"Cleft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was cleft, and still The Moon was at its side: Like waters shot from some high crag, The lightning fell with never a jag, A ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... was no laughing at the joke just then, for the girl burst into tears, and in the midst of that she hastily pressed his hand and hurried away. He watched her go round the rocks, to the cleft leading down to the harbor. There she was rejoined by her sister, and the two of them went slowly along the path of broken slate, with the green hill above, the blue water below, and the fair sunshine all around them. Many a time he recalled afterward—and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... she turned quickly round ready to cry with disappointment; but at sight of Pinney with his blue eyes, and his brown fringe of moustache curling closely in over his lip, under his short, straight nose, and a funny cleft in his chin, she felt more like laughing, somehow, as she had since told him a hundred times. He wrote back to her from Boston, on some pretended business; and they began to correspond, as they called ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... the words when a most beautiful maiden stepped forth from a cleft in the ivy-covered ruin, bearing in one hand a huge silver beaker of an antique form, full to the very brim of foaming wine. In her other hand she held a large bunch of keys of all sizes. She was clad in white from head to foot, her hair was flaxen, her skin was like a lily, and she had such ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... were two accessories, also bits of pottery, but smaller, both globes; one in guise of an apple flushed with red and gold to the life, and, through a cleft at top, you saw it was hollow. This was for the ashes. The other, gray, with wrinkled surface, in the likeness of a wasp's nest, was the match-box. "There," said the stranger, pushing over the cigar-stand, "help ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... reached the mountain range which is a continuation of the great Quathlamba or Drakensberg chain, and saw great frowning precipices rise over steep slopes covered with dense forest. One long winding valley, overhung by precipitous cliffs, cleft the range, and through this the guides led them. At the head of the valley the range was slightly depressed, and a saddle was thus formed between two high peaks. Elevated tablelands, gently sloping to the north-west, and intersected by narrow, shallow valleys, ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... meantime Susannah had walked far. A squatter's old log-house stood by the green roadside; the wood of the roof and walls was weathered and silver-gray. Before it a clothes-line was stretched, heaved tent-like by a cleft pole, and a few garments were flapping in the wind, chiefly white, but one was vivid pink and ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... the Great Causeway, wishes made while seated here being certain of realization. To the west of the Wishing Chair a solitary pillar rises from the sea, the "Gray Man's Love." Look to the mainland, and the mountain presents a deep, narrow cleft, with perpendicular sides, the "Gray Man's Path." Out in the sea, but unfortunately not often in sight, is the "Gray Man's Isle," at present inhabited only by the Gray Man himself. As the island, however, appears but once in seventeen years, and ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... pillory, before the congregation. For Archie continued to drink her in with his eyes, even as a wayfarer comes to a well-head on a mountain, and stoops his face, and drinks with thirst unassuageable. In the cleft of her little breasts the fiery eye of the topaz and the pale florets of primrose fascinated him. He saw the breasts heave, and the flowers shake with the heaving, and marvelled what should so much discompose ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sharp cleft made in the board at the time of the election survived and deepened. The trustees developed a way of dividing seven to five on almost all of West's recommendations which was anything but encouraging. An obstinate, but human, pride of opinion tended to keep the two factions facing each other intact, ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... tears flow fast. "O, hapless wife! approach," he cries, "approach, "And touch me now, while ought of me remains; "Receive my hand, while yet a hand I bear; "Ere to a serpent wholly turns my form."— More he prepar'd to utter, but his tongue, Cleft sudden, to his wishes words refus'd: And often when his sorrows sad he try'd To wail anew, he hiss'd!—that sound alone, Nature permitted. While her naked breast With blows resounded, loud his wife exclaim'd;— "Stay,—O, my Cadmus! hapless ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... month of snows, and great rains had fallen, and the torrents were shouting from the mountains, and the Yaupaae pouring out a mightier flood than had ever been seen rushing through between the cleft rocks. It was then Wampum-hair announced his intention to undertake the adventure of the Falls, and invited the tribe to gather together to witness its performance. It is said that the heart of Leelinau, touched by so much constancy, was inclined to relent and ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... O that his well-driv'n sword Had been so courteous to have cleft me down Unto the navel; ere I lived to see My life, my hopes, my spirits, my patron, all Thus desperately engaged, by ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... coldly studied every stage of human nature, where unbridled human nature ever ruled the hour, knew what he felt; and it was as though he had received a sharp wound that thrust him through, body and heart and soul, and cleft his cold pride in two. For days he wandered beneath the pines and the rhododendron trees alone, lamenting for the fabric of mighty philosophy he had built himself, in which no woman was ever to set foot; and which a woman's hand, a woman's eyes had shattered in a day. It seemed as if his whole life ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... how it happened—but there it was. A big fir swaying from the root: a man will have it fall one way, the storm says another—and the storm it is that wins. He might have got clear after all, but the lie of the ground was hidden by snow. Axel made a false step, lost his footing, and came down in a cleft of rock, astride of a boulder, pinned down by the weight ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... about sixty or eighty feet below us. He wished to regain it, but I offered to supply its place, if he thought the descent too dangerous. He said he would make the trial, and parted from me. I thought it useless to remain idle. A cleft was before me, through which I must pass; so pressing my knees and back against its opposite sides, I gradually worked myself to the top. I descended the other face of the rock, and then, through a second ragged fissure, to the summit of another pinnacle. The highest point of the mountain was now ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... is a very pretty addition to a room, and a cleft-stick has been known to present a more picturesque appearance than a straight one. But to find oneself, metaphorically speaking, pushed into the corner or wedged into the cleft of the stick ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... right, is one of the most charming places in Surrey. Box Hill (590 feet), which may easily be ascended from the well-placed Burford Bridge Hotel, is on the left. The road, river and rail run through a deep cleft in the North Downs forming the Mole valley and facing the sandstone hills of the Weald. In the shallow depression between the two ranges lies Dorking (23-1/4 m.). The town is pleasant but has nothing of much interest for the visitor. It is for its fine situation from a scenic point of ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... an awful sight to behold! When the Remora heard the name of the Firedrake, his hated enemy, he slipped with wonderful speed from the cleft of the mountain into the valley. On and on and on he poured over rock and tree, as if a frozen river could slide downhill; on and on, till there were miles of him stretching along the valley—miles of the smooth-ribbed, icy creature, crawling and slipping forwards. The ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... panting and puffing, Magsie and the boys reached the cleft in the rocks. Lightning Speed, still wearing his side-saddle, which was pulled a little crooked, bent over the chasm and turned his black eyes to Jasper, as much as to say, 'Now this work is yours. Call out to ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... went away across the foggy, soaking moorland, carrying my gun and satchel in their cases, descended the grassy cleft, entered a cattle-path, and picked my way across the wet, black rocks toward ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... Save what grows on a ridge of wall, Where stood the hearth-stone of the hall; And many a time ye there might pass, 400 Nor dream that e'er the fortress was. I saw its turrets in a blaze, Their crackling battlements all cleft, And the hot lead pour down like rain From off the scorched and blackening roof, Whose thickness was not vengeance-proof. They little thought that day of pain, When launched, as on the lightning's flash, They bade me to destruction dash, That one day I should come again, 410 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... hark, that sound! Again and yet again! Darkness is cleft, the stricken silence breaks, And sleep's soft veil is rudely rent in twain, And weary nature all too soon, awakes; Though through the gloom has pierced no ray of light, To hail the dawn and bid ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... held his gun with one hand and pulled out his match-box with the other, when, in spite of his wounds, the Malay knelt down, drew a piece of dammar from the fold of his sarong, stuck it in a cleft stick, and then striking a match he fired the dry grass and lit the dammar, which made an ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... by low bushes, and in the center a fireplace of stones with a fire smouldering. At one side a heap of leaves and small twigs for a bed, a stump for a seat, and lying on top of it a sort of stone axe, made by inserting a sharp stone into the cleft of a sapling and tying it into place with a wild-grape tendril. Pegged out on the ground to cure was a rabbit skin, indifferently scraped. It made our aluminum kettle and canvas tepee look like a marble-vestibuled ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sat in the morning, was a projection of rock, with a narrow cleft between it and the wall of the cavern, visible only from the very back of the cave, where the roof came down low. But when he thought of it, he saw that even here he could not have been hidden in the full light of the morning from the eyes of some urchins who had ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... as it swept under the bridge and fought its way between the rocky cliffs beyond, sweeping swirling, eddying, in its narrow channel, pulsing restlessly into the ragged fissures of its shores, and leaping with a tempestuous roar into the Witches' Eel-pot, a deep wooded gorge cleft in the very heart of the ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... that gave aim to all thy oaths, And entertain'd 'em deeply in her heart. How oft hast thou with perjury cleft the root! O Proteus, let this habit make thee blush! Be thou ashamed that I have took upon me 105 Such an immodest raiment, if shame live In a disguise of love: It is the lesser blot, modesty finds, Women to change their ...
— Two Gentlemen of Verona - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... When the individuals of a herd or family are excited to a sudden deadly rage by the distressed cries of one of their fellows, or by the sight of its bleeding wounds and the smell of its blood, or when they see it frantically struggling on the ground, or in the cleft of a tree or rock, as if in the clutches of a powerful enemy, they do not turn on it to kill but ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... Night so cling to thee? Thou vast, profound, primeval hiding-place Of ancient secrets,—gray and ghostly gulf Cleft in the green of this high forest land, And crowded in the dark with giant forms! Art thou a grave, ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... to where I had encountered Ben Gunn, the maroon; and I walked more circumspectly, keeping an eye on every side. The dusk had come nigh hand completely, and as I opened out the cleft between the two peaks, I became aware of a wavering glow against the sky, where, as I judged, the man of the island was cooking his supper before a roaring fire. And yet I wondered, in my heart, that he should show himself so careless. For if I could see this radiance, might it not reach the ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... early in May, we find, as we are nearly sure to find, two or three little round openings pierced in it, and through these emergent, a slender, pensive, fragile flower[31] whose small dark, purple-fringed bell hangs down and shudders over the icy cleft that it has cloven, as if partly wondering at its own recent grave, and partly dying of very fatigue after its hard won victory; we shall be, or we ought to be, moved by a totally different impression of loveliness from that which we receive among the dead ice and the idle clouds. ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... well, in every case, to ride as far as the bordj, or rest-house, that stands near the entrance of the cleft, since there are about four wearisome miles of level country to be traversed after leaving Metlaoui. On the first occasion the Tripolitan ran for this whole long stretch beside my horse, which trotted briskly; he amused himself, none the less, in ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... two life-boats shot forward to seek the most furious waves, and were seen from afar to surmount the billows and then suddenly disappear. It was a spectacle as moving as it was curious. It was observed that Mr. Relvas's boat cleft the waves, while the other floated upon their surface like a nut-shell. After an hour's navigation the two boats returned to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... brethren shall be Each other's bane, And sisters' sons rend The ties of kin. Hard will be that age, An age of bad women, An axe-age, a sword-age, Shields oft cleft in twain, A storm-age, a wolf-age, Ere earth ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... sidelins shoot, an' dairted intil the vera crevice occupeed by Leddy Carline's fush the day afore. 'Noo for the fun!' thinks I, as I sat still an' smokit calmly. She was certently a perseverin' wummun, that dowager—there was nae device she didna try wi' that saumon tae force him oot o' the cleft. Aifter aboot ten meenits mair o' this wark, she shot at me ower her shouther the obsairve, 'Isn't it an obstinate wretch?' 'Aye,' says I pawkily, 'he's gey dour; but he's only a Spey fush, an' of coorse ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... this, though differently performed, is analogous in its results to budding, and many amateurs not infrequently speak of them in the same terms. To graft a cion, one end is carefully cut in the shape of a wedge, and inserted in a cleft where it is to grow; on the other hand, in budding, we use but a single eye, taken from a small branch, and insert it inside of the bark of the stock or tree we wish to bud. From this one eye, we may in time look for a tree ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... looked steadily out the window. Her eyelids trembled closer together. Her eyes held a far-sighted look. She saw a picture; but it was not the picture of the blue reaches of sky, and the green valley cleft by its silver-blue river. She saw a kitchen, shabby compared to her own, scantily furnished, and in it an old, white-haired woman sitting down to eat her ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... humbug. Make believe you are away up in the curves of the sky. Not one person in fifty will climb a mountain and find you out. But I have been there, and you are nothing but fog, of the earth, earthy. And when I sat in the cleft of a rock on the side of Mount Washington, every fibre dulled through with your icy moisture, I could with a good will have sent a sheriff to arrest you for obtaining love under false pretences. O you innocent, child-like cloud heaving with warmth ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Gunston had given him up for lost. As he learnt afterwards, it was believed that he had not been able to sever the rope, and that he, with one of the guides, had fallen into a crevasse. The rope went straight down into the cleft, and he was believed to be at the end of it. There was not the faintest doubt in the mind of the survivors but that Brian Luttrell was dead. It remained for Brian himself to decide whether he should go ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Our approach to the sacred spot was marked by tombs cut in the rock. A sharp angle of the mountain was passed; and then, all at once, the enormous walls, buttressing the upper region of Parnassus, stood sublimely against the sky, cleft right through the middle by a terrible split, dividing the twin peaks which gave a name to the place. At the bottom of this chasm issue forth the waters of Castaly, and fill a stone trough by the road-side. On a long, sloping mountain-terrace, facing the east, stood ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... driving car by showing diverse kinds of circling motions. And the shafts of Arjuna, engraved with his name, well-tempered, resembling the Yuga-fire, tied round with catgut, of straight joints, thick, far-reaching, and made either of (cleft) bamboo (or their branches) or wholly of iron, taking the lives of diverse foes, drank in that battle, with the birds (of prey assembled there), the blood of living creatures. Standing on his car, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... staggers: He leaps at once to ground, And ere the beast falls bleeding Another horse is found. His right arm falls—'tis wounded; He waves on high his left; In vain he leads the movement, The ranks in twain are cleft. The men in scarlet waver Before the men in brown, And fly in utter panic— The soldiers ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... races done by mortals tied in sacks; of human competitors, high aspirants, climbing heavenward on the soaped pole; seizing the soaped pig; and clutching with cleft fist, at full gallop, the fated goose tied aloft by its foot;—which feats do prove agility, toughness and other useful faculties in man: but this of dexterous talk is probably as strange a competition as any. And the question rises, Whether certain of these ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... surges of life ebb, ebb ever lower in my heart? Nay, nay, but there is hope. I have here beside me an Arab blade of subtle Damascene steel, insinuous to pierce and to hew, with which in a street of Bethlehem I saw a Syrian's head cleft open—a gallant stroke! The edges of this I have made bright and white for ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... affairs of love, so I answered her reprovingly. "Kisses have no causes," said I; "I will kiss Guelph-wise; I will kiss Ghibelline-wise; I will kiss Red; I will kiss Yellow; it's all one to me, so long as the mouth be like yours, as pink as a cleft pomegranate, and the teeth as white as ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... came home, he pushed his wife away, and destroyed the loom with an axe. Then he killed the child with a blow of his fist, and beat his wife till she fell senseless. But Ukko took pity on her, and changed her into a swallow. As she was trying to escape, the man struck at her with a knife, but only cleft her tail. Since that time she flies about twittering her misfortunes, and does not shun men like other birds, but builds her nest ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... deities of the city—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and the citadel that contained the treasure and the archives of the people. In laying the foundations, it was said there was found a human head recently cleft from the body; this head was a presage that Rome should become the head of ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... to and fro. A new effort, after half a dozen failures, sent a blaze mounting up fitfully among the rocks, startling all with the sudden change its blessed splendor made. Then a shrill shout from one of the watchers summoned all to a cleft in the cove, half shaded from the firelight, where there came rolling in amidst the surf, more dead than alive, the body of a man. He was the young foreigner, John Lambert's boatman. He bore still around him the rope that ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... consecration and absolution, and by means of fire a man may break through a taboo, or permantang. Should a man have a fruit-tree, for instance, which he wishes to protect, he places about it several cleft sticks with stones thrust in the clefts, and the stones are told to guard the tree and afflict with dire diseases any pilferer of the fruit. Now, should a friend of the owner see this sign of permantang and yet wish some of the fruit, let ...
— Folk-lore in Borneo - A Sketch • William Henry Furness
... a long while talking, as schoolboys will talk, in a sheltered cleft of the headland, which, I believe, had once been a cavern, and was known by the name of the Kierfiold Helyer. Here the force of many an Atlantic storm had so worn away the face of the rocks that the ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... were. Mr. Patterson was a slim, alert business man, with a firm chin cleft in the middle, mouth hidden by a tawny, drooping mustache, deep-set gray eyes under a broad brow from which the brown hair was rapidly receding at the temples. Pat had his father's cleft chin, straight nose, ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... hair from his head, For Gwydien, the eagle of the air, {140d} Did Gwyddwg {141a} bring protection to the field, {141b} Resembling and honouring his master. Morien of the blessed song, brought protection To the ruined hall, {141c} and cleft the heads Of the first in youth, in strength, and in old age. Equal to three men, though a maid, was Bradwen; {141d} Equal to twelve was Gwenabwy, the son ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... a single mountain as the loftiest of a range; the cloven summit appears most conspicuous when seen from the south. The northern view is, however, more remarkable, for the cleft is less distinguishable, and seven lower peaks suggest, in contemplation with the summits, the fancy of so many seats of the Muses. These peaks, nine in all, are the first of the hills which receive the rising sun, and the last that in the evening ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Excellencies, we'll come to the Doctrinal Part, and understand the Age of this our Game, which is known by several Marks, amongst which this is the most authentick: That if you take his view in the ground, and perceive he has a large Foot, a thick Heel, a deep Print, open Cleft and long space, then be assured he is Old; as the Contrary concludes ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... house as well lies in our midst, as good as it was three hundred years ago. To me, this limestone of the hills is one of the most beautiful features of the Cotswold country. I love to stand in a limestone quarry and mark the layers and ponderous blocks of clean white virgin rock—a tiny cleft in "the great stone floor which stretches over the face of the earth and under the limitless expanse of the sea." That solid cretaceous mass is but the remnants of the countless inhabitants of the old seas,—life changed into solid, hard rock; and even now, as ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... these I have already spoken of. It lay considerably to the north of west, and was where the setting sun made its way, as I have before described, into the amphitheatre, through a cleanly cut natural cleft in the granite embankment; this fissure might have been ten yards wide at its widest point, so far as the eye could trace it. It seemed to lead up, up like a natural causeway, into the recesses of unexplored mountains ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it all, don't you? On one side, looking landward, we had a Constable picture: a sky with tumbled clouds, shadowed downs, and forests cleft by a golden mosaic of meadows. Seaward, an impressionist sketch of Whistler's: Southampton Water and historic Portsmouth Harbour; stretches of glittering sand with the sea lying in ragged patches on it here and there like great pieces of broken glass. ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... consisting of the mate and two seamen, he waited till they were fast asleep, and then butchered them all with a knife. Having so far succeeded without discovery, he returned to the deck, and communicated the exploit to his associate: then they suddenly attacked the master of the vessel, and cleft his head with a hatchet, which they likewise used in murdering the man that stood at the helm; a third was likewise despatched, and no Englishman remained alive but the master's son, a boy, who lamented his father's death ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... of hoofs, a chorus of hoarse shouts, and a terrific whirl of dust, the troopers pulled up, and Jim saw on the opposite edge of the cleft a party of Bolivian guerillas hacking furiously away ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... a receipt which he has already shown to God Himself," he said, "provided there is a God for these accursed French. My sword cleft his skull, but I fell together ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... looked around him, thus raising his head, and gazed upon the sad and shocking scene. Close by him, with the head cleft literally in two by a battle-axe, lay a horseman, and his blood reddened all the ground around Elfric's feet, and had deeply dyed the youth's lower garments; a horse, his own, lay dead, the jugular vein cut through, with all the surrounding muscles and sinews; hard by, a ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... presents a succession of blocks and boulders piled one upon the other in rugged steps, apparently impossible to a laden camel. This ravine, the Splugen of Somaliland, led us, after an hour's ride, to the Wady Duntu, a gigantic mountain-cleft formed by the violent action of torrents. The chasm winds abruptly between lofty walls of syenite and pink granite, glittering with flaky mica, and streaked with dykes and veins of snowy quartz: the strata of the sandstones that here and there projected into the bed were wonderfully ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... many of the spoons of the first colonists were made; and wherever such spoons are found, if they are genuine antiques, they may safely be assigned a date earlier than 1714. The handle was flat and broad at the end, where it was cleft in three points which were turned up, that is, not toward the back of the spoon. This was known as the "hind's-foot handle." The bowl was a perfectly regular ellipse and was strengthened by continuing the handle in a narrow tongue or rat-tail, which ran down the back of the bowl. The succeeding ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... valley, from the breaks between the peaks, and from the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow-lines came a soft and droning murmur. It was the music of running water. That music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny streams gushing down from the snow that lay eternally ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... powerful savages who had grasped Boone and Smith, attempted to drag them off as prisoners. The one who held Smith was compelled to release his grasp by being shot dead. Colonel Boone was slightly wounded. A second tomahawk, by which his skull would have been cleft asunder, he evaded, and it partially fell on Major Smith; but being in a measure spent, it did not inflict a dangerous wound. The negotiators escaped to the fort without receiving any other injury. The ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... went, higher and higher, with wild flowers in profusion, and birds carolling all around. Then literally climbing up a mountain side, we came to a cleft in a precipice, which they called El Buaib, (the little gate,) with unmistakable marks of ancient cuttings about there. Traversing a fine plain of wheat, we at length reached the ancient city of Heshbon, with its acropolis ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... between Viso and San Mateo, a distance of about three leagues, is exceedingly difficult and dangerous. The ravine becomes narrowed to a mere cleft, between walls of mountain rising on either side to the height of more than a thousand feet; sometimes perpendicularly, and at other times inclining inwards, so as to form gigantic arches. The path runs along the base of these mountains, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... the delicate sea-green stem of the fucas twisted round a rock; and near it the ocean fan expanded its broad leaves. Every point was occupied by some feathery tuft of lovely tints, while from each cleft projected the feelers of some sea-anemone or zoophyte. Among the heights of the submarine landscape moved thousands of living beings, to which the doctor gave some learned names which I do not pretend to remember. Some he called ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... Who had made you valiant, strong and swift And maimed you with a bullet long ago, And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift, And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow, Gave back your youth to you, And packed in moments rare and few Achievements manifold And happiness untold, And bade you spring to Death as to a bride, In manhood's ripeness, power and pride, And on ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... frequent in these forests of Ukonongo. Its cry is a loud, quick chirrup. The Wakonongo understand how to avail themselves of its guidance to the sweet treasure of honey which the wild bees have stored in the cleft of some great tree. Daily, the Wakonongo who had joined our caravan brought me immense cakes of honey-comb, containing delicious white and red honey. The red honey-comb generally contains large numbers of dead ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... fully expected, the cleft proved to be the mouth of a cavern, for as I stood at the top of the ladder and peered in, I saw that it extended some way back into the cliff, widening as it went. How far it extended I could not tell, but when my eyes became somewhat accustomed ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... the French astronomer saw, or fancied he saw, with the imperfect telescopes of that day, was one of the remarkable and enigmatical furrows termed clefts or rills, first detected by the Hanoverian selenographer Schroter; who, on October 7, 1787, discovered the very curious serpentine cleft near Herodotus, having a few nights before noted for the first time the great Alpine valley west of Plato, once classed with the clefts, though it is an object of a very different kind. Between 1787 and 1797 Schroter ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... feet. Just think of Pharaoh! Should his example not be a warning to us? He ruled the whole world, yet, because he oppressed the Jews, he was visited with frightful plagues. God delivered them from the Egyptians, and cleft the sea for them, a miracle never done for any other nation, and when Pharaoh pursued them with an army of six hundred thousand warriors, he and his host together were drowned in the sea. Thy ancestor Amalek, O Haman, attacked them with four hundred thousand heroes, and ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... whose all-protecting hand Led us, Thy people, to this chosen land, Through the cleft waters of a distant sea, That we might rear a temple here to Thee; Thou, who on Zion hadst Thy favorite shrine, And in Thy majesty and power divine Wast daily by our suppliant race adored As sovereign Jehovah, peerless Lord; ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... said Raoul, astonished; for D'Artagnan's words began to return to his memory, and he had an indistinct recollection that D'Artagnan had made use of the same word. He looked, but uselessly so, for some cleft or crevice which might indicate an opening, or a ring to assist in lifting up some ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... the provident bird Takes refuge unseen in a cleft of the well; Deposits his prize, and perceiving he's heard, Flies back in the ...
— Ballads - Founded On Anecdotes Relating To Animals • William Hayley
... halted in a green nook, near a beautiful cascade that descended in a mist down a sylvan cleft, and poured its pellucid stream, for their delightful use, into a natural basin of marble. The men picketed their horses, and their corporal, who was a man of the country and their guide, distributed their rations. ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Guy's anger waxed furious at his master's death; and he spurred his horse so that fire rose from under its feet, and with one blow of his sword cleft Sir Gunter from his helmet to the pummel of his saddle. As for the other knights he slew them all except Sir Guichard, who fled on his swift steed to Pavia, and ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... belt and pistols, which had been unfastened from me after my capture, and he and Petrak set to work carrying the sacks of gold into the cleft in the cliff. ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... he felt as a spirited horse feels when it gets free of bit and bridle. The ice was as glass, his skates were keen, his frame fit, and his venture to his taste! So he laughed, and cut through the air as a sharp stone cleaves the water. He could hear the whistling of the air as he cleft it. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... due course, the top of a mountain ridge down part of the glassy slopes of which they had to make their way to the entrance of the cleft in which the trail they had so laboriously hewn lay. The gorge yawned blackly some five hundred feet below. In anticipation of their return with loaded sledges, Ootah, on the last reach of their upland ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... ended, when they heard a rumbling noise from underneath the vessel; and at the same time, perceived her following her course in open sea: from whence they concluded, that the rock was cleft in pieces, and had left a free passage for ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... barred door of his own house, through which he had entered so often. It was unchanged, but seemed deserted. Next, he went to the water-front, where he had left his yacht. Invisibly and sadly he stood upon her upper deck, and gazed at the levers, in response to his touch on which the craft had cleft the waves, reversed, or turned ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... of his skill he taught to me; And, Warrior, I could say to thee The words that cleft Eildon hills in three, And bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone: But to speak them were a deadly sin; And for having but thought them my heart within, A ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... lines very indistinct, those before the 3 lamellated joints short, transverse. Maxillary palpi with the terminal joint dilated, rather blunt at the tip, depressed above, and hollowed out at its base. Legs rather thick, the outer of the two tarsal claws of the third pair of legs, cleft at the end, anterior tibiae externally sub-tridentate. Thorax with the sides somewhat angulated and narrowly margined, rounded behind, but the sides of the posterior margin are straight, the surface is minutely punctured and covered with brown hairs, the sternum of the mesothorax is without ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... slab removed by Guillaume had covered, was by the very side of the pillar; it was either some natural surface flaw, or a deep fissure caused by some subsidence or settling of the soil. The heads of other pillars could be descried around, and these the cleft seemed to be reaching, for little slits branched out in all directions. Then, on seeing his brother leaning forward, like one who is for the last time examining a mine he has laid before applying a match to the fuse, Pierre suddenly ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the mountain. He came in his terror and shook his dusky spear. His eyes were flames, and his voice like distant thunder. 'Son of night,' said Fingal, 'retire. Do I fear thy gloomy form, spirit of dismal Loda? Weak is thy shield of cloud, feeble thy meteor sword.'"[TN-4] Then cleft he the gloomy shadow with his sword. It fell like a column of smoke. It shrieked. Then rolling itself up, the wounded spirit rose on the wind, and the island shook ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... arch fitted with glass doors, which could be secured on occasion by gates of fantastically hammered iron. The arch was enshrined by a Palladian portico, which rose to the roof, and was surmounted by an open pediment, in the cleft of which stood a black-marble figure of an Egyptian, erect, and gazing steadfastly at the midday sun. On the ground beneath was an Italian terrace with two great stone elephants at the ends of the balustrade. The ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... have dropped remain In the cleft: Lord, quicken with dew and rain, Then temple and mosque ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... Cleft sheer down, the sea-wall mountains Give that one port on the coast; Made, the Basin lies in sunshine! Missed, ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... further on, the white cliffs of the tiny cove of Beer come into view. Beer is an exceptionally delightful village, because of its strong individuality. At the top of the inlet the houses are clustered irregularly in little offshoots, but the main street runs down a deep cleft narrowing towards the sea between white gleaming chalk cliffs such as are rare in this county. A rapid stream races down the side of the street, and, dashing over a rock at the edge of the beach, buries itself in the shingle. Beer Head and the cliff that separates the village from Seaton ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... ever had—for, ere long, Black Harry had followed the smart foretopman to the silent land, succumbing to the dangerous wound he had received towards the end of the struggle from an Indian tomahawk wielded by a powerful arm, which had almost cleft the poor fellow's skull in twain; and, after so many months of close companionship, the death of the two ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... women's hair, children's bonnets, such as are generally used upon the plains, and pieces of lace, muslin, calicoes, and other materials. Many of the skulls bore marks of violence, being pierced with bullet holes, or shattered by heavy blows, or cleft with ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Moorish style of architecture. Under heavy, dark eyebrows were eyes deep-set and full of light, marvellous in range of expression, with black eyelashes. All seemed well with me when I met their look. The straight, rather salient nose had a perceptible cleft at the tip, which, I was told, was a sign of good lineage; muddy-mettled rascals lacked it; so that I was much distressed by the smooth, plebeian bluntness, at that time, of my own little snub. The mouth, then unshaded ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... She wasn't moving very fast, he had plenty of time. He took a steel piton out of his tool pack, transferred it to his left hand, and took out a hammer. Then, working carefully, he hammered the piton into a narrow cleft in the rock. Three more of the steel spikes were hammered into the surface, forming a ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... church, the offices of the parson, and the soprano's voice from behind the flowers, singing "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me"—Marthy's favorite hymn—brought the tears trickling, but he could not believe that what had happened had happened. He got through the melancholy honor of riding in the first hack in the shabby pageant, though the town looked strange from that window. He shivered stupidly at the first ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... memory—but they left A record in the desert—columns strown On the waste sands, and statues fallen and cleft, Heaped like a host in battle overthrown; Vast ruins, where the mountain's ribs of stone Were hewn into a city; streets that spread In the dark earth, where never breath has blown Of heaven's sweet ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... on the bare rocks. A huge fissure, opening in the mountain ridge, encumbered at the bottom with broken rocks, with precipitous banks, scarcely affording a foothold for the wild goats—- such is the spot where, upon a cleft on the steep precipice, still remain the foundations of the 'hold', or tower, believed to have been the David's retreat, and near at hand is the low-browed entrance of the galleried cave alternating between narrow passages and spacious halls, but all ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the miner next tells us to keep strict silence and listen. We obey him, sitting speechless and motionless. If the reader could only have beheld us now, dressed in our copper-coloured garments, huddled close together in a mere cleft of subterranean rock, with flame burning on our heads and darkness enveloping our limbs—he must certainly have imagined, without any violent stretch of fancy, that he was looking down upon ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... regarded as the baby's point of exit from the body. This is a natural conclusion, since the navel is seemingly a channel into the body, and a channel for which there is no obvious use, while the pudendal cleft would not suggest itself to girls (and still less to boys) as the gate of birth, since it already appears to be monopolized by the urinary excretion. This belief concerning the navel is sometimes preserved through the whole period ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... September, the carpenter died, and was interred the next day in the cleft of a mountain, it being impossible to put a spade into the ground, on account of the severity of the frost. The following days were devoted to the transport of driftwood and the building of the house. To cover ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... the d'Ochtes led his cousin to a higher point of the hill overlooking the chateau where he could show her the whole estate of Roche Craie. It was a beautiful sight. The gentle hills sloped to the Seine with here and there a sharp cleft showing a cliff of chalk, standing out very white against the green of the ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... by him he said to her, "Keep away from me, lest thou infect me." Whereupon she uncovered her wrist[FN60] to him, and he saw that it was cleft, as it were in two halves, by its veins and sinews and its whiteness was as the whiteness of virgin silver. Then said she, "Keep away from me, thou! for thou art stricken with leprosy, and maybe thou wilt infect me." He asked, "Who told thee I was a leper?" and she answered, "The ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... intervals, dividing the staff into measures. A box with many compartments sat on a stool beside him, and this held bits of wood that looked like pegs, but were in reality whole, half, quarter, and eighth notes, rests, flats, sharps, and the like. These were cleft in such a way that he could fit them on the wires almost as rapidly as his musical theme came to him, and Lyddy had learned to transcribe with pen and ink the music she found in wood and wire. He could write only simple airs in this ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Angles of the bone, also termed the Wings, are two projections directed backwards. Each is divided by a cleft into an upper, the Basilar Process, and a lower, the Retrossal Process. In old animals the posterior portion of the cleft separating the two processes gradually becomes filled in with bony deposit, thus transforming the cleft into a foramen, which gives passage to the preplantar ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... strong, and the little craft boldly cleft the waters, as it sped forward over the ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... account; she had chosen a part to which she was quite unequal. Lucien read on through a pile of penny-a-lining, put together on the same system as his attack upon Nathan. Milo of Crotona, when he found his hands fast in the oak which he himself had cleft, was not more furious than Lucien. He grew haggard with rage. His friends gave Coralie the most treacherous advice, in the language of kindly counsel and friendly interest. She should play (according to these authorities) ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... dreamed of riding on a coal-black horse, seated behind the veiled figure of a man whose face she could not see, who carried her like the wind away to the ends of the earth, and there shut her up in a mountain for ages and ages, until a bright angel cleft the rock, and, clasping her in his arms, bore her up to light and liberty in the presence of the Redeemer and of all the host ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... desire to exclude the nobility from all office and all dignity was obvious, at half a glance. My spirit was ulcerated at this; I saw approaching the complete re-establishment of the bastards; my heart was cleft in twain, to see the Regent at the heels of his unworthy minister. He was a prey to the interest, the avarice, the folly, of this miserable wretch, and no remedy possible. Whatever experience I might have had of the astonishing weakness of M. le Duc d'Orleans, it had passed all ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of a mound-like upheaval, he saw some four hundred yards ahead a broad bay of sunlight stretching in from the glaring sea to the east, and, glancing to his right, noted that there was a depression in the range,—something like a broad cleft in the mountains, possibly a pass through to the broader desert on the other side. He gave it little thought, however. There, only a mile or so away now, came his fellow-troopers, two in front, another lagging some distance behind, riding sleepily towards him ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... the face to match the hair. It was a round, plump, elderly face, with a short nose, delicately pink at the tip. The eyes were a pale blue, and just under the lower lip, which protruded slightly, was a small gray-red goatee, sticking straight out from a cleft in the chin like a dab of a sandy sheep's wool. Also, as the speaker swung himself further round, I took note of a shirt of plaited white linen billowing out over his chest and ending at the top in a starchy yet rumply collar that rolled majestically and Byronically clear ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... numbers and a variety of kinds of walnut-trees in this country. There is a very large kind, the wood of which is almost as black as ebony, but very porous. The fruit, with the outer shell, is of the size of a large hen's egg: the shell has no cleft, is very rough and so hard as to require a hammer to break it. Though the fruit be very relishing, yet it is covered with such a thick film, that few can bestow the pains of separating the one from the other. The natives make bread of it, ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... friend the dwarf, and descended the other side of the mountains, towards the Treasure Valley; and, as he went, he thought he heard the noise of water working its way under the ground. And when he came in sight of the Treasure Valley, behold, a river, like the Golden River, was springing from a new cleft of the rocks above it, and was flowing in innumerable streams among the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... breach, couched in the great cleft that split the Barrier, darkness within darkness. Unseen, I felt the glare of Its hate beat upon me. From It emanated deathly cold, like the nearness of an iceberg in the night, with an odor of damp ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... towering natural wall, which seemed to shut off whatever lay beyond the gaze of man, as though it veiled an ancient mystery. Indeed, the aspect of it thrilled me, I knew not why. I observed, however, that at one point in the mighty cliff there seemed to be a narrow cleft down which, no doubt, lava had flowed in a remote age, and it occurred to me that up this cleft ran a roadway, probably a continuation of that by which we had threaded the swamp. The fact that through my glasses I could ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... veil, moved from me, and seated herself on a crag above that cleft between mountain and creek, to which, when I had first discovered the gold that the land nourished, the rain from the clouds had given the rushing life of the cataract; but which now, in the drought and the hush of the skies, was but a ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... northern sky, very, very far away, there was cold in the world, for even last week, through the violet and primrose dusk, out of the north, shadowy winged things came speeding, batlike phantoms against the dying light—flight-woodcock coming through hill-cleft and valley to the land where ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the sun flashing from the brown glass toggles near the white lobster-buoys; or, lifting his gaze to the horizon beyond the purple deep, he would trace the low, rolling humps of the mainland hills, the cleft range of Isle au Haut, or the heights of Mount Desert. But no studies or scenery caused him to forget his daily trip with ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... the steps by the proprietor of the boarding-house. This man was short and stout, with a harelip and cleft palate, which at once gave him the well-known slurring speech of persons so afflicted, and imparted also to the timbre of his voice a peculiarly hollow, resonant, trumpet-like note. He stumped about energetically on a wooden leg of home manufacture. It was a cumbersome ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... looked for; and, with the speed of a winged fiend, he bounded to where Leemah stood, and accused her of having aided in his escape. She acknowledged she had, and pointed to the far-off forest as his hiding place. In an instant his glittering tomahawk cleft the hand she raised off at the wrist. Silas knew no more. Leemah's hot blood fell upon his brow, and he fainted through excess of agony, but like Mazeppa, he lived to repay the Red Eagle in after-years for that night of horror—when ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... Mountains and the shores of the St. Lawrence on the other. The stage-coach always drew up before the door of the cottage. The wayfarer with no companion but his staff paused here to exchange a word, that the sense of loneliness might not utterly overcome him ere he could pass through the cleft of the mountain or reach the first house in the valley. And here the teamster on his way to Portland market would put up for the night, and, if a bachelor, might sit an hour beyond the usual bedtime ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... to be the first to test whatever danger confronted us, but my companion prevented this, and Hassan was compelled to take second place, while I followed him. We were absolutely in the dark before we had proceeded a dozen yards through the cleft in the mountain side, and then our ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 19th March, the Hassler left Sandy Point. The weather was beautiful,—a mellow autumn day with a reminiscence of summer in its genial warmth. The cleft summit of Sarmiento was clear against the sky, and the snow-fields, swept over by alternate light and shadow, seemed full of soft undulations. The evening anchorage was in the Bay of Port Famine, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... in the cleft A broken pavement may have left, Is like the star that, still and sweet, Shines where the ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... through the woodland so dreary, Slowly approaching, a warrior was seen; Life's ebbing tide mark'd his footstep so weary, Cleft was his helmet, and woe ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... a thick, concave, horny plate that forms the sole. At the heels and between the bars is a wedge-shaped mass of rather soft horny tissue that projects forward into the sole. This is the foot pad or horny frog. It is divided into two lateral portions by a medium cleft. ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... this cleft ends," said the major, approaching what seemed to be the termination of the gorge—quite a jagged rift, cut or split in the side ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... like to be the man to incur your wrath. By the powers above! what a fierce reception you gave those rascals yonder. It was lucky for them that poor Matamore's sword had no edge. If it had been sharp and pointed, you would have cleft them from head to heels, clean in two, as the ancient knight-errants did the Saracens, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... imaginations. Huge mountains of ice here rose against the northern sky, from which the smoke of volcanoes rolled balefully up; and the large tracts of lava, which had descended from them to the sea, were cleft into fearful abysses, where no bottom could be found. Here were strange, desolate valleys, with beds of pure sulphur, torn and overhanging precipices, gigantic caverns, and fountains of boiling water, which, mingled with ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... They shone strangely. A tense eagerness was expressed in the squatting figure leaning out toward him. On the other side, within reach of his arm, the night stood like a wall -discouraging—opaque—impenetrable. No help would avail. The darkness he had to combat was too impalpable to be cleft by a blow—too dense to be pierced by the eye; yet as if by some enchantment in the words that made this vain offer of fidelity, it became less overpowering to his sight, less crushing to his thought. He had a moment of pride which ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad |
