"Rift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... told a woman named Rachel Murch 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, ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... his eyes ached with the radiance in which everything seemed drenched as with flame, and turning his gaze once more toward the sun, he saw that it had nearly disappeared. Only a blood-red rim peered spectrally above the gold and green horizon-and immediately overhead, a silver rift in the sky had widened slowly in the centre and narrowed at its end, thus taking the shape of a great outstretched sword that pointed directly downward at the busy, murmuring, glittering city beneath. It was a strange effect, and made on the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and thyme and juniper grew rank, but above all the place was strewn with rocks, leg-twisting boulders, and great cliffs where eagles dwelt. Being a seaman, Atta had his bearings. The path to Delphi left the shore road near the Hot Springs, and went south by a rift of the mountain. If he went up the slope in a beeline he must strike it in time and find better going. Still it was an eerie place to be tramping after dark. The Hellenes had strange gods of the thicket and hillside, and he ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... the little rift was closed. But the Squire's words had not been unheeded and two hearts were busily thinking and wondering if he had really meant ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... established by means of a pocket-compass; then, pointing the glass as nearly at an angle of forty-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 Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... observed with astonishment that they were following a path that crept up the very face of the bluff. Up— up— up they went until they reached a rift in the wall, and into this the trail went precipitously. Stones clattered down from the hoofs of the horses as they clambered up like mountain goats. Once the Texan had to throw himself to the ground to keep Teddy ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... To what white heights do you dare climb? You seem literally to push away the clouds and gaze straight through that dome which marks the farthest limit of my imaginings! You seem to tear it with your hands, and look through!—you put your lips to the rift and whisper with the angels!—and you always bring a little something back which does men good! Oh, Jane, Jane! How honestly ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... With goodly purposes[*] there as they sit: And in his falsed fancy he her takes To be the fairest wight that lived yit; 265 Which to expresse he bends his gentle wit, And thinking of those braunches greene to frame A girlond for her dainty forehead fit, He pluckt a bough;[*] out of whose rift there came Small drops of gory bloud, that trickled ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... lagged in answer loth to render up My precontract, and loth by brainless war To cleave the rift of difference deeper yet; Till one of those two brothers, half aside And fingering at the hair about his lip, To prick us on to combat 'Like to like! The woman's garment hid the woman's heart.' A taunt that clenched his purpose like a blow! For fiery-short ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... was deserted, a dry wind stirred 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 boor, who, not suspecting my presence, was sleeping on that stone bench as peacefully as if in his ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... minutes, during which I lay as close as I could, there was a rift in the cloud. I looked out again. I stood alone on the point of the peak with the snow ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... answered MIGNON, "there will come a rift in the hitherto perfect lute of our friendship (the rift's name will be DARKEY), but we shall manage to bridge it over—at least TOM RUM SUMMER says so." Here EMILY broke in. He could stand it no longer. "Dash it, you know, this is wewry extwraowrdinawry, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... here some pick out bullets from the side, Some drive old okum through each seam and rift; Their left hand does the calking-iron guide, The rattling mallet with ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... that gripped the revolver remained motionless. Through a rift in the leafy curtain I caught a glimpse of a bulk that was within a yard of our hiding place, and I knew that the youngster was waiting for the brute to speak to make certain that he was covering the right man. ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... A rift now appeared in the war cloud. Early in April, Washington received intelligence of a new order in council dated January 8, 1794, which only forbade trade between the French colonies and Europe, leaving American vessels to trade freely with the French West Indies. Washington seized ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... lake and plain The stork, the heron, and the crane Through the clear realms of azure drift, And on the hillside I can see The villages of Imari, Whose thronged and flaming workshops lift Their twisted columns of smoke on high, Cloud cloisters that in ruins lie, With sunshine streaming through each rift, And broken arches of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... sailors were activity itself, and they slashed and trampled down and hauled and lowered till the whole party found themselves upon a broad stony shelf at the very edge of a sharply-cut rift, whose sides showed that it must have been split from the opposite side by some convulsion of Nature, so ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... in east, highland area in west; Great Rift Valley separates East and West Banks of the ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... scheduled for April 1992 Climate: tropical monsoon with wide topographic-induced variation; some areas prone to extended droughts Terrain: high plateau with central mountain range divided by Great Rift Valley Natural resources: small reserves of gold, platinum, copper, potash Land use: arable land 12%; permanent crops 1%; meadows and pastures 41%; forest and woodland 24%; other 22%; includes irrigated NEGL% Environment: geologically active Great Rift Valley susceptible ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... more careful inspection I found that it ran, a tiny thread, along a crack in the lava not more than a couple of inches wide, which, on tracing it back, I found we had driven over without noticing. Apparently the water came down from the "bubble" through a rift in ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... 