"Chasm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Latin classics were inspired by Evil Spirits; that sculptures or paintings, if beautiful, were of evil; that all cleverness in Mathematics, Chemistry, or Medicine proved the presence of the corrupting Evil Spirit working in man. Any bridge over a chasm or a rapid river was the work of the Devil; even the most beautiful Gothic cathedrals, like those of Cologne and St. Stephen at Vienna were constructed by architects who served their apprenticeship in the infernal regions. The Devil sat grinning on the inkstands of poets and learned men, dictating ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... excavation, pit, cache, cave, cavern, hollow, depression, perforation, puncture, rent, slit, crack, chink, crevice, cranny, breach, cleft, chasm, fissure, gap, opening, interstice, burrow, crater, eyelet, pore, bore, aperture, orifice, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Tjon, so deep and wide as to require a viaduct from three hundred and fifty to four hundred feet long. The floor of the valley is scattered over with rocks, and a hundred feet down. If the train had been hurled to the bottom of that chasm, not one of us would have escaped alive. This memorable catastrophe—most interesting from a reporter's point of view—would have claimed a hundred victims. But thanks to the coolness, energy and devotion of the young Roumanian, we have escaped ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... such-like delicacies that come in its way, which the poor, weak, human stomach cannot digest at all. At this moment I feel capable of swallowing whole that great mass of scenery and decorations in the chariot yonder. I feel as if I had as big a chasm in me as the grave I dug this morning for poor Matamore, and as if I never could get enough to fill it. The ancients were wise old fellows; they knew what they were about when they instituted the feasts that always followed their funerals, with abundance ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... his brother strew'd; But overcharged, and out of wind, Though strong in limbs, he lagg'd behind. Desire had now the goal in sight; It was a tower of monstrous height; Where on the summit Fortune stands, A crown and sceptre in her hands; Beneath, a chasm as deep as Hell, Where many a bold adventurer fell. Desire, in rapture, gazed awhile, And saw the treacherous goddess smile; But as he climb'd to grasp the crown, She knock'd him with the sceptre down! He tumbled in the gulf profound; There doom'd to whirl an endless ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... echoing noise, like that of a shout rolling in a rocky chasm, approached the ship and went away again. The last star, blurred, enlarged, as if returning to the fiery mist of its beginning, struggled with the colossal depth of blackness hanging over the ship—and ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... regret the friends that drop away every day; those, at least, with whom I came into the world, already begin to make it appear a great void. Lord Edgecumbe, Lord Waldegrave, and the Duke of Devonshire leave a very perceptible chasm. At the Opera last night, I felt almost ashamed to be there. Except Lady Townshend, Lady Schaub, Lady Albemarle, and Lady Northumberland, I scarce saw a creature whose debut there I could not remember: nay, the greater part were maccaronies. You see ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... a tremulous voice. Little One pressed on, singing softly to herself, till she came to a frightful chasm, full ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... came a mighty chasm, so deep that none might see the bottom thereof; and there rushed therein an ocean, and the earth did burst afresh with a sound that did shake all the cities of the world; and a great mist lay upon the earth for many days, and there was a ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... the shouts, which came nearer, till Ngati suddenly took a sharp turn round a great buttress of lava, and entered a wild, narrow, forbidding-looking chasm, where on either side the black, jagged masses of rock were piled up several hundred feet, and made glorious by streams which coursed among ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... was swept away by the rush of thought which took its place. For there below, as he gazed down at the falling water arching from the narrow rift into a stony basin, to then rush over the sides and fall in a silvery veil, to the deep chasm fringed with delicate dew—sparkling greenery, amidst whose leaves and boughs floated upward a cloud of white mist, which kept changing, as the sun shone upon it, to green and yellow and violet and orange ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... following ingenious way. Near the edge of the floe was a crack in the ice of considerable length, but only eighteen inches or two feet wide, and three or four feet deep. To this spot the bear turned; and when, on crossing the chasm, the bight of the rope fell into it, he placed himself across the opening; then suspending himself by his hind feet, with a leg on each side, he dropped his head and most part of his body into the chasm; and with a foot applied to each side ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... never pleasing to Imogen, who, indeed, disliked being touched; and now, though she submitted to having her head drawn down to her mother's shoulder, she could not feel that the physical contact in any way bridged the chasm between them. She felt, presently, from her mother's inarticulate murmurs of compunction and pity, that this was, apparently, what she had hoped for. It was evidently with difficulty, before her child's unresponsive silence, that ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... upon the rocks, and left there to die, unpitied and unbefriended, without God and without hope in the world. By every virtuous person she is despised. Hence, between a virtuous woman and ruin there is a bridged chasm; whoever crosses that bridge leaves hope, and honor, and happiness behind. Think of the thousands about us going, unprayed for, down ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... he was out early, and entered the canyon as the sun began to illumine its rocky domes and cast long shafts of light across the chasm. A summer morning ride through a canyon of the Rockies is always an inspiration, but Rupert was not conscious of it. Again, at noon, he fed his horse a bag of grain, and let him crop the scanty bunch-grass on the narrow hillside. A slice of bread from his pocket, dipped into the clear stream, ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... that unless we could soon come up with the chase he might escape us altogether. The appearance of the country had changed, too; while rocks arose at some distance, there was evidently a vast intervening chasm ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... like a thing long imprisoned, liberated by some happy chance. Her feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground as she sped along down the ravine, then across the rustic bridge that spanned the chasm through which rushed the tumultuous mountain stream foaming among the boulders deep in its depths, and breaking ever and anon into crystal cascades. On the opposite side she soon struck into the mountain road that had been graded and tamed and improved by the ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... future enemies, whosoever they may be, will dislike to hear of. Accordingly you are to order the peasants to dig a series of pits with wide mouths near the mountains of Caprarius and the parts round about the walls[857]; and let such a chasm yawn there that there shall be no ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... immeasurable contempt. A stern disdain of myself also awoke in me, as I remembered the unreasoning joy with which, I had hastened—as I thought—home, full of eager anticipation and Romeo-like ardor. An idiot leaping merrily to his death over a mountain chasm was not more fool than I! But the dream was over—the delusion of my life was passed. I was strong to avenge—I would be swift to accomplish. So, darkly musing for an hour or more, I decided on the course I had to pursue, and to make the decision final I drew ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... prophesied that within forty years Mozart's G minor Symphony would be written. Between Bach and Wagner is a great gulf set, a gulf bridged by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; between ourselves and Mendelssohn there is no such chasm and certainly no such list of mighty names. It was in the period of swift transition from Bach's fugues to Beethoven's Choral Symphony that Wagner was born, a period when musical Germany was in a state of tumultuous ebullition. Later we shall see for how much this counted in the ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... asked himself, horrified, whether this was still life, dared call itself life; Nature's glorious structure seemed to him ravaged like a wall rent by a storm, the speaking mouth of all these people struck him as nothing but a chasm convulsively and repellently opening and shutting, darkness invaded his spirit, he burned with a feeling of shame, he felt ashamed in the name of the nameless God, ashamed that his body was molded like that of these creatures ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... Coates before passing the creek, dashed over the bridge on the guard stationed at the opposite end with a howitzer, which he seized. In this operation, his horses threw off some of the loosened planks, and made a chasm, over which the following section, led by Lieutenant Carrington, leaped with difficulty. In doing this some other planks were thrown off, and the horses of the third section refused to take the leap. At this time Lee came up, and every effort was made to replace the planks, but without ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... searched the hen-house, where the fowls on their perches crowded close because of the chill of the evening. He even ran to the bars and looked down across the narrow ravine to which the clearing sloped. Beyond the chasm-like gorge he saw presently on the high ascent opposite footprints that had broken the light frostlike coating of ice on the dead leaves and moss—climbing footprints, swift, disordered. He looked ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the cooker was hanging by its last thread; it was secured, and again saw the light of day. Hassel and Hanssen attended to the hauling up of the cases, as Wisting had them ready. These two fellows moved about on the brink of the chasm with a coolness that I regarded at first with approving eyes. I admire courage and contempt for danger. But the length to which they carried it at last was too much of a good thing; they were simply playing hide-and-seek with Fate. Wisting's ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... and Present, On that bleak moment's height, She stood. As some lost traveller By a quick flash of light Seeing a gulf before him, With dizzy, sick despair, Reels backward, but to find it A deeper chasm there. ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... the pithead seemed terrible in their never-ending revolutions, as they flew round to bring up the loads of coal. The big yawning chasm, with the swinging steel rope, running away down into the great black hole, was awesome to look at, as the rope wriggled and swayed with its sinister movements; and the roar and whir of wheels, when the tables started, ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... magic names seemed to him now that his son's life had been sacrificed to so paltry an ambition, so sordid a passion, so vile and grovelling a desire! He took the boy on his knee, and kissed him tenderly. His thoughts bridged over a chasm of five-and-twenty years as his lips pressed that fair young brow; and it was his own son—the son whom he had disowned—whose soft hair was mingling itself now with the grey bristles on ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... of the yellow sunlight that flecked their homely doorways, or the tenderness of a midsummer's night, to whose moonlight they bared their