is Athabaska rolling toward the Sun Through the cleft mountain ledge." ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... scattered lights, lay up and down, and the bells (which to his ear were alarm-bells) sounded out the fourth hour; [3] when the carriage rolled through the triumphal gate of the city, the Porta del Popolo, then the moon rent her black heavens, and poured down out of the cleft clouds the splendor of a whole sky. There stood the Egyptian Obelisk of the gateway, high as the clouds, in the night, and three streets ran gleaming apart. "So," (said Albano to himself, as they passed through the long Corso to the tenth ward) "thou ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... guesses he made the wrong one first, urging his mustang toward the canyon trail. A stumbling half-mile up the narrow cleft of the river's path revealing nothing, he began to reconsider. Drawing a second blank of the same dimensions, he turned back to the ford and tried the hill trail. At the end of the first hundred yards on the new scent he came ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... or observation." Milton gives us a rhetorical definition in a negative form, which is of equal value, at least, with any authority yet cited. "And though a linguist," says Milton, "should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things in them, as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man, as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only."—"Language ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell

... cleft runs inland, fenced by a bold headland on either hand, and I have rounded Highveer Point and am looking down Heddon's Mouth. Heddon is the corruption of the Celtic word "etin," which means a giant, and the Celtic spirit which so named this wild valley had ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... themselves were on high ground. Soft and velvety and green lay that great upward sweep in the sunshine, shaded in some places by a dark patch of pines, or gleaming with a heap of fallen snow. Here and there some deep rugged cleft would be filled from top to bottom with the gleaming whiteness, while above, crowning the steep and barren height, the snow reigned supreme, unmelted as yet even by ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... huge arch of the sky and the desert beneath it. The barren scene, the sense of loneliness, and the mystery and urgency of my task all struck a chill into my heart. The boy was nowhere to be seen. But down beneath me in a cleft of the hills there was a circle of the old stone huts, and in the middle of them there was one which retained sufficient roof to act as a screen against the weather. My heart leaped within me as I saw it. This must be the burrow where the stranger lurked. At ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle

... of Tintagel and the Land's End. And if Wessex cannot boast the sustained grandeur of the stern face that England turns to the Atlantic waves, the romantic arch of Durdle Door, the majestic hill-cliff that rises above the green cleft of Arish Mel, and the sombre precipices of St. Aldhelm's, with the smiling loveliness of the Wessex lanes and hamlets behind them, will be ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... ages to which we are united, and cannot be swept away by the storm, so long as it stands unmoved. I have seen a thin hair-stemmed flower growing on the edge of a cataract and resisting the force of its plunge, and of the wind that always lives in its depths, because its roots are in a cleft of the cliff. The secret of strength for all men is to hold fast by the 'strong Son of God,' and they only are sufficient in whatsoever state they are, to whom this loving and quickening voice has spoken the charter 'My grace is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... air; broad-leaved priyalas, palms And date-trees, and the gold myrobalan, With copper-leaved vibhitikas. All these Crowded the wood; and many a crag it held, With precious ore of metals interveined; And many a creeper-covered cave wherein The spoken word rolled round; and many a cleft Where the thick stems were like a wall to see; And many a winding stream and reedy jheel, And glassy lakelet, where the woodland beasts In free peace gathered. Wandering onward thus, The Princess saw far-gliding forms of dread— Pisachas, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... hand Led us, Thy people, to this chosen land, Through the cleft waters of a distant sea, That we might rear a temple here to Thee; Thou, who on Zion hadst Thy favorite shrine, And in Thy majesty and power divine Wast daily by our suppliant race adored As sovereign Jehovah, peerless Lord; Why hast Thou cast us off to ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... of the stairway by the stables he paused; as it was deserted, he continued on almost running—on past the cracked bench—past the Cleft Gate. Now, in front, he beheld the towers of the imperial residence bearing the name Julian, and he was upbraiding himself for indecision, and loading his conscience with whatever grief might happen the poor girl, when he beheld a ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... friends thought of nothing but shelter. They drew their blankets over their heads and ran hither and thither looking for a friendly tree. At last they found an old tree with a prodigious stem that parted about ten feet up into two forks. With some effort they got up into this cleft, and then they were on a natural platform. Robinson always carried nails in his pocket, and he contrived to nail the two blankets to the forks so as to make a screen. Then they took out their provisions and fortified themselves ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... of man and the birds, or any of the spirits; it forms an important part in the ceremonies of consecration and absolution, and by means of fire a man may break through a taboo, or permantang. Should a man have a fruit-tree, for instance, which he wishes to protect, he places about it several cleft sticks with stones thrust in the clefts, and the stones are told to guard the tree and afflict with dire diseases any pilferer of the fruit. Now, should a friend of the owner see this sign of permantang ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness