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 little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... everyday aspects. The sun concentrated its rays on my head through a rift in the jungle, and the stone, stained dull red, lay in its cell, while rootlets fringed with tawny slime wavered ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... moments throbbed away as I lay on my flea-ridden couch—moments which seemed long as hours, and no gleaming rift broke the settled and deepening blackness of my hateful environs. Every thing and every place was full of the wearisome, depressing, beauty-blasting commonplace of Interior China. Stenches rose up on the damp, dank air, and throughout the night, through the opening of a window, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... roof dipped sharply down, and the sides closed in, forming a tunnel about six feet high and five feet wide. This tunnel was three or four yards long, and then it opened out again into a second cave of fair size. The second cave was dimly lighted from a rift in the rock, forty feet above their heads. In two minutes Jack had made the circuit of it, and knew that, except for the fact that it was an inner cave, it offered them no refuge. The walls were smooth and unclimbable, and there was no break in them ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... ghostly. Thunder rolled with menacing crashes up the valley and scattered through the woods in intermittent batteries. He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally, through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a rift in the trees where the unbroken lightning showed open country. He rushed to the edge of the woods and then hesitated whether or not to cross the fields and try to reach the shelter of the little house marked by a light far down the valley. It was only half past five, but he could see scarcely ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... scrambling Sundown managed to keep within sight of Chance, who had picked up Fernando's tracks leading from the cottonwoods. The dog leaped over rocks and trotted along the levels, sniffing until he came to the rift in the canon wall down which the herder had toiled on his grewsome errand. Chance climbed the sharp ascent with clawing reaches of his powerful forelegs and quick thrusts of his muscular haunches. Sundown ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... monotonous green turf to the verge of the blown beech-trees, about which the rooks drifted in picturesque confusion. Now they soared like hawks, or on straightened wings were carried down a furious gust across the tumultuous waves of upheaved yellow, and past the rift of cold crimson that is tossed like a banner through the shadows ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... of grey-green land all round him. Besides himself, and that one tiny dwelling, there was not a sign of human life to be seen. Overhead the storm still threatened and grumbled; below, the man and the house stood powerless, but undaunted. Far away to the south the sun shone out brightly through a rift in the clouds. "Always God's promise somewhere. God's sign ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... cast all in one mold. But what struck the centurion and his comrades as most remarkable in their appearance were the flash and sparkle from their slender ankles, as the setting sun suddenly shot a fleeting ray through a rift in the heavy clouds. Each of these fellows wore on his legs gold bands set with precious stones, and the rubies which glittered on the harness of Seleukus's horse were of far ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the cement wall, as he turned away from the Pierce car. A little apart from the human current she stood, still and expectant. As if to point her out as the chosen of gods and men, the questing sun, bursting in triumph through a cloud-rift, sent a long shaft of gold to encompass and irradiate her. To the end, whether with aching heart or glad, Hal was to see her thus, in flashing, recurrent visions; a slight, poised figure, all gracious curves and tender consonances, with a cluster of ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was a crack, a fissure. Now it was a yard in width, now three, and blackness seemed to well up from within it, blackness that was the very essence of the depths. Steadily the ebon rift expanded; spread suddenly wide open in two sharp-edged, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... as we pass by. Rift in the lute I think. Treats him with scorn. See. He admires him all the more. The night Si sang. The human voice, two tiny silky chords, wonderful, more than ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... to a deeper rift, in which long slender weeds, fantastically tinted, like floating green and rose-colored hair, were swaying under the quivering water as it trickled off to the distant sea ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... form within was rude and strong, Like an huge cave hewn out of rocky clift, From whose rough vault the ragged breaches hung, Embossed with massy gold of glorious gift, And with rich metal loaded every rift, That heavy ruin they did seem to threat: And over them Arachne high did lift Her cunning web, and spread her subtle net, Enwrapped in foul smoke, and ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... The rift was gradually widening, and the forest on either side thinned. The trees were wider and more scattered, and the broken hilltops, which but now had been well ahead, were frowning right over him, and he knew, by the steady, gradual rise of the country, ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... with the 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
... 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
... other, stand out magnificently. Their huge sides tower up nearly a thousand feet from the river, until they are within reach of the lowering clouds that every moment threaten to envelop them in their indigo embrace. There is a curious rift in the dark cumulus revealing a thin line of dull carmine that frequently changes its shape and becomes nearly obliterated, but its presence in no way weakens the awesomeness of the picture. The dale ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... uttering an exclamation, those who stood near seized and held him. Presently he saw the reason. He was standing on the brink of a precipice at the back of and dominating the dim and shadow-clad city, while far beneath him lay a gloomy rift along which ran the trade ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... sat down on a rock, and amused himself with the thought of the wonder there would be at home. Suddenly he heard the sound of a horse's hoof, and grasping his rifle, stooped down behind a fallen rock. A moment later a mounted Indian dashed past the mouth of the rift. He was scarce twenty yards away, but Dick noticed the eagle feathers of his head-dress, the rifle slung across his shoulder, and the leggings decorated with tufts of hair. It was but a moment, and then he was gone. Dick waited a minute or two, and then ran in to tell the miners. They ...