shirt-sleeves or their tulle dresses, came from thousands of miles away to calculate the height of this rock, to observe the depth of this chasm, to remark upon the enormous size of this unsightly tree, and to believe with ineffable self-complacency that they really admired Nature. And so it came to pass, that, in accordance with the tastes or weaknesses of the individual, the more prominent and salient points ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... center; and all that could be seen was a slow heaving of the water. But that heaving did not cease. Slowly, so slowly it seemed to the observers now high in the heavens, the waters rose up and parted; revealing a vast chasm blown deep into the ocean's rocky bed. Higher and higher the lazy, mountains of water reared; effortlessly to pick up, to smash, to grind into fragments, and finally to toss aside every building, every structure, every scrap of material ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... guided the horses away from the wide trail, into the Bear Forks trail that wound in and out, now on the brink of the river's chasm, or again between jagged cliffs. Anon the awed girls gazed down into fearful depths as the wagon skirted the dangerous brink, or craned their necks to look at the wonderful vines and foliage hanging from the tops of massive rocks. By the time they reached the ridge of foot-hills where the trail ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... through a chasm between perpendicular cliffs some hundreds of feet in height, leads from Krogkleven to the level of the Tyri Fjord. There is no attempt here, nor indeed upon the most of the Norwegian roads we travelled, to mitigate, by well-arranged curves, the steepness of the hills. Straight ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... mistaken, for, while no words passed on the subject, she felt that visiting was to be discouraged and the power to invite was vested in Simeon alone. Respect was the keynote of her attitude in regard to him, and he made little effort to bridge the chasm of years ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... of the Chine from the beach is not the most favorable: as the eye of the spectator is much too low to comprehend all the deep and bold windings of the chasm, which contribute so essentially to its romantic effect: but, gradually ascending by a narrow path, we soon open a wider view, and should then pause, to contemplate it on every side. We see suspended on the opposite slope, the humble ale ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... leading up to it. By this entrance Mr. Dionysius Cram led them into a small jailer's lodge, with a table and some wooden chairs, in the side of which, opposite to the entrance, was a strong movable grate, between the bars of which might be seen a yawning sort of chasm leading into ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Dutch in ruling Malays, who are notoriously turbulent and warlike, is largely due to the fact that, so long as the customs of the natives are not inimical to good government or to their own well-being, they studiously refrain from interfering with them. Nor is there the same social chasm separating Europeans and natives in the Insulinde which is found in Britain's Eastern possessions. Were a British official in India to marry a native woman he would be promptly recalled in disgrace; if a Dutch official marries a native woman she is accorded the same social recognition ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... material shut out the sky. Gigantic globes of cool white light shamed the pale sunbeams that filtered down through the girders and wires. Here and there a gossamer suspension bridge dotted with foot passengers flung across the chasm and the air was webbed with slender cables. A cliff of edifice hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and the opposite facade was grey and dim and broken by great archings, circular perforations, balconies, buttresses, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... 'biography'; 'apostata' (Massinger) 'apostate'; 'despota' (Fox) 'despot'; 'misanthropos' (Shakespeare) if 'misanthropi' (Bacon) 'misanthrope'; 'psalterion' (North) 'psaltery'; 'chasma' (Henry More) 'chasm'; 'idioma' and 'prosodia' (both in Daniel, prose) 'idiom' and 'prosody'; 'energia', 'energy', and 'Sibylla', 'Sibyl' (both in Sidney); 'zoophyton' (Henry More) 'zoophyte'; 'enthousiasmos' (Sylvester) 'enthusiasm'; 'phantasma' (Donne) 'phantasm'; 'magnes' ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... wounds, lying on a rock. In rushed the enemies, Baron, High Sheriff, and all, to seize him. Not a word spoke the Bandit, but his attitude was sublime,—even Vance cried "bravo;" and just as he is seized, halter round his neck, and about to be hanged, down from the chasm above leaps his child, holding the title-deeds, filched from the Baron, and by her side the King's Lieutenant, who proclaims the Bandit's pardon, with due restoration to his honours and estates, and consigns to ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "can't you see that Mallory is your kind—that HE is a fit mate for you. I have learned since I came into this house a few minutes ago the unbridgeable chasm that stretches between Billy Byrne, the mucker, and such as you. Once I aspired; but now I know just as you must have always known, that a single lifetime is far too short for a man to cover the distance from Grand Avenue ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and was whirled across the chasm. No sooner had I reached the other side than new terrors came upon me. I had to pass by great cauldrons of boiling oil, in which ...