... ages long since passed away, the war-whoop resounded through the forest. The shriek of mothers and maidens pierced the skies as they fell cleft by the tomahawk; and all the horrid clangor of war, with "its terror, conflagration, tears, and blood," imbittered ten thousand fold the ever bitter lot ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... thrilled through the breast of more than one of Judea's dark-haired daughters. Greece, too, had her representatives, to remind the spectators that there had been an Orpheus. There were flutes of the Doric and of the Phrygian mode, and—let us forget not—the Tyrrhenian trumpet, with its brazen-cleft pavilion. But by far the greater part of his musical relics he had acquired during his stay in Italy. He could show the litui with their carved clarions—the twisted cornua—the tuba, a trumpet so long and taper,—the concha wound by ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... began, and the two next portions of the strange zigzag series of cleft were passed down easily enough, while, as he descended a couple more, Aleck felt how smoothly floor and sides were worn and carved, and began to dwell upon the time that must have elapsed and the industry bestowed upon the curious passage by the smugglers, who had by ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn

... dark-green leaves spread perhaps ninety feet above his head, he reached the nearer boughs with an omei, a very long stick with a forked end to which was attached a small net of cocoanut fiber. Deftly twisting a fruit from its stem by a dexterous jerk of the cleft tip, he caught it in the net, and lowered it to the kooka on the ground by ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... time to run to his aid—which, although wounded, I should have done—when the branch he clung to, slowly yielded with his weight, and the round, plump figure of my poor friend rolled over the little cleft of rock, and, after a few faint struggles, came tumbling heavily down, and at last lay peaceably in the deep heather at the bottom—his cries the whole time being loud enough to rise even above the vociferous laughter of ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,—few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods—what the after age Knows and names ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... compared to the course of a steamer across an unquiet ocean. The waves raised by a fresh gale on the starboard bow were cleft by the stem, only to reunite behind the churn of the propeller. They were powerless to abridge the day's run by many miles, but they could still swing forwards to the shore. On one occasion the ship was slowed down to a ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited

... and close in front of us a rift opened. Twenty feet in width, it cut the cavern floor and vanished into the blue mist on each side. The cleft was spanned by one solid slab of rock not more than two yards wide. It had neither railing ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... fertile in literature. The political unity of the nation is achieved, but it is not an integral people in other respects. It has not the unity of England or France or even of the general European mind; it rather contains such disparate elements as characterize the Roman or the Turkish empire. It is cleft by political tradition and in social moral conviction, north and south, and by intellectual strata of culture east and west; it is still a people in the making. Its literature has been regional, as was said, centred in New England, New York, Philadelphia, contributed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... padded down by the feet of generations of Athabascan tribesmen long before the Ancient and Honorable Company of Adventurers laid the foundation of the first post at Hudson's Bay, long before the Half Moon's prow first cleft those desolate waters. They have been trodden, these dim trails, by Scotch and French and English since that historic event, and by a numerous progeny in whose veins the blood of all three races mingles with that of the native tribes. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... her husband, still on anxious thought intent, Cleft in two her throbbing bosom, as in silence ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous

... at last from that narrow iron-walled cleft, the depth of which he had not seen, and now had no wish to see; and his eyes fell upon a little Navajo lamb limping in the trail of the flock, headed for the canyon, as sure as its mother in purpose. He dismounted ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey

... the waters closed, the ripples spread over the broad surface, and the sleeping lilies trembled for a few minutes, and then lay still again! Once, and once only, a woman's white hand, thrown up, as it were, in agonizing supplication, cleft the dark water, and then all was over; the wind blew the ripples more strongly; they washed upon the grass, and the stir of the deep ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme

... ground. It is two or three days in circumference, and is the place of refuge of the Arabs who fly from the Pasha's troops, or from their enemies in the desert. The Szaffa has no springs; the rain water is collected in cisterns. The only entrance is through a narrow pass, called Bab el Szaffa, a cleft, between high perpendicular rocks, not more than two yards in breadth, which one ever dared to enter as an enemy. If a tribe of Arabs intend to remain a whole year in the Szaffa, they sow wheat and barley on the spots fit for cultivation on its precincts. On its E. ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... Harold! Swinging now in both hands this weapon, with a peculiar and rapid whirl, which gave it an inconceivable impetus, the Earl let fall the crushing blow: at the first stroke, cut right in the centre, rolled the helm; at the second, through all the woven mail (cleft asunder, as if the slightest filigree work of the goldsmith,) shore the blade, and a great fragment of the stone itself ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... truth, is itself an islet, being cut off from Brefar by a channel, scarcely eight feet wide, through which the seas rush darkly with horrible gurglings. The cleft goes down sheer, and was cut, they say, with one stroke of a giant's sword. Beyond it the headland rises grim and stark—a very Gibraltar of the birds, that roost in regiments on its ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... (Talim) and Halahala point extends a strait a mile wide and a league long, which the Indians call 'Kinabutasan,' a name that in their language means 'place that was cleft open'; from which it is inferred that in other times the island was joined to the mainland and was separated from it by some severe earthquake, thus leaving this strait: of this there is an old tradition among the Indians."—Fray Martinez ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... throw open the door, Davideen. It is not ourselves are in dread that the white man in the sky will be calling names after us and ridiculing us. Ha! ha! I might be as foolish as yourselves and as fearful, but for the Almighty that left a little cleft in my skull, that would let in His candle ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory

... pounds of copper to the man who brings his head." He looked upon his clients; but none would work his will. He looked upon his lictors, but they trembled, and stood still. And, as Virginius through the press his way in silence cleft, Ever the mighty multitude fell back to right and left. And he hath passed in safety unto his woeful home, And there ta'en horse to tell the camp what ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... hours of the next morning, Raphael climbed the crags, and sat down in a mossy cleft in the rocks, whence he could see the narrow path along which the water for the dwelling was carried. At the base of the hill he saw Jonathan in conversation with the Auvergnate. Some malicious power interpreted ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... birds in winter is that infinite profusion of aureliae of the lepidoptera ordo, which is fastened to the twigs of trees and their trunks; to the pales and walls of gardens and buildings; and is found in every cranny and cleft of rock or rubbish, and even ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... at the steps by the proprietor of the boarding-house. This man was short and stout, with a harelip and cleft palate, which at once gave him the well-known slurring speech of persons so afflicted, and imparted also to the timbre of his voice a peculiarly hollow, resonant, trumpet-like note. He stumped about energetically ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... mortals He hath named "To do His bidding, will I thrust my darts, "And through their wounds, as His ambassadors, "The spirit bruise of Him who sent them—thus!" And then again, as though his breaking heart Were cleft with red-hot blade, the voice of Saul Is heard in mortal anguish breathing out The soul-subduing tones—"What shall I do?" Dead silence intervenes; and then again The spirit of the Prophet slowly speaks: "To-morrow thou ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning

... but a look of anticipation brightened her eyes. It deepened and glowed as Emma McChesney Buck bent to her task and the great jaws of the shears opened and shut on the virgin cloth. Six pairs of eyes followed the fascinating steel before which the cloth rippled and fell away, as water is cleft by the prow of a stanch little boat. Around the curves went the shears, guided by Emma's firm white hands, snipping, slashing, doubling on itself, a very ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber

... that's handsome, valiant, wise, If he can kill him, thinks t' inherit 25 His wit, his beauty, and his spirit As if just so much he enjoy'd As in another is destroy'd For when a giant's slain in fight, And mow'd o'erthwart, or cleft down right, 30 It is a heavy case, no doubt; A man should have his brains beat out Because he's tall, and has large bones; As men kill beavers for their stones. But as for our part, we shall tell 35 The naked truth of what befel; And as an ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... for when, half an hour later, Standish and Cooke returned to the tree they had felled, the tools were all gone, and a headless arrow was left standing derisively in the cleft of a log. ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... disastrously thinned his following. From the refusal of George to grant Catholic Emancipation, and the consequent resignation of Pitt in the spring of 1801, we may trace three sinister results. The Union with Ireland was bereft of its natural sequel, Catholic Emancipation; the Ministerial ranks were cleft in twain; and the crisis brought to the front Addington, a man utterly incapable of confronting Napoleon. Had Pitt remained in power, the Peace of Amiens would have been less one-sided, its maintenance ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... straight towards the shore at fearful speed; and those who looked on seemed to be impressed with a vague feeling that she had power to spring upon the strand and continue her swift career through the forest, as she had hitherto cleft her passage through the sea. As she approached, the savages shrank back in fear. Suddenly her frame trembled with a mighty shock. A terrible cry was borne to land by the gale, and all her masts went overboard. A huge wave lifted the vessel on its crest ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne

... in a rude age they very easily pass into the popular mind as declaring facts literally to be believed. A Talmudic writer says, "There are in hell seven abodes, in each abode seven thousand caverns, in each cavern seven thousand clefts, in each cleft seven thousand scorpions; each scorpion has seven limbs, and on each limb are seven thousand barrels of gall. There are also in hell seven rivers of rankest poison, so deadly that if one touches it he bursts." Hesiod, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... upon him, as his bruised body and discolored face showed next morning. But he never once faltered. To himself, with a precious moment lost back in the study and a heart afire to know if he were yet in time, his progress seemed desperately slow; yet he cleft a path for himself ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... knights riding, one with a gold surcoat over his armour, and thereon a cleft heart of red; the second with a green surcoat, and on the same a chief of silver with green boughs thereon, their ends a-flaming; but the third bore a black surcoat besprinkled with silver tears. And all these ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris

... alarm all the while it has been ringing. But there is nothing which delights and terrifies our English theatre so much as a ghost, especially when he appears in a bloody shirt. A spectre has very often saved a play, though he has done nothing but stalked solemnly across the stage, or rose through a cleft in it and sunk again without speaking one word. There may be a proper season for these several terrors, and when they only come in as aids and assistances to the poet, they are not only to be excused ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... happily particularised. He slays Herman, the craniologist, who dwelt by the linden-shadowed Elbe, and measured with his eye the skulls of all who walked through the streets of Berlin. Alas! his own skull is now cleft by the Corsican sword. Four pupils of the University of Jena advance together to encounter the Emperor; at four blows he destroys them all. Blucher rushes to arrest the devastation; Napoleon strikes him to the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... by my father's mother many years before. She had fashioned it out of water-worn stones and sea shells, with mosses and ferns in the chinks. Well, as we came in through the gates my eyes fell upon this stone heap, and there was a letter stuck in a cleft stick upon the top of it. I took a step forward to see what it was, but Edie sprang in front of me, and plucking it off she thrust it ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... and, too impatient to walk, I hailed a droschky, and drove through the wide, cheery streets of Berlin. It was a balmy June evening. The pavements were thronged. Through the vast open fronts of the cafes one saw agglutinated masses of people just cleft here and there by white-jacketed waiters darting to and fro with high-poised trays of beer and coffee. Save these and the folks in theatres all Berlin was in the streets, taking the air. A sense of gaiety pervaded the place, organised and recognised, as though it were as much ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... besieged lord of the castle once took refuge during a local war. The sacristy has an unusual shape, and is hewn out of the rock itself; and here it was that the maiden sat in safety, the rock closing over the cleft by which she had crept in, and a dove finding its way in every day with a loaf to feed her, while a spring within the cave supplied her with water. Legends have grown over every stone of this poetic land like moss and lichen and rock-fern; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... his good Excalibur with a last effort and struck his enemy with it so fiercely on the head that the blow cleft the helmet and pierced to the emperor's chin. He fell from his horse without a moan. When the Romans near by saw that their ruler was dead, they gave a great cry of grief and rushed upon Arthur, but ...
— King Arthur and His Knights • Maude L. Radford

... clearing, surrounded by low bushes, and in the center a fireplace of stones with a fire smouldering. At one side a heap of leaves and small twigs for a bed, a stump for a seat, and lying on top of it a sort of stone axe, made by inserting a sharp stone into the cleft of a sapling and tying it into place with a wild-grape tendril. Pegged out on the ground to cure was a rabbit skin, indifferently scraped. It made our aluminum kettle and canvas tepee look like a marble-vestibuled apartment ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the sparrow; but it missed her, and only broke the window. The sparrow now hopped in, perched upon the window-seat, and cried, 'Carter! it shall cost thee thy life!' Then he became mad and blind with rage, and struck the window-seat with such force that he cleft it in two: and as the sparrow flew from place to place, the carter and his wife were so furious, that they broke all their furniture, glasses, chairs, benches, the table, and at last the walls, without touching the bird ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm

... led down from the steep slope to the floor of the canyon. What from far above had appeared only a green timber-choked cleft proved from close relation to be a wide winding valley, tip and down, densely forested for the most part, yet having open glades and bisected from wall to wall by the creek. Every quarter of a mile or so the ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... remember that the Brighton Pavilion was also Nash's work; and thus the mind can wander from this peaceful Cornish cove to that most populous of British watering-places. At Portholland is a small hamlet wedged into a tiny cleft, where those who desire the uttermost quietude might be satisfied; westward along the coast is the slightly larger fishing village of Portloe. This is in the parish of Veryan, one of the "Roseland" parishes whose name has really nothing to do with roses. Roseland, formerly ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... lantern, and stepped into the cleft in the wall. Martin followed, and found himself again on a level floor, and in the entrance ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... seemed to isolate her alone with him, and now seemed to uplift her, as on a pillory, before the congregation. For Archie continued to drink her in with his eyes, even as a wayfarer comes to a well-head on a mountain, and stoops his face, and drinks with thirst unassuageable. In the cleft of her little breasts the fiery eye of the topaz and the pale florets of primrose fascinated him. He saw the breasts heave, and the flowers shake with the heaving, and marvelled what should so much discompose ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... with the packing, she desired to show him some tenderness; her heart was cleft in two with pity; but she could not move; some harshness of pride or vanity prevented her ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... they rolled themselves up in their blankets and tried to encourage one another. They travelled fourteen miles between granite walls from two thousand to three thousand feet high; and for sixteen days they were almost without food. Then they came to a cleft in their prison walls which seemed to offer a ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... around her navel. Then she came up out of the cistern and throwing herself on the Porter's lap said, "O my lord, O my love, what callest thou this article?" pointing to her slit, her solution of continuity. "I call that thy cleft," quoth the Porter, and she rejoined, Wah! wah, art thou not ashamed to use such a word?" and she caught him by the collar and soundly cuffed him. Said he again, Thy womb, thy vulva;" and she struck him a second slap crying, "O fie, O fie, this is another ugly ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... held his gun with one hand and pulled out his match-box with the other, when, in spite of his wounds, the Malay knelt down, drew a piece of dammar from the fold of his sarong, stuck it in a cleft stick, and then striking a match he fired the dry grass and lit the dammar, which made an ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn

... the secretion as we whip white of egg, in order to make it rise and stiffen. The extremity of the abdomen opens in a long cleft, forming two lateral ladles which open and shut with a rapid, incessant movement, beating the viscous liquid and converting it into foam as it is secreted. Beside the two oscillating ladles we see the internal organs rising and falling, protruding and ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... cat made his entrance into that hidden life of the summers from which his exits had been as sudden, though less dramatic. In the heart of the hills, where a mountain torrent has fretted its way for miles through a rocky gorge, there is a place where the cleft widens into a miniature valley, and the stream slips along quietly between banks of moss before it plunges again on its riotous path down the mountain. Here the charcoal-burners, half a century ago, had made a clearing, and left their dome-shaped stone kiln to cover itself with the green velvet ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various

... beyond the gaze of man, as though it veiled an ancient mystery. Indeed, the aspect of it thrilled me, I knew not why. I observed, however, that at one point in the mighty cliff there seemed to be a narrow cleft down which, no doubt, lava had flowed in a remote age, and it occurred to me that up this cleft ran a roadway, probably a continuation of that by which we had threaded the swamp. The fact that through my glasses I could see herds of cattle ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... rather a misfortune; for it is to adopt a suggestion from Schaller a cleft in the soul through which thought steals away what the heart desires. The guilt or innocence of doubting depends on the spirit in which it is done. There are two attitudes of mind and moods of feeling before propositions and evidence. One is, "I will not believe unless I see the prints of the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... early bloom. They were the days when her personality was too big for her body, so it flowed into everything she wore; on the tips of every ribbon at her neck, she glowed with a kind of electric radiance. A flower in her hair seemed as much a part of her as the turn of her cleft chin. A bow at her bosom was vibrant with her. And to Grant even the things she touched, after she was gone, thrilled him as though ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... sounding in my ears; but, being in water, I was safe if it were but deep enough. Presently I struck out, and, with a stroke or two, came to the surface. But no sooner did my head show above, and I draw a deep breath or twain, looking for my enemy, than an arbalest bolt cleft the water with a clipping sound, missing me but narrowly. I had but time to see that there was a tumult on the bridge, and swords out (the Scots, as I afterwards heard, knocking up the arbalests that the French soldiers levelled ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang

... shore closely we draw in under towering Cap Tourmente, fir-clad, rising nearly two thousand feet above us; a mighty obstacle it has always been to communication by land on this side of the river. Soon comes a great cleft in the mountains, and before us is Baie St. Paul, opening up a wide vista to the interior. We are getting into the Malbaie country for Isle aux Coudres, an island some six miles long, opposite Baie St. Paul, was ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong

... be traced back until its fountainhead is found in a thread of water streaming from a cleft in the rocks, so a great national movement may sometimes be followed until its starting-point is found in the cell of a monk or the studies of a pair of ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Hamlet gives to his mother 'to throw away the worser part of her cleft heart,' Pietro ridicules ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis

... an awful sight to behold! When the Remora heard the name of the Firedrake, his hated enemy, he slipped with wonderful speed from the cleft of the mountain into the valley. On and on and on he poured over rock and tree, as if a frozen river could slide downhill; on and on, till there were miles of him stretching along the valley—miles of the smooth-ribbed, icy creature, crawling and slipping forwards. ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang

... this frail world unto that infinite bosom of eternal rest and say, "Thou art mine and I am thine to all eternity?" You may look to other refuges but they are not secure, to other coverts but they are not safe. Here is the Rock of Ages and that rock is cleft for you. God manifest in the flesh. Behold Christ crucified and flee to Him, flee for refuge, flee to-day; once in Christ you will know that you are safe. Let the storm come, let the winds blow, let the floods beat, let the fires break out, safe! safe! safe! Nothing ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King

... with maddening ferocity and desperation, he tried to find his foe, for he was now blinded with the blows. Panting with pain, and roaring with rage, he flew wildly round and round, returning each time with fourfold fury to the charge, till at last a well-directed stroke of the elfin's sword cleft his head asunder, and he fell prone to the earth, with one prodigious kick of all his feet in ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow

... required is the knowledge of certain signs. From these, scientists deduce accurate conclusions regardless of distance. A few fossils sent to the expert geologist enables him to accurately determine the rock-formation from which they were taken. He can describe it to you as perfectly as if a cleft of it were lying on his table. So also the chemist can determine the constitution of the sun as accurately as if that luminary were not ninety-five million miles from his laboratory. The sun sends certain signs over the "infinitude of space," which the chemist classifies ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... flǣschoman, the battle-axe cleft the body through and through, 1568; hæfde ... eal gefeormod fēt and folma, had devoured entirely feet and hands, 745; sē þe eall geman gār-cwealm gumena, who remembers thoroughly the death of the men by the ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.

... out in a golden blur, And the small stars followed after her, But when the fireflies cleft the air I saw those three forms standing there, Until the night cooled, and the trees Shook in the strong hands of the breeze, And then I heard their footsteps press The muffled grass beyond the door, And so went forth for ever more, My ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer

... so well, it was strange to hear her going on with all the patter of the gallery attendant, names of painters, prices, dates. He stood before the portrait of Daniel Kain, his father, a dark-skinned, longish face with a slightly-protruding nether lip, hollow temples, and a round chin, deeply cleft. As in all the others, the eyes, even in the dead pigment, seemed to shine with an odd, fixed luminosity of their own, and like the others from first to last of the line, it bore upon it the stamp of an ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... cleft in twain, Its waters never meet again; Far east and to the furthest west Those wavelets ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren

... was no parry. A kingdom seemed to be passing. Canute threw his shield before him, while his spur caused his horse to swerve violently; but the blade cleft wood and iron and golden plating like parchment, and falling on the horse's neck, bit it to the bone. Rearing and plunging with pain, the animal crashed into those behind him, missed his footing and fell, entangling ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... attracted me most. There was no denying it—shorn of his overgrowth of whiskers and put into a correct setting, William was handsome; even more than that, he was interesting. He had that firm, chiselled kind of mouth which women and artists find so attractive, and a delightful cleft in his chin; his hair, which had hitherto always struck me as being so unkempt and disordered, now that it was brushed smoothly back from his brow and curled into the nape of his neck gave him a distinguished ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick

... rendered unnecessary by stupefying him with opium. The mode of putting him to death varied in different places. One of the commonest modes seems to have been strangulation, or squeezing to death. The branch of a green tree was cleft several feet down the middle; the victim's neck (in other places, his chest) was inserted in the cleft, which the priest, aided by his assistants, strove with all his force to close. Then he wounded the victim slightly with his axe, whereupon the crowd ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... some nice hotels and evidences of fashionable country places. It was getting dark as they came off the mouth of the Saguenay River, and the high rocks on either side as they moved on gave one the impression of great depth. This impression was correct, as the river flows along a cleft in the strata rather than along any bed that has been made by the action of the waters themselves. They moved into a wharf that merely jutted out from the rocky shore. Everything was confusion, for there did not seem to be any one but Frenchmen on the wharf. The boys got off and ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton

... found himself lying upon a rough stone pavement and it was still dark. He saw above a narrow cleft of somber sky, and something cold and trailing lay across his face. He shivered with repulsion, snatched at it to throw it off, and found that it was his rope. Then he felt of himself cautiously and fearfully, but found that no bones were ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler

... No, Silius, we are no good inginers. We want their fine arts, and their thriving use Should make us graced, or favour'd of the times: We have no shift of faces, no cleft tongues, No soft and glutinous bodies, that can stick, Like snails on painted walls; or, on our breasts, Creep up, to fall from that proud height, to which We did by slavery, not by service climb. We are no guilty men, and then no great; We have no place in court, office In state, ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson

... a gas-engine from somewhere in the distance drew Denver on from point to point and at last, in the bottom of a deep-cleft canyon, he discovered the source of the sound. Huge dumps of white waste were spewed out along the hillside, there were houses, a big tent and criss-crossed trails; but the only sign of life was that chuh, chuh, of the engine and the explosive blap, blaps of an ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge

... a sack coat—and his diamond. His distinctly convex face, its thick, rosy flesh, thick mouth and cleft chin gave Lulu once more that bold sense of looking—not at him, for then she was shy and averted her eyes—but at his photograph at which she could gaze as much as she would. She looked up at him openly, fell in step beside him. Was he not ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale

... untaught Was Jove that secret long, and, hearing it, Indignant, slew him with his candent bolt. 150 So also, O ye Gods, ye envy me The mortal man, my comfort. Him I saved Myself, while solitary on his keel He rode, for with his sulph'rous arrow Jove Had cleft his bark amid the sable Deep. Then perish'd all his gallant friends, but him Billows and storms drove hither, whom I lov'd Sincere, and fondly destin'd to a life Immortal, unobnoxious to decay. But since no Deity may ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... For thy new light, and trembled at each shower! When thou dost shine darkness looks white and fair, Forms turn to Musick, clouds to smiles and air: Rain gently spends his honey-drops, and pours Balm on the cleft earth, milk on grass and flowers. Bright pledge of peace and Sunshine! the sure tye Of thy Lord's hand, the object[47] of His eye! When I behold thee, though my light be dim, Distant and low, I can in thine see Him Who looks upon thee from His glorious ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... the first to test whatever danger confronted us, but my companion prevented this, and Hassan was compelled to take second place, while I followed him. We were absolutely in the dark before we had proceeded a dozen yards through the cleft in the mountain side, and then ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... to find water and pasturage. Consequently there was both time and scenery for his project. Late in the afternoon the train crossed a narrow mesa or plateau, and approached a sublime terrace of rock which was the face of a second table-land. This terrace was cleft by several of those wonderful grooves which are known as canons, and which were wrought by that mighty water-force, the sculpturer of the American desert. In one place two of these openings were neighbors: the larger was the route and the smaller ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... reached the summit of the valley's wall and for a half mile ahead the others were to be seen on the trail to Soledad, but it was not there she pointed, but to the northeast where a dark cloud hung over the mountains. Its darkness was cleft by one lance of lightning, but it was too far away for sound ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan

... {born (passive) begin began begun behold beheld beheld bid bade, bid bidden, bid bind bound {bound, {[adj. bounden] bite bit bitten, bit blow blew blown break broke broken chide chid chidden, chid choose chose chosen cleave clove, clave (cleft) cloven (cleft) climb [clomb] climbed climbed cling clung clung come came come crow crew (crowed) (crowed) dig dug dug do did done draw drew drawn drink drank {drunk, drank {[adj. drunken] drive drove driven eat ate, eat eaten, eat fall fell fallen fight fought fought find found found fling flung ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell

... south side of this there is a great cleft from the top to the bottom, and up the sides of this cleft are the two halves of a stairway, which was carved there before some earthquake rent the stone in twain, and under this is a deep dark pool of ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith

... rounding a corner, "a magnificent sight suddenly burst upon us. On either side of the river were beautifully wooded cliffs rising abruptly to a height of three hundred feet and rushing through a gap that cleft the rock. The river pent up in a narrow gorge roared furiously through the rock-bound pass, till it plunged in one leap of about one hundred and twenty feet into a dark abyss below. This was the greatest waterfall of the Nile, and in honour of the distinguished ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... 7.18 went half a mile north-north-west to a cleft hill on the left bank of the river; at 7.35 went three-quarters of a mile north; at 7.52 went half a mile north-east; at 8 went quarter of a mile east-north-east to where we got any quantity of figs from ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough

... sat in the morning, was a projection of rock, with a narrow cleft between it and the wall of the cavern, visible only from the very back of the cave, where the roof came down low. But when he thought of it, he saw that even here he could not have been hidden in the full light of the morning from the eyes of some urchins who had seated ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... seen rising above the woods that cover the plain; and the view is bounded by the Adriatic, which, like a thin line of blue, runs along the horizon. On the south and west is the hill country of the Apennines, among whose serrated peaks and cleft sides is many a lovely dell, rich in waters, and vines, and olive trees. The distant country towards the Mediterranean lay engulphed in a white mist. A violent electrical action was going on in it, which, like ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... were to be no more fortunate than its predecessor. The covert was a patch of scrubby woodland at a little distance below the road, at the head of one of the long deep glens that were the terrors of the Broadwater country. The wind blew from the west, across the wide cleft of Gloun Kieraun, and the hounds were thrown into the wood in which the upper end of the glen was masked, and were encouraged to work downwards. An unaccustomed wave of misanthropy had assailed Larry, and instead of following with the crowd the course of the hounds, he moved ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... inner wall but at length fissured and gaping as in the more usual phase figured by authors, where the plasmodiocarp is simply compressed but not extravagantly thin. Both types occur in the western mountains, forms with and without calcium, fissured by wider or narrower cleft, from the same plasmodium; forms bilabiate and forms opening at first to display an inner peridium; forms globose with narrow base, but apex cleft, and forms ellipsoidal, yet compressed, opening like the gaping of some tiniest bivalve; did not Persoon say P. bivalve! all ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... cleft of the hills of Jamaica, fifteen hundred feet above that blue tropical sea below, on the brow of a cool valley, where that bounding stream of white water rushes from the tall peak in the sky in tiny cataracts, till it forms a pool there, held in by the smooth rim of rocks, where the ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... Lawrence on the other. The stage-coach always drew up before the door of the cottage. The wayfarer with no companion but his staff paused here to exchange a word, that the sense of loneliness might not utterly overcome him ere he could pass through the cleft of the mountain or reach the first house in the valley. And here the teamster on his way to Portland market would put up for the night, and, if a bachelor, might sit an hour beyond the usual bedtime and steal ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett



Words linked to "Cleft" :   fracture, scissure, compound, crack, volcano, opening, faulting, dissected, rift, shift, chap, fissure, split, indentation, pudendal cleft, cleft foot, cleft palate, crevasse, slit, crevice, cleft lip



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