— The Golden Canyon - Contents: The Golden Canyon; The Stone Chest • G. A. Henty
... Marjorie, when, breathless and somewhat tired, the three explorers had reached a small turret room into which was shining a ray of sunshine from a rift in the clouds—'I wonder if you would laugh if I ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... rift in the clouds let through a glancing beam of moonlight, which fell full upon the figure of old Killick as he stood upon the forecastle of his vessel, preparing to let down the anchor as arranged when a safe place had been found. The old sea-dog had convoyed the party as cleverly as ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... go so far as to express our belief that experiments, conducted by a skilful physiologist, would very probably obtain the desired production of mutually more or less infertile breeds from a common stock, in a comparatively few years; but still, as the case stands at present, this "little rift within the lute" is not to ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... any rate, was prospect of food and rest, and the poor travellers brisked up again. But alas! between them and the tents lay a formidable obstacle. Nothing less than a birch-twig bridge over a rushing stream which filled up the bottom of a wide rift or chasm in the upland. This chasm stretched right across the upland from a steep rock which blocked up the head of the little valley, and out of which the stream gushed, and there was no way of crossing it, so the shepherd explained by signs, except ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... altogether himself, but Soames as well, so that he was not only experiencing but watching. This figure of himself and Soames was trying to find a way out through the curtains, which, heavy and dark, kept him in. Several times he had crossed in front of them before he saw with delight a sudden narrow rift—a tall chink of beauty the colour of iris flowers, like a glimpse of Paradise, remote, ineffable. Stepping quickly forward to pass into it, he found the curtains closing before him. Bitterly disappointed he —or was it Soames?—moved on, and there was the chink again through the parted ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... tired of its endless task, were doing dispiritedly as little as it dared, and murmuring at that. The curving cliffs on the left looked like white curtains, closely drawn. The low grey sky was unbroken by cloud or rift except low down on the horizon, where it had risen like a blind drawn up a little to admit the light. It was a melancholy prospect, and Beth shivered and sighed in sympathy. Then a sparrow cheeped somewhere behind her, and another bird in the hedge softly fluted a ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... deliberations. Not far from here lies also the 'Logberg,' or 'law rock,' a large mound from whence the laws were proclaimed or judgments given to the people who assembled on the outside slope of the eastern wall of the rift, in view of the proceedings below. Our notice was likewise directed to the 'blood stone,' on which, for certain offences, the criminals were condemned to have their backs broken, after which barbarous punishment ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... In them you are in a maze, in a weltering world of woods; you can see neither the earth nor the sky, but a confusion of the growth and decay of centuries, and must traverse them by your compass or your science of woodcraft,—a rift through the trees giving one a glimpse of the opposite range or of the valley beneath, and he is more at sea than ever; one does not know his own farm or settlement when framed in these mountain ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... a spectacle to watch, those thunder-clouds come through the glack, or rift, dividing the falling hill on which I stood, from the rising one beyond. Down in the valley ran a stream and a track used by cattle-drovers, and, as my eye went there, I thought I saw a tall figure. Certainly, for he looked up and, during a moment, we were both silhouetted ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... 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 ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... a river, now frozen to its bed. But, from the hut door, the rift which marks its course in the ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... And then I had a sort of unreasonable notion that I should see you at the Linnean Council to-day and hear that all was right again. God knows, I feel for you and your poor wife. Knowing what a great rift the loss of a mere undeveloped child will leave in one's life, I can faintly picture to myself the great and irreparable vacuity in a family circle caused by the vanishing out of it of such a man as Henslow, with great acquirements, and that great calm ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... 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 a gulf. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... that thou holdest somewhat of him in thine hand, Skallagrim, and for the rest, go seek it in yonder rift." ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... them. It is nearly always the bright lad of a family, the most promising, the mother's darling, that goes wrong; it is the brilliant students, the men of whom one says, "Ah, what could he not do if he would only try!" is those who trip, and quench their brilliance in the mud. A little rift in the fabric of the will, a little instability of temper, an unlucky week of idleness—these are the things that start a man towards the very gulf of doom. Bob Darbishire, the athlete, the delightful and exhilarating companion, was set gliding on the slope, and now he and his ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... Indian banker had his habitat and office only a few months before, with a lakh of rupees stacked in a conspicuous place as glittering earnest of his ability to pay well for anything remarkable in the way of a pearl. And beyond, where occurs the rift in the sand, stood the shanty in which venturesome divers whiled away time and money in trying to pitch rings upon the ends of walking-sticks, as do farmers' boys at ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... and wives sometimes goes unexplained, and the rift between them widens through life. I know some houses where the wife enters at one door and the husband at another; where if they meet on the stairs, they do not salute each other. Under the same roof they have lived for years and have not spoken. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... thou 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
... one little rift in the gray fog of her daily life, however. And through it she had seen Edith well married, with perhaps a girl to do the house work, and a room where Edith's mother could fold her hands and sit in the long silences without thought ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... could go back to his world and pick up the threads again, but not with a wife at his side. Oh, yes; they would be happy at first. Then Elsa would begin to miss the things she had so gloriously thrown away. The rift in the lute; the canker in the rose. They were equally well-born, well-bred; politeness would usurp affection's hold. Could he save her from the day when she would learn Romance had come from within? No. All he could do was to help ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... wrote to Shelley:—"You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore." Cheeky!—but not so much amiss. Poetry, and no prophecy however, must come of that mood,—and no pulpit would have held Keats's wings,—the body and mind together were not heavy enough for a counterweight.... Did you ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... rise The purple hills of Paradise. Oh, softly on yon banks of haze Her rosy face the Summer lays! Becalmed along the azure sky, The argosies of cloudland lie, Whose shores, with many a shining rift, Far off their pearl-white ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... the pass, and began to see distinctly the ferns that grew on the rocks, and the fair country between the rift in them, spreading out there, blue-shadowed. Whereupon came a great rush of men of both sides, striking side blows at each other, spitting, cursing, and shrieking, as they tore away like a herd of wild hogs. So, being careless of lfe, as I said, I drew rein, and turning ...
— The Hollow Land • William Morris
... each man's life there comes a time supreme; One day, one night, one morning, or one noon, One freighted hour, one moment opportune, One rift through which sublime fulfillments gleam, One space when fate goes tiding with the stream, One Once, in balance 'twixt Too Late, Too Soon, And ready for the passing instant's boon To tip in favor the uncertain beam. Ah, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... footstep of the watchman, who told him that the morning was fair, and, at his bidding, opened a door which admitted to the open terrace overlooking the sea. Having stepped forth, Basil stood for a moment sniffing the cool air with its scent from the vineyards, and looking at the yellow rift in the eastern sky; then he followed a path which skirted the villa's outward wall and led towards the dwelling of Aurelia. Presently he reached the ruined wall of the little garden, and here a voice challenged him, that of a servant ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... tinkling bells of pack-horses to Italy by the St. Gothard. To the roar of the river and the rushing of winds without they plunged through this dark "Hole of Uri," which brought them to a rugged rock-rift pass with but a thread of heaven's blue far above them; and here "a slight, narrow bridge of a single arch spanned the gorge with a hardihood that caused one to shudder." Its slender, unrailed, fifteen feet of width was eighty ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... water was four feet deep at the edge of the cliffs and the waves would wash over his head. For two miles, I have said, there was a line of cliffs on this coast, for two miles save just where I stood, the only break, a narrow rift which, coinciding with a section line, was the end of a road coming down to the water. They could not see this rift in the dusk, perhaps were ignorant of its existence and so not ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... the anchor-chain caused him to waken sharply, stiff with cold. The motor was silent. The launch rocked lazily. Through a rift in the fog he saw a rocky beach only a stone's throw away. They were anchored close by ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... 