— The Eskimo Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... impossible title, the boy presently lifted his feet, and carelessly resumed his passage across the chasm until, reaching the sycamore, he began to let himself down squirrel-wise, leap by leap, with an occasional trapeze swinging from bough to bough, dropping at last easily to the ground. Here he appeared to be rather good-looking, albeit the sun and ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... it is," said Peregrine, both speaking as South Hants folk; "this is the strange cave or chasm ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... raised the heavy lid, sliding it to one side. How deep was the black chasm beneath he could not even guess. Doubtless it led into a coal bunker, or it might open over a pit of great depth. There was no way to discover other than to plumb the abyss with his body. Above was ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... poor when you know I am an heiress! As for being little, you can tell me the more easily from Polly," and she laughs over the chasm of solitude that ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... moment Roy looked at the dark chasm below him with hesitation, then he murmured to himself, "If I break my other leg, I must ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... one form or other, of the antique classification of human beings into Masters and Slaves. I defy any one to show me, in this case, any other alternative. We should be compelled to contemplate the Divine plan which governs society, with the regret of thinking that it presents a deplorable chasm. The stimulus of progress would be forgotten, or, which is worse, this stimulus would be no other than injustice itself. But, no! God has not left such a chasm in his work of love. We must take care ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... minds of practical legislators, even if their reconciliation be at the expense of strict logic and historical accuracy. But unfortunately the historical and the ideal constitutions in France were too far separated to be easily united. The chasm between the feudal monarchy gradually transformed into a despotism, which had existed, and the well governed limited monarchy, which the most judicious Frenchmen desired, was too wide to be bridged. "The throne of France is inherited only in the male line;" to that ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... powerful as a battering-ram, separates itself from the dock like the opening blade of a penknife. You recall the good old days when there were no cruelly-humane gates, and when this stage of the proceeding was marked by a wild leap of belated forms across the widening chasm, with now and then the souse of a miscalculating passenger into the yeasty brine. The scene is less picturesque and exciting now, but it is decidedly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... freeze-out I ever sat in. My throat is sore from singing, 'Father, dear father, come home with me now!' and every move I make nets me a new ornamentation on my neck. Why didn't I tell the good wife that the ponies put the crimp in my pocketbook instead of crawling into this chasm of ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh
... smallest provincial burgher is often only the difference between a truth that can sometimes express itself and a truth that can never crystallise into form. The difference is considerable—a gap, but not a chasm. The higher our thoughts ascend, the vainer and the more arbitrary seems the distinction between him who is thinking always and him who thinks not yet. The little burgher is full of prejudice and of passions at which we smile; his ideas are small and petty, and sometimes ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... storks heard this through their chasm in the wall, they became almost beside themselves with joy. They ran so quickly with their long feet to the door of the ruin, that the owl could scarcely keep up with them. Thereupon spoke the Caliph to her: "Preserver of my life and ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... of going—that the company we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on, on the stage—because a word lost would have been a chasm, which it was impossible for them to fill up. With such reflections we consoled our pride then—and I appeal to you, whether, as a woman, I met generally with less attention and accommodation, than I have done since in more expensive situations in the house? The getting in indeed, and the crowding ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Gabriella, to save him, in a voice that might have rent the heavens; and then they seemed to open, and you appeared distant as a star, yet distinct and fair as an angel, slowly descending right over the yawning chasm. You stretched out your arms towards him, and drew him upward as if by an invisible chain. As he rose, the dark abyss was transformed to beds of roses, whose fragrance was so intensely sweet it waked me. It was but a dream, my Gabriella, but it may be that God destined you ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... breadth," and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, "If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm must it ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... evident that no corresponding break took place in the chain of existence; but that, on the contrary, from the present time up to the times represented by the earliest Eocene formations of the Tertiary division, day has succeeded day, and season has followed season, and that no chasm or hiatus—no age of general chaos, darkness, and death—has occurred, to break the line of succession, or check the course of life. All the evidence runs counter to the supposition that immediately before the appearance of man upon earth, there existed a chaotic period ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... go-as-you-please features of a Turkish carpet. Her eyes are a trifle too ferrety, but the osculatory power of her mouth in auld lang syne must have been such as to give Cupid spinal curvature. Her nose retreats somewhat precipitately from the chasm; but whether that be its original pattern, or it has been gradually forced upwards by eager pilgrims to her shrine of adjustable pearls, is a secret hidden in her own heart. Like Willy Wally Astor, she finds the customs of this country too ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in three real wars and about a dozen little ones, and he's built thousands of miles of railroads, I don't know how many thousands, but Captain Stuart