"Rift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I knew not) help me as when life begun: Rift the hills, and roll the waters, flash the lightnings, weigh ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... came hurrying up just then, and looking in the direction pointed out, there was the serpent, writhing and twining in the most horrible manner down in a narrow rift, out of which it now glided in a blind purposeless way, writhing, whipping the herbage with its tail, and tying itself in what seemed ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... again and again, but the thought couldn't help him. Her face drove the last of his curses from his lips, but it threw him into a fathomless despair, where he no longer defined his thoughts into words. Her face shone like a star, but it stood over a bottomless rift in the earth and showed how ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... companions were fairly started on the last day of their ride, it was toward this rift in the Mission range that the trail led them. Sinclair, with consummate cleverness, had rejoined his companions; but the attempt to get into the Cache, and his reckless ride into Medicine Bend, had reduced their chances of escape to a single outlet, and that they ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... steamship Baroda, moving down the Red Sea, once thought to be an arm of the Indian Ocean, but which we now know to be only a portion of "the great rift valley,"—the longest and deepest and widest trough on the earth's surface, which extends from the base of Mount Lebanon and the Sea of Galilee, through the Jordan Valley, the Dead Sea, the dried up wadies, the Red Sea, and the chain of lakes and Nyanzas discovered in recent years ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... had been a brief but violent thunderstorm, with a tropical downpour of rain, and now clouds were scudding across the blue of the sky. Through a temporary rift in the veiling the crescent of the moon looked down upon us. It had a greenish tint, and it set me thinking of the filmed, green eyes ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... peep of dawn widened into a silver rift, and the silver rift streamed into a bar of gold, and the gold broke up into long strands of blush pink and pale blue like festal banners hanging in heaven's bright pavilion, and the "White Eagle" flew on swiftly, steadily, ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... alone. Her eyes were heavy, for she had been weeping long. Her sky seemed overcast; there was not a rift discoverable anywhere, and she was almost broken-hearted. Nearly two months had passed, and no sign of her lover had she seen to brighten her. Edward had told her that her lover had renounced her, ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... made in the course of our explorations which enabled us to understand how the fate that had overtaken the drowned city had fallen upon it. Close by the northern border of the valley we saw, high up above us, a vast rift more than a thousand feet wide in the face of the cliff; and below this the ground was torn into a deep wild channel, and everywhere huge fragments of rock were scattered over the ground. Here it was, then, that the water had ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... and the tepid, tropical clouds added obscurity to the darkness of the sky, so that the night fell with even more startling quickness than usual. The blackness was very dense. Now and then a group of drifting stars swam out of a rift in the vapors, but the night was curiously silent and ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... burn into her face. It was as though she had been walking in an arbour and suddenly, through some rift in the boughs, found herself exposed to the scorching sun. She felt dominated by a force stronger than her own nature. A little afraid, she shrank instinctively away from him, and as she dared not look up, she did not see the expression of triumph, mingled with other things, which, for ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... early in October. There was fog over the land. Hazy clouds hovered on the horizon between the outlines of the hills; others, rent asunder, floated up and disappeared. Sometimes through a rift in the clouds, beneath a ray of sunshine, gleamed from afar the roots of Yonville, with the gardens at the water's edge, the yards, the walls and the church steeple. Emma half closed her eyes to pick out her house, and never had this poor ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... conspicuously. He could not have said whether bravado or contempt was moving him to such flamboyant dawdling. Or was he merely trying to persuade himself that he had nothing to fear in any case? He stepped out into a shower of noonday sunshine flooding through a rift in the high fog of a July morning in San Francisco. A delicious thrill from open spaces communicated itself to him. No, he would not go back to the office—it was Saturday, anyway, and, besides, he felt a vague desire for freedom and the tang of wind-clean air. He ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... moment a few gleams of sunlight struggled through a rift in the clouds, and a shower of colored light fell over the wild garden. The brown tiles of the roof glowed in the light, the mosses took bright hues, strange shadows played over the grass beneath the trees; the ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... gloomy on either side, and the seething, boiling waters of the Humboldt - that for once awakens from its characteristic lethargy, and madly plunges and splutters over a bed of jagged rocks which seem to have been tossed into its channel by some Herculean hand - fill this mighty "rift" in the mountains with a never-ending roar. It has been threatening rain for the last two hours, and now the first peal of thunder I have heard on the whole journey awakens the echoing voices of the caon and rolls and rumbles along the great jagged fissure like an angry monster muttering ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... the high thrusting precipices upon which the bridge's far end rested, frowned close; the enigmatic, dully shining dome loomed ever greater. Now we had reached that end; were passing over a smooth plaza whose level floor was enclosed, save for a rift in front of us, by the fanged ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... thou wast a spirit too delicate To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands, Refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, By help of her more potent ministers, 275 And in her most unmitigable rage, Into a cloven pine; within which rift Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain A dozen years; within which space she died, And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groans 280 As fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island— Save for the son that she did litter here, ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... of its beautiful dome and sculptured detail in our thoughts, let us take leave of our subject; trusting that the Taj itself, like a morning star glittering from a single rift in a darkened sky, may form the prophecy of a fairer dawn for the womanhood of the country in which it ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... saying good-night, the fitful moonlight streamed out brightly again through a rift in the clouds. At the same moment a stout old gentleman, smoking a pipe, sauntered past us on the pavement, noticed me as he went by, stopped directly, and revealed himself as Mr. Engelman. "Good-night, Mr. David," said the widow. ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... friendship, the astute Redell discovered a rift in Cappy's armor—two rifts, in fact. The first was that Cappy feared and loathed old age and fiercely resented even the most shadowy intimation that with age he was, to employ a sporting phrase, "losing his punch." The second weakness that lay exposed to Redell was Cappy's passion ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... ringing, flies apart, Suddenly cracks the vaulted hall; And through the rift the flames upstart; The guests in dust are scattered all With the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... a pretty phrase, Some poeesy for woe it wins, Commemorating roundelays And troubadours and mandolins: We seem to view some minstrel-boy Beside his shattered music mute, The shattered string, the ruined joy— The Rift within the Lute. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 3, 1892 • Various
... duke of Milan, and father of Miranda. He was deposed by his brother, Antonio, who sent him to sea with Miranda in a "rotten carcass of a boat," which was borne to a desert island. Here Prospero practised magic. He liberated Ariel from the rift of a pine tree, where the witch Syc'orax had confined him for twelve years, and was served by that bright spirit with true gratitude. The only other inhabitant of the island was Cal[)i]ban, the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the periodic droughts in south; Congo River floods (seasonal); in the east, in the Great Rift Valley, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... efforts. He descended into the chasm of the rivulet, crawled up on a heap of crumbling brick-work, and gained a hole above it, which he immediately began to widen, to admit of his passage through. Inch by inch, he enlarged the rift, crept into it, and found himself on a fragment of the bow of one of the foundation arches, which, though partly destroyed, still supported itself, isolated from all connection with the part of the upper wall which it had ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Then came an unexpected rift in the clouds, the receipt of a very friendly letter from Mr. Zenas Crane, the great paper manufacturer, of Massachusetts, who had contributed to a previous expedition, but whom I had never met. Mr. Crane wrote that he was deeply ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... he perceived the rift in his logic "Gol-darn ye!" he exclaimed, violently kicking the horse, "you-uns ain't got no call ter view visions ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Capital had left no traces of embarrassment in me: I was, in fact, rather aggressively anxious to reveal myself to him as one who has thriven on the views he condemned, as one in whose unity of mind there is no rift. He was alone, apparently waiting for someone, leaning against a steam radiator in one of his awkward, angular poses, looking out of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... increasing, culminates at West Point, a lofty eminence jutting upon a lake apparently without any outlet. The spurs of mountain ranges which meet here project in precipices from five to fifteen hundred feet in height; trees find a place for their roots in every rift among the rocks; festoons of clematis and wild-vine hang in graceful drapery from base to summit, and the dark mountain shadows loom over the lake-like expanse below. The hand wearies of writing of the loveliness ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... sons of Sagara, accepted this command of their father, and once more began to search through the entire world. Now these heroes saw a rift on the surface of the earth. And having reached this pit, the sons of Sagara began to excavate it. And with spades and pickaxes they went on digging the sea, making the utmost efforts. And that same abode of Varuna (namely the ocean), being thus, excavated by the united ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... dismounting, to prepare to follow them. A few moments' scrambling brought them to the top of the ledge; the path then passed between a narrow defile, where only one could walk at a time, till suddenly they came to a rift or chasm more than a yard in breadth, and beyond which lay a pile of rocks, separate from the rest of the ledge, standing full thirty feet high, with its sides steep and perpendicular as those of a castle. Phineas easily ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Welsley and could not now imagine herself living anywhere else. Robin, too was a pronounced, even an enthusiastic, "Welsleyite," and had practically forgotten "old London," as he negligently called the greatest city in the world. They were very happy in Welsley. In fact, the Dean's widow was the only rift in Rosamund's lute, that lute which was so full ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... hundred yards wide, two fathoms deep near the mouth, and rapid. From the top of a neighboring cliff, four hundred feet high, it could be seen trending back into the mountains some thirty or thirty-five miles. The mountains, devoid of snow, were seen under favorable circumstances through a rift in the clouds, and appeared brown and naked, with smooth rounded tops. During a tramp of some miles over a muddy way, composed of argillaceous clay and black pebbles, I observed fragments of quartz and granite. Several specimens containing iron pyrites ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... and is clouded all over. The desert is as level as a floor; not a mound as high as a kneeling camel. The sun sinks in the west. Like a red-hot cannon-ball it shines through a rift between dark clouds, and a shaft of dazzling red rays streams over the desert, the surface of which shines like a purple sea. To the north the sky is of a dark violet colour, and against this background the camels stand ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... azure drift, And on the hillside I can see The villages of Imari, Whose thronged and flaming workshops lift Their twisted columns of smoke on high, Cloud cloisters that in ruins lie, With sunshine streaming through each rift, And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... check the murmur, and Eustace sulked all the rest of the day; indeed, this has always seemed to me to have been the first little rift in his adherence to his cousin, but at that time his dependence was so absolute, and his power of separate action so small, that he submitted to the decree even while he grumbled; and when he found that Lord Erymanth viewed it as very undesirable ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... difficult connection between an unseen world of spirit, unconditioned by matter, and our present world of spirit, conditioned by matter. When the pull is strong enough. And what pull could be stronger than England's danger? To Kitchener?" The black-lashed, gray eyes flamed at me, unblinking the rift of light through the ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... within was rude and strong, Like an huge cave hewn out of rocky clift, From whose rough vault the ragged breaches hung, Embossed with massy gold of glorious gift, And with rich metal loaded every rift. That heavy ruin they did seem to threat: And over them Arachne high did lift Her cunning web, and spread her subtle net, Enwrapped in foul smoke, and clouds more black ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... half the year up here in the wild Peak country, caring for a few sheep, and going down to the village not more than once or twice a week. There was a little spring welling up in a hollow not fifty yards away from the hut, which itself stood in a deep, natural rift among the high hills, so that men might search for it a lifetime and not ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... rift in the cliff which had been widened and extended by the action of the water draining through it from the plateau above. It gave us a rather rough climb to the summit, but finally we stood upon the level mesa which stretched back for several miles to the ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... what I saw not at the time,—that my weakness came upon me fr-rom my own lack of str-rength to make an effort. I was cr-rushed by a gr-rief when I left my land to come to America. I allowed it to paralyze my will. I let myself dr-rift, not caring enough about what became of me to exert myself to ward off poverty. Poverty never had been mine,—I did not r-realize it, but I did know well the meaning of self-r-respect and honor, and it was base of me to permit my will ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... goblet ringing flies apart, Suddenly cracks the vaulted hall; And through the rift, the wild flames start; The guests in dust are scattered all, With the breaking ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... lightly; M. Gillenormand's chamber adjoined the drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had been taken, the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the rift of light which he saw under his door, he had risen from his bed, and had groped ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the little rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... confidence, out of tenderness to his feelings. Their friendship, then, was notorious, and, indeed, was an element in Saul's dread of David, who seemed to have some charm to steal hearts, and had bewitched both Saul's son and his daughter, thus making a painful rift in the family unity. It does not appear how David came to be so sure of Saul's designs. The incident at Ramah might have seemed to augur some improvement in his mood; and certainly there could have been no overt acts, or Jonathan could not have disputed the suspicions. Possibly some whispers ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... keeping cool-headed than any other way," rejoined Frank. "A crevasse, into one of which the professor has fallen, is not 'a hole' as you call it, but a long rift in the earth above which snow has drifted. Sometimes they are so covered up that persons can cross in safety, at other times the snow 'bridge' gives way under their weight and they are precipitated into ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the loose, hot soil, crumbling beneath his feet, was no honest foodful mother earth, but an acrid mass of ashes and corrosive minerals. Arsenic, sulphur, and many a sharp and bitter salt were in all he touched, every rift in the ground hissed with stifling steam, while rolling clouds of dun sullen smoke, and a deep hollow booming, like the roar of an immense furnace, told his nearness to the great crater. He penetrated the sombre tabernacle, and stood on the very brink of a huge basin, formed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... anti-slavery leanings had voted for the instructions; only the Democrats from the southern counties voted solidly to sustain the Illinois delegation in its opposition to the Proviso.[320] While not a strict sectional vote, it showed plainly enough the rift in the Democratic party. A disruptive issue had been raised. For the moment a re-alignment of parties on geographical lines seemed imminent. This was precisely the trend in national politics ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... his side, and now quite resigned to the semi-official nature of the ball, rose and drank the health of the distinguished guest in long and flowery praises. Rezanov responded in briefer but no less felicitous vein, and concluded by remarking that the only rift in the lute of his present enchanting experience was the fear that whereas he had nearly died of starvation several times during the past three years, he was now threatened with a far more ignominious end, so delicious and irresistible were the temptations ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... protested. "Everything was all right until this political business came up between us. But that opened the rift. I couldn't do as he wanted me to, and my sympathies were with the corporations which I thought he was fighting unjustly. So when Mr. McVickar made me an offer, I accepted in good faith, believing that I could really do something toward bringing ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... and play one part And do one thing. Since death divides the pair, 'Tis well that I depart and thou remain Who wast to me as spirit is to flesh: Let the flesh perish, be perceived no more, So thou, the spirit that informed the flesh, Bend yet awhile, a very flame above The rift I drop into the darkness by— And bid remember, flesh and spirit once Worked in the world, one body, for man's sake. Never be that abominable show Of passive death without a quickening life— ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... of the troop, and with every prospect of a broiling ride across the desert ahead so soon as the sun was up, no chance for watering their horses could be thrown away. Just as he expected, Drummond found the descent becoming more gradual, and in a moment or two the bottom of the dark rift was found, and presently, keeping keen lookout for the reflection of the stars still lingering overhead, the leading men were rewarded, and halted at the edge of a shining pool of clear, though not very cool, water, and the horses thrust their hot muzzles deep ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... extraordinary influence of its beauty. Here are, indeed, the best words best placed, and that curious felicity of style which makes every line a marvel, and an eternal possession. It is as if Tennyson had taken the advice which Keats gave to Shelley, "Load every rift with ore." To choose but one or two examples, how the purest and freshest impression of nature is re-created in mind and memory by the picture of ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... on the crest of the hill was bathed in sunlight that poured from a rift in the clouds, as if sent for the sole purpose of showing the grand portico, the broad piazza, and the flag that floated gracefully ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks
... window. A mild fresh air which seemed to be pouring over the earth through that rift in heaven which the sunset had made, breathed freshly on her face and the yellow light shone on her amber hair, which lay on her shoulders about the length of the hair of an angel in some ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... smell of the incense, beside his bride of yesterday's making—she intensely happy too, but in another way, for was not her bridegroom of yesterday her husband of twenty years ago—cruelly wrenched away, but her husband for all that. Still, there was always that little rift within the lute that made the music—pray Heaven not to widen! Always that thought!—that he might recollect. How could he remember the messe des paresseux, and keep his mind a blank about how he came to know of it? It was the first discomfort that had crossed ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... unwillingly. His was naturally a bright, vivacious, healthy nature—but he was over- sensitively organised,—his nerves did not resemble iron so much as finely-tempered steel, which could not but suffer from the damp and rust in the world's conventionalities. And some "little rift within the lute" chanced to him, as it often chances to many, so that the subtle music of his soul jarred into discord with the things of life, making harsh sounds in place of melody. There was no adequate cause for this,—neither disappointed love nor balked ambition shadowed his ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... to understand Roy's failure to press for short leave home. He had said very little on the subject. And Roy—with the instinct of sensitive natures to take their tone from others—had also said little: too little, perhaps. Least said may be soonest mended; but there are times when it may widen a rift to ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... League of Nations is one. Assuring his supporters that the proposal for separate peace with Germany was "opening their front lines," he drew a word sketch of a gigantic contest in which he as a general had sensed a rift in the opposition ranks and had broken through ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... have you introduce me to your family than to have the colonel. As a matter of fact, I told him I couldn't get up. But I changed my mind. Come along." The first rift in the storm-packed clouds; and to meet her through the kindly offices of this amiable ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... fanned away the nimbus of cigar smoke with which he had surrounded himself and stared gloomily at her through the rift. ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... later, umbrella, easel, and colour-box were safely stowed away in a narrow opening in the face of the limestone rock, and the three were trudging on upwards to a mighty bend. There a great rift opened out into a wide amphitheatre, where, shallow and bright with flashing stickle, the stream danced among the stones, to calm down directly after in deep pool after pool, which looked like so many silvery mirrors netted by the rings formed by ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... now 'Gan thunder and both ends of heaven; the clouds From many a horrid rift abortive poured Fierce rain with lightning mixed, water with fire In ruin reconciled; nor slept the winds Within their stony caves, but rush'd abroad From the four hinges of the world, and fell On the vex'd wilderness; whose tallest pines ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... glamour of memory, and the growth of the new bonds of commerce and travel, the sense of a common country and destiny began to take root in the hearts of men, and on occasion disclosed itself with the strength and nobility of a heroic passion. True, a new rift was appearing, in the doctrine of nullification and the question of slavery, but this evoked at times a more militant and again a more appealing aspect in the sentiment of union. Jackson seemed to rise from the rough frontiersman to the guardian of the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... means of a pocket-compass; then, pointing the glass as nearly at an angle of twenty-one degrees of elevation as I could do it by guess, I moved it cautiously up or down, until my attention was arrested by a circular rift or opening in the foliage of a large tree that overtopped its fellows in the distance. In the centre of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... made you valiant, strong and swift, And maimed you with a bullet long ago, And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift, And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow, Gave back your youth to you, And packed in moments rare and few Achievements manifold And happiness untold, And bade you spring to Death as to a bride, In manhood's ripeness, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... There was one rift in the lute of lumber trust solidarity in Centralia. Business and professional men had long been groveling in sycophantic servility at the feet of "the clique." There was ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... taste and elegance and refinement in their furnishing, still impress one with the feeling that somewhere within the lute there is a rift which destroys its perfect harmony, and that rift is not far to seek—it lies in the pictures. Cheap chromos, lithographs, and woodcuts have small excuse for being in these days of fine reproductions in photographs, photogravures, and engravings, ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... passed by, and still there was no rift in the clouds. Once more Corydon was forbidden to see him, and so her pain grew day by day. At last there came another letter, voicing utter despertion. Something must be done, she declared, she was slowly ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... the lute May sometimes make the music mute! By slow degrees, the rift grows wide, By slow degrees, the tender tide— Harmonious once—of loving thought Becomes with harsher measures fraught, Until the heart's Arcadian breath Lapses ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... little. To those wrapped in true anticipation their shifting was as the first sign of a descending heaven. Somewhere behind the thick clouds there was a crescent moon, and when in the upper region of the sky a rift was made in the deep cloud cover, though she did not shine through, the sky beyond was lit by her light, and the upper edges of cloud were ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... their families. Returning after the work was over, she lingered a moment in the path to the house, looking far across the white country. The snow had ceased, and a single star was shining, through a rift in the scudding clouds, straight overhead. From the northwest the wind blew hard, and the fleecy covering on the ground was fast freezing a foot deep in ice. With a shiver she drew her cloak about her and ran indoors and upstairs to where ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... Church, the drug store and dwelling of Dr. Pelliter, and was on the outskirts of the village. The shadow of the western range had now slipped across the valley and nearly climbed the opposite wall; lavender scarfs of mist veiled the far, jumbled peaks in the darkling rift; slim, swaying columns of smoke from the clustered chimneys of Greenstream towered dizzily through the shaded air to where, high above, they were transformed to gold by the last, up-flung ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... became fainter; he heard retreating footsteps, and at last they died away entirely. Through a rift in the trees straight above him the white, cold stars of the night gleamed down on him, and Howland stared up at them fixedly until they seemed to be hopping and dancing about in the skies. He wanted to swear—yell—fight. ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... distant arm of the bay back into the land. It was like a wedge of green thrust through the yellow, splitting it apart, at one end meeting the sky in a level line, at the other narrowing to a point which penetrated the bases of the hills. From these streams wound down ravine and rift till their currents slipped into the brackish waters of the marsh. Such a stream, dried now to a few stagnant pools, had worn a way along the gulley ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... entered the land without shadows, Thou who, 'neath the shadow, so long Hast sat with thy white hands close-folded, And lips that could utter no song; Through a rift in the cloud, for an instant, Thine eyes caught a glimpse of that shore, And Earth with its gloom was forgotten, And Heaven is thine ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... a hill, which they mounted, and descended into another valley. Here they came upon Pendle Water, and while skirting its banks, could see at a great depth below, the river rushing over its rocky bed like an Alpine torrent. The scenery had now begun to assume a savage and sombre character. The deep rift through which the river ran was evidently the result of some terrible convulsion of the earth, and the rocky strata were strangely and fantastically displayed. On the further side the banks rose up precipitously, consisting ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the trapper, "it's the boy's own piece, and he let it off as he shot the rift the fourth bend above. Yis, the boy knows his danger and he took the vantage of the rift to signal me with his piece, for oars couldn't help him in the rift and the missin' of a single stroke wouldn't count. I trust the boy got the pups, arter all," added ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... a prudent retreat through the back of the tent. The canvas was ripped open, letting in a streak of light. They left their prisoner upon the ground, and cautiously drew near the rift. ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... in hunger and thirst, for a sail; the final loss of all companions save a gorilla-like half-breed, whose animal instinct of love and fidelity fell about the poor boy like a protecting garment. Then comes this bright spot in his life away in Hili-liland, like a momentary rift in the clouds of a stormy day. For Pym the sun shone with a heavenly effulgence, whilst the obstructions of a dire destiny were for a time removed; but when again the clouds closed between him and the ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... to the position of IBSEN as a Dramatist, or as to the order of merit and precedence to be assigned to his works. No, on such matters they are apparently at one; but in other matters they are at one another. Thus the unity appears to be only superficial, a decent plaster hiding the rift occasioned by one of their number having literally translated into English IBSEN's latest Norwegian drama, of which translation the verbal correctness is impugned by ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... the azure sky, The argosies of cloudland lie, Whose shores, with many a shining rift, Far ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... From the top of his head a red lock flamed up, licking the air; over its sides the hair tumbled in cataracts, breaking about his ears; then the surging hair lost itself in orderly currents which flowed, waving, from his cheeks, leaving a rift from which sprang a generous nose and a round chin with many folds. His mouth was formed for the enunciation of large words and pompous phrases. From it monosyllables fell like bullets from a cannon. He seldom ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... that the Pythagorean doctrine in its entirety was too high a one for its adherents, and a rift between Pythagorean religion and Pythagorean science was inevitable. Those who were capable of appreciating the scientific side of the movement would tend more and more to neglect the religious rule ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... than his reputation for integrity. Both men had donned coarse overalls, and Melhuish, the mining expert, held his candle so that its light fell upon his companion as well as upon the dripping surface of the rock. Moisture fell from the wet stone into the gloomy rift, and a faint monotonous splashing rose up from far below. Melhuish, however, was watching Thurston too intently to notice anything else. He was a middle-aged man, with a pale, puffy face and avaricious eyes. He was well-known to ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... exasperated that he could not avoid the discussions which his father, with a weak man's obstinacy, forced upon him. Some unhappy, baneful power seemed to drive Colonel Parsons to widen the rift, the existence of which caused him such exquisite pain; his natural kindliness was obscured by an uncontrollable irritation. One day ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... hospital, and the squeak of fiddle and drone of 'cello, mingled with the plaintive piping of the flute, were heard at intervals through the silence of the wintry night. No tramp of sentry broke the hush about the little rift between the heights—the major holding that none was necessary where there were so many dogs. Most of the soldiers' families had gone to the dance; all of the younger children were asleep; even the dogs were still, and so, when at ten o'clock ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... the Empire, or the prerogatives of the parliament or Crown.' But the emphasis was different. Howe insisted on the greatness of the change in local administration; Johnston on the amount of still surviving control by the mother country. The little rift in the lute was already apparent, and was increased by the natural tendency of the governor to consult the courtly Johnston, and to show impatience at ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... which may well have been the old cave-bear, enormously enlarged and modified by its new environment. For countless aeons the internal and the external creation had kept apart, growing steadily away from each other. Then there had come some rift in the depths of the mountain which had enabled one creature to wander up and, by means of the Roman tunnel, to reach the open air. Like all subterranean life, it had lost the power of sight, but this had no doubt been compensated ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his home and his social life in Richmond, it would seem that every need of The Dreamer's being was now satisfied and the days of his life were moving in perfect harmony. But "the little rift within the lute" all too soon made its appearance. It was caused by the alarm of Mr. White, the owner and founder of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... A hound might have done so, but a human being couldn't that night." Roberts dropped back to the grass, again avoiding the rift of light. "At daylight Evans got his bearings, and that day we found the claim, built our monuments, tacked up the notice and the rest. I learned afterwards there were six men in the machine behind; but I never saw any of them—until ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... bed, remained in the utmost solicitude and confusion, expecting every moment to be buried under the ruins of their shattered edifices. When day-light came they were at leisure to contemplate the devastations of the night: they then found that a deep rift, or chasm, had opened under their houses, and torn them, as it were, in two; and that one end of the barn had suffered in a similar manner; that a pond near the cottage had undergone a strange reverse, becoming deep at the shallow end, and so vice versa; that many large oaks were ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... time and God's resources have wrought their will upon man. They are to be cherished as the mariner cherishes the guiding star that stands upon the horizon; they are to be cherished as some traveler, lost in a close, dark forest, cherishes the moment when the sun breaks through a rift in the clouds and he takes his bearings out of the swamp and toward his home. Visions are God within the soul. They come to lead man away from sin and sorrow. They come to guide ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... out magnificently. Their huge sides tower up nearly a thousand feet from the river, until they are within reach of the lowering clouds that every moment threaten to envelop them in their indigo embrace. There is a curious rift in the dark cumulus revealing a thin line of dull carmine that frequently changes its shape and becomes nearly obliterated, but its presence in no way weakens the awesomeness of the picture. The dale appears to become huger and steeper as the clouds thicken, and what have been ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... ravine which I should have descended had I crossed the Nufenen. I thought of the Val Bavona, only just over the great wall that held the west; and in one place where a rift (you have just seen its picture) led up to the summits of the hills I was half tempted to go back to Airolo and sleep and next morning to attempt a crossing. But I had accepted my fate on the Gries and the falling road also held me, and so I ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the revolver remained motionless. Through a rift in the leafy curtain I caught a glimpse of a bulk that was within a yard of our hiding place, and I knew that the youngster was waiting for the brute to speak to make certain that he was covering the right ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... grasses on its ledges, and the crows nesting in its parapets, rising blind and dumb on its green mound, with the hamlet at its feet; or like the craggy islet, severed by the raging sea from the towering headland, where the samphire sprouts in the rift, and the sea-birds roost, at whose foot the surges lap, and over whose head the landward wind ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Guicciardini, the first statesman and historian of his age, had undertaken his defence, and was ready to support him by advice and countenance in the conduct of his government. Within the lute of this prosperity, however, there was one little rift. For some months past he had closely attached to his person a certain kinsman, Lorenzo de' Medici, who was descended in the fourth generation from Lorenzo, the brother of Cosimo Pater Patriae. This Lorenzo, or Lorenzino, or Lorenzaccio, as his most intimate acquaintances called him, was ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... that her character was "as black as Hell," and upon Rachel's complaint to the session, he was "churched" for "breach of the Ninth Commandment and also for a violation of his covenant agreement." This incident caused a rift which gradually developed into something very like a schism in the local congregation, and this internal disagreement finally produced a split between Eleazar's son, Dr. John Wheelock, who was now president of Dartmouth College, and the Trustees of the institution. The result was that ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... wedged in a rift of the massive stone, Most plainly rent by its roots alone, A beautiful peepul-tree ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... called for the notes of my lecture. My mind could not put two and two together hardly, and so I gave up in despair and left myself to my fate. On my way to the Meeting, however, a strange feeling came over me. It was like the sun through a rift in the black clouds, and all at once a spirit of tenderness, hope, and faith came over me. A voice in my soul seemed to say, 'Go and do the Lord's work, and the people will gather; go for their souls, and all will be well.' I accepted the command, my fears vanished, a ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... stout manhood was shivered within him, utterly and suddenly, as 4000 years ago the rock was cloven in Horeb, the Mount of God. Now, too, from the rift in the granite the waters flowed; the first tears that he had shed since he was a very little child—the last that any mortal saw there—streamed hot and blinding from his eyes down on the thin, transparent hand that ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... thicker and denser, but, ever and anon, through some rift I might catch a glimpse of the scarred, blackened side of the English ship, or the litter and confusion of our decks. Twice shots ploughed up the planking hard by me, and once my post itself was struck, so that for a moment I had some hope of winning free of my bonds, yet ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... But no rift appeared in the artist's black sky of sorrow; she had not yet learned that, in drawing near the hand that holds the rod, the blow is lightened, and she bitterly demanded of her Maker to be released ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... eddy of wind blew aside part of the fog, revealing through the rift a low-lying island. Within a minute the fog had closed down again, but the glimpse had been enough to give the captain his bearings. The noise from the seal-rookery had grown deafening, so that the men had to shout to ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... like views in mid-ocean; then, the clouds lifting, some islet will be presented standing alone, with the tops of its trees dipping out of sight in pearly gray fringes; or, lifting higher, and perhaps letting in a ray of sunshine through some rift overhead, the whole island will be set free and brought forward in vivid relief amid the gloom, a girdle of silver light of dazzling brightness on the water about its shores, then darkening again and vanishing back into the general gloom. Thus island ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... one sleep, 'n' they got right in on top o' her Hottentot pillow-shams 'n' old Dr. Carter tore a sham with his toothpick. 'N', added to all that, Amelia 's furious 'cause she read in a book 't teaches how to stay married 't a husband's first night out is the first rift in the lute, 'n' she was down town buyin' a dictionary so 's to be sure what a lute is afore she accuses young Dr. Brown. 'N' there's a man over in Meadville down with a sun-stroke, 'n' they want Dr. Carter to hurry, 'n' they can't seem to make him realize nothin'. He jus' sits there in Mrs. ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... same result. Then the sturgeon, in anger, swallowed Hiawatha and canoe also; but Hiawatha smote the heart of the sturgeon with his fist, and the king of fishes swam to the shore and died. Then the sea-gulls opened a rift in the dead body, out of which Hiawatha ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... spermatozoa and embryos not only of all human races but of all things that live, whether animal or vegetable, think little, but that little almost identically on every subject. That "almost" is the little rift within the lute which by and by will give such different character to the ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... servant," said Chaka, and the dreadful light came into his eyes that never shone in the eyes of any other man. Then I grew sick at heart, my father—ay, though I loved my people little, and they had driven me away, I grew sick at heart. Now we had come to a spot where there is a great rift of black rock, and the name of that rift is U'Donga-lu-ka-Tatiyana. On either side of this donga the ground slopes steeply down towards its yawning lips, and from its end a man may see the open country. Here Chaka sat down at the ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... come unto her, from her palms she will not lift The dark face hidden deep within them like the moon in cloudy rift. ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... jointing, sedimentary stratification, and secondary cleavage. Nearly all rocks are jointed. The joints may be open and conspicuous, or closed and almost imperceptible. The closed joints or incipient joints cause planes of weakness, known variously as rift, grain, etc., which largely determine the shapes of the blocks which may be extracted from a quarry. Where properly distributed, they may facilitate the quarrying of the stone. In other cases they may be injurious, in that they limit the size of the blocks which ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... door—through which another and sadder burden had been carried but a few instants before—her eyes caught sight of the south-western sky, and, without heeding, saw white sunlight shining in shaft-like lines from a rift in a slaty cloud. Emotions will attach themselves to scenes that are simultaneous—however foreign in essence these scenes may be—as chemical waters will crystallize on twigs and wires. Even after that time any mental agony brought less vividly to Cytherea's mind the scene from the ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... deserted, a dry wind swept the dust here and there; the moon shone through a rift in the clouds and lighted the spot where the man slept. So I found myself tete-a-tete with this man who, not suspecting my presence, was sleeping on that stone bench as peacefully as though in ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... dismemberment, dislocation; luxation^; severance, disseverance; scission; rescission, abscission; laceration, dilaceration^; disruption, abruption^; avulsion^, divulsion^; section, resection, cleavage; fission; partibility^, separability. fissure, breach, rent, split, rift, crack, slit, incision. dissection anatomy; decomposition &c 49; cutting instrument &c (sharpness) 253; buzzsaw, circular saw, rip saw. separatist. V. be disjoined &c; come off, fall off, come to pieces, fall to pieces; peel off; get loose. disjoin, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... before they reached the big cemetery on the edge of Lexington. Through a rift in the trees the Major pointed out the grave of Henry Clay, and told him about the big monument that was to be reared above his remains. The grave of Henry Clay! Chad knew all about him. He had heard Caleb Hazel read the great man's speeches aloud by the hour—had heard ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... little garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more wonderful that, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... which the seven Companies worked together, and the success they attained was, I think, something to be proud of. Sir William Goulding was an excellent Chairman. There was just one little rift in the lute. One of the seven Companies showed a disposition, at times, to play off its own bat, but this was, after all, only a small matter, and the general harmony, cohesion and unanimity that prevailed were admirable, and unquestionably productive of good. We had as Counsel, to guide ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... The first rift in the cloud was due to the good offices of Hasbrouck. He saw matter of public interest in the swollen jest and threw the columns of the Sunday Times open to Jimaboy. Under the racking pressure, the sentimentalist fired volley upon volley of scathing ridicule into the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... as he hastily scanned the note; "a rift in these gloomy clouds. Break we our camp, my lord Westmoreland, and back to Hereford town. We do but spend our strength to little use awaiting a wily foe in these flooded plains. This billet tells me that Sir Harry Percy and my lord of Worcester, ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... we entered I had three distinct shocks in quick succession. Flashy, painted and rouged as I was I dreaded Orontides' eyes. There he was behind his counter, visible through a rift in the press of handsomely dressed customers of ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... I interfered. I was not the only one in Rustum Khan's debt; it was likely his brilliant effort at the critical moment had saved our whole fighting line. Besides, I saw the Turk grinning to himself with satisfaction at the rift in our ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... him that his presence there, part of the drifting pandemonium of the pavement, was in a sense typical of his own existence in New York. He had given so much of his life into another's hands and now the anchor was dragging. He was suddenly confronted with the possibility of a rift in his relations with Elizabeth; with a sudden surging doubt, not of Elizabeth herself but simply a feeling of insecurity with regard to their future. He only realised in those moments how much he had leaned upon her, ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Presently through a rift in the sky an early star stole out, and she made a wish on it. That was one of the things Belle had taught her. She started to wish that Barby might be happy. But before the whispered verse had entirely passed ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Church. 'They... of the circumcision' were probably 'certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed,' and were especially zealous for all the separating prescriptions of the ceremonial law. They were scarcely a party as yet, but the little rift was destined to grow, and they became Paul's bitterest opponents through all his life, dogging him with calumnies and counterworking his toil. It is a black day for a Church when differences of opinion lead to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... editor by offering some two hundred corrections. But the conflict was not merely strife between two writers: it was a clash between two kinds of criticism in which the weight of tradition and polite taste were all on the side of Pope. What Theobald had done, in modern terms, was to open the rift between criticism and scholarship or, in eighteenth-century terms, to proclaim himself a "literal critic" and to insist upon the need for "literal criticism" in the understanding and just appreciation of an older writer. The new concept, ...
— Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734) • Lewis Theobald
... platinum—the latter a material which resists all acids at ordinary temperatures—enters into the solution. If now the water thus charged with mineral stores finds in the depths a shorter way to the surface than that which it descended, which may well happen by way of a deep rift in the rocks, it will in its ascent reverse the process which it followed on going down. It will deposit the several minerals in the order of their solubilities—that is, the last to be taken in will be the first to be crystallized on the walls of the fissure through which the upflow ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... I, lying in the snow that melts all around us in the fierce, scorching glare. Through the lurid rift of smoke I can see the friendly stars. Against that curtain of blaze, strangely beautiful in its sinuous strength, I watch the black silhouettes of men running hither and thither like rats, gutting the houses, looting the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... drizzling rain. The arch of the clouds seemed to get higher and lighter; and suddenly a long oblique sunbeam fell on the fields. Through the break in the clouds a streak of blue sky could be seen, and then the rift got bigger as though a veil were being drawn back, and a beautiful sky of a pure deep blue spread itself out over the world. There was a fresh mild breeze like a happy sigh from the earth, and from the gardens and woods came now and again the merry ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... vestments trailing to the ground and gaudily trimmed with fanciful trappings, their coarse hair so trained as to stand almost erect, were two aged men, who, with wild gesticulations, and solemn chanting, were apparently paying adoration to the setting sun, the last beams streaming over them through a rift in the western wall. ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... eyes of jet Beneath the brows which almost met. Stern was his face; but war and crime, —For he had sinn'd in many a clime— Had plough'd it deeper far than time. He was their chief: will he draw rein? Will he the yawning rift refrain? And with his halting band remain? He rais'd up in his stirrups, high, Better the chasm to descry, And measure with his hawk-like eye, While his dark steed begrim'd with toil, Tried madly, vainly, to recoil! A mutter'd curse—a sabre ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... of a moment the blue skirmishers had not yet found Anna, but it was their advance, their soft stir at her back as they came upon their fallen leader, that had hushed her cries. At the rift in the wood she had leaned on a huge oak and as body and mind again failed had sunk to its base in leafy hiding. Vaguely thence she presently perceived, lit from behind her by sunset beams, the farther edge of the green opening, and on that border, while she feebly ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... a first rift of light began to shine in the dark place. But it was not broadened by the letter which he found waiting upon ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... again. It was the middle of the afternoon when they entered the valley, and gazing back at old Snow-Top, with his towering summit piercing the skies, they thanked God for their deliverance. About the snowy peak there clung a rift of vapor, as if some passing cloud had caught upon it and torn off ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... to his creek the name of Misery. The two pioneers had come together from Virginia, as their ancestors had come before them from Scotland. Together, they had found one of the two gaps through the mountain wall, which for more than a hundred miles has no other passable rift. Together, and as comrades, they had made their homes, and founded their race. What original grievance had sprung up between their descendants none of the present generation knew—perhaps it was a farm line or disputed title to a pig. The primary ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... and the seraphim! Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop; Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, Plundered, profaned and disinherited, Cries protest to the Judges of the World, A protest ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... shuffling of a foot; or the sound of breathing. Nothing. Even the night roar of the city was missing; the silence was oppressive. At last he opened his eyes. A pall of gloom encompassed him—a pall without one rift of light. His fingers, moving slowly, explored the limits of the couch ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... by Lamarck, and not the false Charles-Darwinian natural selection that does not correspond with facts, and cannot result in specific differences such as we now observe. But, waiving this, the "my's," within which a little rift had begun to show itself in 1866, might well become as mute in 1869 as they could become without attracting attention, when Mr. Darwin saw the passages just quoted, and the hundred pages or so that lie ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler |