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 ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... where absolute darkness, unrelieved by the stars of midnight, always reigns, the great Auditorium appeared before us softly flooded with daylight diffused from a broad white beam slanting down in long straight lines from the entrance as from a rift in heavy clouds; only this rift displayed around its edges a brilliant border of vegetation that the rough rocks ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... knowledge of the First Consul, a peace treaty with the Portuguese, which he cunningly had ratified by the French ambassador, Lucien Bonaparte. This greatly annoyed the First Consul, and caused, from that day, a rift ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... inspection, and I fear that foxy old Bhme who prompted it. The mere fact of their inviting us shows that we stand badly; for it runs in the teeth of Brning's warning at Bensersiel, and smells uncommonly like arrest. There's a rift between Dollmann and the others, but it's a ticklish matter to drive our wedge in; as to to-night, hopeless; they're on the watch, and won't give us a chance. And after all, do we know enough? We don't know why he fled from England and turned ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... and passed through a rift, to see a feeble glow upon his left, where a candle was stuck against the rock, and beneath it lay a figure, very dimly-seen, while, apparently coming through an opening farther on, they heard the low hoarse sound of voices; and words came suggesting that the speakers ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... taken with us a sparing lunch of thin sandwiches and a frugal flask of modest, blushing brandy, which we diluted at a stingy little fountain spring which dropped economically through a rift in the rock, as if its nymph were conscious that such a delicious drink should not be wasted. As it was, it refreshed us, and we were resting in a blessed repose under the green leaves, when we heard footsteps, and an old ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... leaning against the windowless framework of the railway carriage, watching the valleys drop away, curve by curve, as the train climbed. Far below lay the lake, a blue rift glimmering between pine-clad heights. Then a turn of the track and the lake was swept suddenly out of sight, while the mountains closed round—shoulder after green-clad shoulder, with fields of white narcissus flung ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... soon they mounted into total darkness, so that the Wizard was obliged to get out his lanterns to light the way. But this enabled them to proceed steadily until they came to a landing where there was a rift in the side of the mountain that let in both light and air. Looking through this opening they could see the Valley of Voe lying far below them, the cottages seeming like toy ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... Legate the Primate had averted a conflict between the national desire for self-government and the Papal claims of overlordship. But his death gave the signal for a more serious struggle, for it was in the oppression of the Church of England by the Popes through the reign of Henry that the little rift first opened which was destined to widen into the gulf that parted the one from the other at the Reformation. In the mediaeval theory of the Papacy, as Innocent and his successors held it, Christendom, as a spiritual realm of which the Popes were ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... horror. I saw a wide rift open, saw the skylight shatter and break, and daylight pouring through the cracking walls, Rakhal snatched Rindy up, protecting her from the falling debris with his head and shoulders. I grabbed Miellyn round the waist and we ran for the rift ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... tell him. But he guessed that she knew nothing definite, while suspecting much. She had shown the most acute concern at his own danger, and more than once implored Mark to do nothing but look after his own safety until Peter Ganns was back again. Meantime the rift between her spouse and herself appeared to grow. She was tearful and anxious, yet still chose to be vague, though she did admit that she thought she had glimpsed Robert Redmayne again, one evening. But Brendon ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... to war would be established. This was the ultimate ulterior purpose in Seward's mind; the negotiation was but a method of fixing a quarrel on some foreign Power in case the United States should seek, as Seward desired, a cementing of the rift at home by ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... covered with water, in which dwelt aquatic animals and monsters of the deep. Far above it were the heavens, peopled by supernatural beings. At a certain time one of these, a woman, by name Ataensic, threw herself through a rift in the sky and fell toward the earth. What led her to this act was variously recorded. Some said that it was to recover her dog which had fallen through while chasing a bear. Others related that those who dwelt in the world above lived off the fruit of a certain ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... Mary?" asked Uncle Tucker with a slight rift in the gloom. "They are some women in the world, if a man was to seal up his trouble in a termater-can and swoller it, would get a button-hook and a can-opener to go after him to get it out. ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Skag's feeling was called to pity as well as admiration. The rift in this Deal's nature was emotional not physical—some mad poetic thing, forever struggling in the tight matrices of a hard-set world. India was rising clearer to Skag; even certain of her profound complexities. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... altogether in the phase of forgiving her so much bliss; in the phase moreover of believing that, should they continue to go on together, she would abide in that generosity. She had, at such a point as this, no suspicion of a rift within the lute—by which we mean not only none of anything's coming between them, but none of any definite flaw in so much clearness of quality. Yet, all the same, if Milly, at Mrs. Lowder's banquet, had described herself to Lord Mark ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... 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
... up in great masses of water, which, as they neared the ship, threatened to overwhelm them, but which, as she rose on their summits, passed harmlessly under her, hurling, however, tons of water upon her deck. The wind was still blowing fiercely, but a rift in the clouds above, through which the sun threw down a bright ray of light upon the tossing water, showed that ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... the dark 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 ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... crowds of people who had taken refuge on the foot-pavements of the covered ways, the umbrellas flitting past in the downpour, and the cabs that dashed with increased clatter and speed along the wellnigh deserted roads. Presently there was a rift in the clouds; and a red glow arose in the west. Then a whole army of street-sweepers came into sight at the end of the Rue Montmartre, driving a lake of liquid mud before them with ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Lest thine eye should choke thy throat After gorging, wouldst thou sleep? Look thy den be hid and deep, Lest a wrong, by thee forgot, Draw thy killer to the spot. East and West and North and South, Wash thy hide and close thy mouth. (Pit and rift and blue pool-brim, Middle-Jungle follow him!) Wood and Water, Wind and Tree, Jungle-Favour go ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... Yankee" was situated out of doors, a small rift in the face of the bluff forming a natural fireplace, while a narrow crevice between rocks acted as chimney, and carried away the smoke. The preparation of an ordinary meal under such primitive conditions was speedily accomplished, the menu not being elaborate ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... ordinary room. The floor was strewn with the short needles of the mountain pine. As she turned, looking about her, she noted first another opening in a wall suggesting still another cave; then, feeling a faint breath of the night air on her cheek she saw a small rift in the outer shell of rock and through it the stars thick ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... house's form within was rude and strong, Like an huge cave hewn out of rocky clift, From whose rough vault the ragged breaches hung, Embossed with massy gold of glorious gift, And with rich metal loaded every rift. That heavy ruin they did seem to threat: And over them Arachne high did lift Her cunning web, and spread her subtle net, Enwrapped in foul smoke, and clouds ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... loved, And mindless at last we died; And deep in the rift of a Caradoc drift We slumbered side by side. The world turned on in the lathe of time, The hot sands heaved amain, Till we caught our breath from the womb of death, And crept into ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... better. I'd rather 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 man who ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... Alden," and as many others as could be spared from duty, were asleep. The Legion was already pulling itself together, though in depleted numbers. Discipline had tautened again. Once more the sunshine of possible success had begun to slant in through a rift in the lowering clouds ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... light, Then closed forevermore; A soul passed through the rift of blue And reached ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... not yet strong enough to be able to meet the French forces, and when they attempted to besiege Leith and put a forcible stop to the building they were defeated with shame and loss. A curious sign of the inevitable "rift within the lute," which up to this time had been avoided by the concentration of all men's thoughts upon the first necessity of securing the freedom of the preachings, becomes visible before this futile attempt at a siege. When the leaders ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... that direction, scanning the woods right and left. By Heavens, the girl had not been mistaken. Through a rift in the foliage, nearly opposite the canoe, peered a swarthy, sinister countenance and I recognized the features of Cuthbert Mackenzie. I took aim at him, but before I could fire he was gone. My brain seemed in a whirl. I had found the ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... he felt he had blundered. It was the first real shadow on his courtship—perhaps the little rift within the lute. He turned back to Becky for sympathy. There was no Becky. She had taken advantage of the conversation to slip away. He found her again in a moment though, at the other end of the room. She was seated before a machine. He crossed ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... doubt; then I went a little way on either side of it, and found myself looking over the edge of horrible precipices on to the river, which roared some four or five thousand feet below me. I dared not think of getting down at all, unless I committed myself to the rift, of which I was hopeful when I reflected that the rock was soft, and that the water might have worn its channel tolerably evenly through the whole extent. The darkness was increasing with every minute, but I should have twilight for another half-hour, so I went into the ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... more than a peep at his personality. His was the expansive temperament, or, to employ a modern phrase, the dynamic temperament. Antiquated as were his modes of thought, he would bewilder you with an excursion into latter-day literature, and like a rift of light in a fogbank you then caught a gleam of an entirely different mentality. One day I found him reading a book by the French writer Huysmans, dealing with new art. And he confessed to me that ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... 