knows; and he built the highest bridge in Peru. It swings in the air across a chasm, and it rocks when the wind blows. And the German Emperor ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... this, which they equally tell, the people of Hierapolis add a marvellous narrative: That in their country a great chasm opened, into which all the waters of the Deluge poured. Then Deucalion raised an altar, and dedicated a temple to Hera (Atargatis) close to this very chasm. I have seen it; it is very narrow, and situated under ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... were ascending a mountain, whose summit commanded a very magnificent view. Their path led over a deep, dark, craggy ravine, which was swept by a mountain torrent, foaming and roaring over the rocks. Alpine firs, casting a gloomy shade, clung to its sides. A frail rustic bridge crossed the chasm. Hortense with light step passed over in safety. Madame Broc followed. A piercing shriek was heard, followed by a crash. As Hortense turned round she saw that the bridge had given way, and her companion was falling, torn and mangled, from rock to ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... created new difficulties by a legerdemain in the construction of sentences; he assumed in his public an alertness of intelligence equal to his own. When it needs a leaping-pole to pass from subject to verb across the chasm of a parenthesis, when a reader swings himself dubiously from relative to some one of three possible antecedents, when he springs at a meaning through the fissure of an undeveloped exclamatory phrase, and when these efforts are demanded again and again, some ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the admiration she excited, Damaris stood absorbed, awed even, by the grandeur of the scene. Many hundred feet below, the rent chasm down which it took its course steeped in violet gloom, the milk-white waters of an ice-fed river impetuously journeyed to the fertile lowlands and the sea. Opposite, across the gorge, amazingly distinct in the pellucid atmosphere, rose the high mountains, the undefiled, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... her. It revealed a phase of writers' lives of which she had known nothing—the gathering of myriads of details, in order to free the mind for accurate rendering of pictures and conditions. She wished she could see some of the finished product of Terabon's use of these notes, and the wish revealed a chasm, an abyss that confronted her. She felt deserted, as though she had need of Terabon to give her a view of his own life, that she might be diverted into something not sordid, and decidedly not ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... 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, ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... circumstances of the place, sometimes with a rivulet on one hand, gently stealing through the glade, at other with a cataract tumbling from above, raging with foam, and rebounding with a thousand echoes from below, or silently engulphed in a gloomy pool, or yawning chasm. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... furious. Yonder, close to the fragments of the bridge, stand the Tyrolese; here, near the fragments on this side of the river, are the soldiers and the French engineers advancing to construct a temporary bridge across the chasm, and thereby unite again the disrupted ends of ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... the Southern Democracy followed Buchanan, while the Northern Democracy followed Douglas. Yet there was just enough local exception to baffle accurate calculation. Could the Charleston Convention heal the feud of leaders, and bridge the chasm in policy and principle? As the time approached, and delegation after delegation was chosen by the States, all hope of accommodation gradually disappeared. Each faction put forth its utmost efforts, rallied its strongest men. Each caucus and convention only accentuated and deepened existing ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... British fastness on a stern bare height; crumbled dwellings amid their great protecting walls, with cairn and cromlech and mystic circles; where in old time the noise of battle clanged amid these grey hills, now sleeping in sunlight. And from Tre'r Caeri down into the rocky gloom of the seaward chasm, Nant Gwrtheyrn, with its mound upon the desolate shore, called by legend the burial-place of Vortigern. Here Mrs. Abbott spoke of the prehistoric monuments she had seen in Brittany, causing Alma to glance at her with a sudden surprise. The impulse was very significant. Thinking ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... other displayed a sort of deep cavity, covering the space of about thirty cells, with the piece of tin as its base. The bees were disconcerted at first; they flocked in numbers to inspect and examine this curious chasm; day after day they wandered agitatedly to and fro, apparently unable to form a decision. But, as I fed them copiously every evening, there came a moment when they had no more cells available for the storage of provisions. Thereupon ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Somewhat similar is the following.—I am in a high, steep place with my father. I fear. He moves a stone and in the hollow of a rock I see moss or fungus. There are often brief, passing dreams in which no person figures. I see a bridge across a chasm; it is long and extends beyond where a bridge is necessary. I see two rivers join and wonder what the resulting stream is called. I see a river from the side of which emerges a spring of water and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... roller, when we might have been swept helplessly away. The dangers to be encountered by keeping inland were equally great. We might be struck by lightning, crushed by falling trees, or losing our way, fall into some gully or chasm. ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... sombre and mordant author of the "Maximes," but a complete apprehension of the character of La Rochefoucauld requires the story of his adventures to be at least briefly indicated. A chasm divides his early from his late history, and this chasm is bridged over in a very shadowy way by such records as we possess of his retirement ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... night-heron (nyctardea nycticorax), floriken or Hobara (Otis aurita), quail, partridge, curlew and sometimes hare: it gives excellent sport with crows but requires to be defended. Indian sportsmen, like ourselves, divide hawks into two orders: the "Siyah-chasm," or black-eyed birds, long-winged and noble; the "Gulabi-chasm" or yellow-eyed (like the goshawk) round-winged ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... crosses; a presumed loggan, or rocking-stone, in Yorkshire, is Robin Hood's penny-stone; a fountain near Nottingham, another between Doncaster and Wakefield, and one in Lancashire, are Robin Hood's wells; a cave in Nottinghamshire is his stable; a rude natural rock in Hope Dale is his chair; a chasm at Chatsworth is his leap; Blackstone Edge, in Lancashire, is his bed."[20] In fact, his name bids fair to overrun every remarkable object of the sort which has not been already appropriated to King Arthur or the Devil; with the latter of whom, at least, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... travelled 4 miles, and at the end of 30 seconds 9 miles. Supposing this granted, let us ask what would be taking place in each intervening fissure a thousand miles deep, which, in the space of half a minute, had opened out to nearly a mile wide, and in the subsequent half minute to a chasm approaching 3 miles in width. There would first be propelled through it enormous jets of the molten metals composing the internal liquid shell; and these would part into relatively small masses as they ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... his white wife; they did a subtler, crueller thing: they ignored them. To the Indian's face, when by infrequent chance they met, they were affable, obliging. His reputation had spread too far for them to appear otherwise; but, again, they were white and he was red—and between them the chasm yawned. ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... psalmody, and crusaders. The greatest buildings we saw were ecclesiastical, the richest dresses were church vestments, even "the princes and burghers accompanied by armed knights remind one of ecclesiastics celebrating the Mass. All the women are holy virgins, seemingly. The chasm between the ideal and the reality itself, however idealized, but by meditation manifested pictorially." ("The ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... He even half thrust out a hand, as though to signify that he was ready to bridge the chasm that had always existed between them, if the other would come the rest of ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... least interest—the dead level skirting the coast between Bristol and Taunton. As a matter of fact, there are few districts which afford such a variety of physical features as Somerset. Hill and valley, cliff and chasm, moor and seaboard, are all to be found there; and, in addition to its wealth of scenery, Somerset is rich in antiquities of different kinds; whilst it has also been the theatre of some of the most stirring events in ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... theories which attempted to explain this catastrophe were quite on a par with those which dealt with a remoter period of the earth's history. Some speculators, holding that the interior of the globe is a great abyss of waters, conceived that the crust had dropped into this chasm and had thus been inundated. Others held that the earth had originally revolved on a vertical axis, and that the sudden change to its present position bad caused the catastrophic shifting of its oceans. But perhaps the favorite theory was that which supposed ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... what this one was after. The beast had planted his feet firmly upon the floor of the passage, and stretched his long body up and across the chasm to serve as a bridge for the rest. Curdie mounted instantly upon his neck, threw his arms round him as far as they would go, and slid down in ease and safety, the bridge just bending a little as his weight ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... O! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... watched him anxiously as he sprang from pan to pan making a zigzag course toward shore, now and again taking hair-raising risks, sometimes resting for a moment on a substantial pan while he looked ahead to select his route, then running, and using the boat hook as a vaulting pole, spanning a wide chasm. Then, suddenly, Dr. Grenfell saw him totter, throw up his hands and disappear beneath the surface of the water. In a hazardous leap he had missed his footing, or a small cake of ice had ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... last, slow sinks the writhing spasm, And, black through the foaming white, Downward gapes a yawning chasm— Bottomless, cloven to hell's wide night; And, sucked up, see the billows roaring Down through ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... were outside the pale of human sympathy, and almost outside the pale of human rights. And here the foremost of Christian teachers, who was a freeman born, separated from these poor people by a tremendous chasm, stretches a brother's hand across it and grasps theirs. The Gospel that came into the world to rend old associations and to split up society, and to make a deep cleft between fathers and children ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... thousand feet before it will reach the bosom of the current; and you can only gain the water level by turning backward for scores of miles and winding laboriously down some subsidiary canon, itself a chasm of awful grandeur. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... did not have very far to carry his burden. Before long he came to a grove of large trees, which stood wide apart and admitted of an easy passage. Traversing this, he at length reached a low tower, which was in a half-ruinous condition. It stood upon the brink of a deep chasm, the sides of which were densely wooded, while at the bottom there was a brawling brook. Upon the other side of the chasm appeared the outline of a stately castle, with walls and towers and battlements and keep, all plainly discernible as they rose ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... retained in this revolutionary period the manners of the old school, recently said in his reply to a delegation of his opponents, "When people are on opposite sides of a chasm they may be courteous to one another, and regret the impossibility of their shaking hands, or doing more than wave a courteous gesture across so ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... abyss, but on stormy days its fury was terrific. The wild waves boiled and thundered in their imprisonment, till they seemed to convulse the solid cliff about them, like an earthquake. But, high as they leapt up in the rocky walls of the chasm, they never leapt into sight from above. Nothing but clouds of spray indicated to the eye, what must be the horrible tumult of ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... very differently, of course—there were few of them, and they could combine and dominate, and their power would be unbreakable. And so all over the world two classes were forming, with an unbridged chasm between them—the capitalist class, with its enormous fortunes, and the proletariat, bound into slavery by unseen chains. The latter were a thousand to one in numbers, but they were ignorant and helpless, and they would remain at the mercy of their exploiters until they were organized—until they ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... eclipse is a period of relative silence. But his mind was not inactive. He did not cease thinking upon the deep theoretical distinctions that were separating him by a steadily widening chasm from the most powerful faction in Congress. In fact, his mental powers were, if anything, more keen than ever before. Probably, it was the very clearness of the mental vision that enfeebled him when it came to action. He saw his difficulties with such crushing certainty. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... along the steep shore, in the shade of the alder trees, resplendent in their young green. They sat down on the turf, silent and depressed. He was morose and disheartened; gloomy thoughts revolved behind his aching brow. Life seemed a great chasm which had opened to ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... desolate in the extreme, the mountains on either hand looking as if they had been swept by a tornado of stone. Stone avalanches hung suspended on their sides, or had shot down into the chasm below. It was a kind of Alpine scenery, where crushed and broken boulders covered ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... had sent them abroad with-out their horses, damning—as none but a dismounted cavalryman can damn—the earth's unevenness, their swords, their luck, their priests, the night, their boots, and Jaimihr. Forewarned, Alwa held on down the pitch-dark side street, into whose steep-sided chasm the moon's rays would not reach for an hour or two to come, and once again he led his party in a sweeping, wide-swung circle, loose-reined and swifter than the silent night wind—this time for Howrah's palace. There was his given word, plighted ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... brute must be close to us. Do thou keep in the lower end of this gorge—see, yonder, where it is narrow. I will go round to the upper end; perchance the wolf is there. If so, we stand a good chance of killing him, for the sides of the chasm are like two walls all the way up. But," added Glumm, hesitating a moment, and looking fixedly at the small but sturdy frame of his companion, whose heightened colour and flashing eyes betokened a roused spirit, "I doubt thy—that is—I have no ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... farther; and we often descended the hill in one direction or another, though usually going toward the "gorge," a romantic spot where a clear brook found its way through a deep and rather dangerous-looking chasm. Once he was persuaded to descend into this fairy-like place, for it was well worth exploring; but his footing was no longer sure and he did ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and feet, and consequently soon got in front of me. We could soon see down into the bottom of the hole; the burning fragments of our torches fell upon a heap of stones at a depth of twelve or fifteen feet. L'Encuerado threw one of the torches into the chasm, and the vague glimmer showed us a yawning opening on the left. Delighted with this discovery, we now beat a retreat, deferring a more thorough exploration until ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... ordered horses; these on inspection, proved to be of excellent breed, either from Australia or America—very rough shod, for the stony roads. Started for the Grand Canal—peeped down that mighty chasm, which has the appearance of an immense mass having been blown out of ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... gathering, and the wind blew with perfect fury, which, combined with the black and stormy sky, gave the coast an air of extreme wildness. All at once, as we followed the winding path, the crags appeared to open before us, disclosing a yawning chasm, down which a large stream, falling in an unbroken sheet, was lost in the gloom below. Witnessed in a calm day, there may perhaps be nothing striking about it, but coming upon us at once, through the gloom of twilight, with the sea thundering ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... wife were alone. The days were so pleasant—those long, golden, June days!—they might have been so happy in the solitude of that beautiful spot, but for the chasm which lay between the souls of these married people, scarcely perceptible as ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... temper by the strict severity of the discipline to which its early life had been subjected, frets and chafes in all its after course, till it loses itself in the sea. The banks, ere we reach the opening of the chasm, have become steep, and wild, and densely wooded; and there stand out on either hand, giant crags, that plant their iron feet in the stream; here girdled with belts of rank succulent shrubs, that love the damp shade and the frequent drizzle of the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... not very winding. They met with no noxious exhalations, nor did any chasm bar the path. There was no reason for stopping for a whole hour; James Starr, Madge, Harry, and Simon Ford walked on, though there was nothing to show them what was the exact direction of this ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... of the States General, of the States of Britanny, of the States of Burgundy, are to him matters of as little practical importance as the constitution of the Jewish Sanhedrim or of the Amphictyonic Council. The gulph of a great revolution completely separates the new from the old system. No such chasm divides the existence of the English nation into two distinct parts. Our laws and customs have never been lost in general and irreparable ruin. With us the precedents of the middle ages are still valid precedents, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... indestructible; the Holy Cross which Heraclius, in the year 635, had brought from Jerusalem, and delivered to Sergius; and the Panagia Blachernitissa, or All Holy Banner of the Image of the Virgin. Then rose another reminiscence, and though to reach him it had to fly across a chasm of hundreds of years, it presented itself with the distinctness of an affair of yesterday. In 626, Heraclius being Emperor, a legion of Avars and Persians sacked Scutari, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, and laid siege to Constantinople. The Byzantines were in ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... away from the dark chasm which lay before us, but even as I did so I found at my side a strange little man. He was uglier than any one I had ever seen. His nose was wellnigh as large as all the rest of his body, and his mouth was so big that it stretched from one ...
— Undine • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... these green-coated guardians of the French revenue caught a sight of Juan alone and unarmed. They pursued him, and a rare race he led them, over cliff and crag, across rock and ravine, until at last they saw with exultation that he made right for the chasm in question, and there they made sure of securing him. It seemed as if he had forgotten the position of the cleft, and only remembered it when he got within a hundred yards or thereabouts, for then he slackened his pace. The douaniers gained on him, and expected him to desist from his flight, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... out on a jutting crest and made a sharp turn to the right, and the horse paused on the verge so suddenly that his rider lost his hold and fell headlong over into a scrub oak that caught him and held him suspended in its tough and twisted branches above a chasm so deep that the buzzards sailed on widespread wings round and round in ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... honors courage: the courage of Christianity, which sustained martyrs in the amphitheatre, at the stake, and on the rack; the courage of Patriotism, which inspired millions in our own land to realize the historic fable of Curtius, and to fill up with their own bodies, if need be, the yawning chasm which imperiled the republic; the courage of Humanity, which is witnessed in the pest-house and the hospital, at the death-bed of the homeless and the prison-cell of the convict. But there is a courage of Statesmen, besides; and nobly was it illustrated by the statesman whose national services ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... operation Jack L'Estrange lay hovering on the brink of the great chasm. Then he began to mend and ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... "God bless you, legal forms! All that a man who wants to sell has to do is to throw a plank, any little rotten plank, across the chasm of future litigation and ten buyers will walk it with nerves of steel." He patted Steering's shoulder. "My boy, it's this headlong impetus that assures the success of the Canaan Company. If I get that thing started ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... the brown and gray lizards darted across his path, and the mother scorpions, taking the air at the entrances of their holes, scuttled out of sight. Roy took off his hat and let the little draught of air that blew through the chasm dry the perspiration on face and hair. Presently the sunlight above gave way to a sullen, silent shadow. The air grew strangely quiet; even the lizards no longer moved. Roy gazed straight upward into the slowly rolling depths of a dark cloud, and heartily ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... people. It is impossible to divine the motive which influenced Napoleon in the most unexpected decision. Some have supposed that even then he had in view the Empire and the hereditary monarchy, and that he wished to leave a chasm in the organization of the government, as a reason for future change. Others have supposed that he dreaded the rivalries which would arise among his brothers and his nephews, from his having his disposal so resplendent a gift as the Empire of France. ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... little rift which widened and widened and at last opened a great chasm between Roosevelt and the people on one side and the Machine dominators of the Republican Party on the other. For although Roosevelt was the choice of the Republicans and of migratory voters from other parties, although he ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... down from London together, talking all the way incessantly upon one single topic. When we got to Loughborough, I know not what chasm had made us diverge for a moment to some other subject, at which he was indignant. 'Come,' said he, 'don't let us break through—let us go on as we began, to our journey's end;' and so he continued, and was ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore |