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 descended to conversation. He declaimed. He sought to impress on me the importance ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... me one rift! Through this sepultural blight A breath runs living, new; Unburdening light As when the flame-borne prophet on The Syrian ploughman threw A people's dawn. The world is Heaven worth, The cradle earth Casts orphanhood, a Bethlehem ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... I watch thee, all unfettered sweeping High o'er the rift that weighs my pinion here, I yearn like thee my plume in ether steeping, To soar away through yon ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... regulating the weather and performing the other ceremonies which are deemed necessary to ensure the fertility of the earth and the multiplication of animals. Men who are credited with powers so lofty and far-reaching naturally hold the highest place in the land, and while the rift between the spiritual and the temporal spheres has not yet widened too far, they are supreme in civil as well as religious matters: in a word, they are kings as well as gods. Thus the divinity which hedges a king has its roots deep down in human history, and long ages ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... he hastily scanned the note; "a rift in these gloomy clouds. Break we our camp, my lord Westmoreland, and back to Hereford town. We do but spend our strength to little use awaiting a wily foe in these flooded plains. This billet tells me that Sir Harry Percy and my lord of Worcester, with our son the ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... majesty of the Church and the gorgeousness of her material fabric. The religious ideals taught him by his good mother took deep root. But the day arrived when the expansion of his intellect reached such a point as to enable him to detect a flaw in her reasoning. It was but a little rift, yet the sharp edge of doubt slipped in. Alas! from that hour he ceased to drift with the current of popular theological belief; his frail bark turned, and launched out upon the storm-tossed sea, where only the outstretched hand of the Master, treading the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... conscientiously performed, from June to December, and round again. The last thing attended to before putting on his coat was always carefully to brush and dispose his hair. Until within two or three years, he had been able to keep up appearances by coaxing a gray rift across the top of the bald place; but it had grown month by month thinner and grayer, and more difficult to keep in position, until at last he had bravely told himself it was a vanity and a delusion, and had consigned it to obscurity and oblivion among the rusty side-locks which still sturdily ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... appears to have been happy with Minna; the good lady had all she wanted; and the rift within the lute did not show until Wagner later on began to kick against the pricks. Perhaps the greatest pleasure that he had at this time—perhaps the greatest he had had in his life—came through old Spohr the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... autumn of 1911. The conviction lay heavy on all hearts that in the settlement of the Morocco dispute no mere commercial or colonial question of minor importance was being discussed, but that the honour and future of the German nation were at stake. A deep rift had opened between the feeling of the nation and the diplomatic action of the Government. Public opinion, which was clearly in favour of asserting ourselves, did not understand the dangers of our political position, and the sacrifices ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day's breeze. Blue with cold a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine tree lay guzzling insatiably at a leaf-brown pool. Monotonous as a sob the waiting birch canoe ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... Democrats with 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 ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... King of England's brother, and likely to be herself the daughter of an English sovereign. For certain reasons it seemed an unlikely and incongruous alliance, for even in the end of 1677, when the marriage took place, anyone with prescience could foresee that there would be a wide rift between the politics of the Duke of York when he became King and those of William, and even then there must have been some who saw afar off the conflict which ended in William and Mary succeeding James upon the throne of England. There were many envied Claverhouse when it came out ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... the next day in again searching for some indication that might assist them, but in vain. Dias and Jose both asserted that the tiny rift in the rocky peak looked wider from the middle of the valley than at any other point, and even Harry and his brother admitted that it could scarcely be seen from the foot of the hills on either side, ...
— The Treasure of the Incas • G. A. Henty
... he could not shout and because he could not loosen himself, there came a rift in his madness. He remembered who he was, and all the old hatreds and ...
— Happy Ending • Fredric Brown
... a first rift of light began to shine in the dark place. But it was not broadened by the letter which he found waiting ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle |
