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Chasm   Listen
noun
Chasm  n.  
1.
A deep opening made by disruption, as a breach in the earth or a rock; a yawning abyss; a cleft; a fissure. "That deep, romantic chasm which slanted down the green hill."
2.
A void space; a gap or break, as in ranks of men. "Memory... fills up the chasms of thought."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Chasm" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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 turned under ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace

... would have been forfeited had I not gone over and possessed the land. I struggled and suffered sometimes unutterably. After the struggle was over and I was sanctified I could look back and see where I had come up to a deep chasm so deep and dark that I could not see the bottom. It was too wide for me to step across. On the other side was everything my soul longed for. I could see the beautiful plane and way of sanctification. My loved ones were walking on it and rejoicing in its glory. Above the chasm there seemed ...
— Sanctification • J. W. Byers

... the sides of the cavity. Into this one of the brave explorers had to descend, and when they had cast lots the choice fell upon Montano himself. His preparations were soon made, and his companions lowered him in a basket into the horrible chasm to a depth of four hundred feet, and there as he hung, he scraped the sulphur from the sides of the crater, descending again and again until he had procured enough for the wants of the army, with which they returned triumphantly to Tlascala. Meanwhile ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang

... we had very speedily discovered: The Indians would do nothing to help us. In every other way they were our friends—one might almost say our devoted slaves—but when it was suggested that they should help us to make and carry a plank which would bridge the chasm, or when we wished to get from them thongs of leather or liana to weave ropes which might help us, we were met by a good-humored, but an invincible, refusal. They would smile, twinkle their eyes, shake their heads, ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... a strange one. The two ranges approached so nearly that it seemed as if a ball might be tossed from one to the other. But the chasm between was stupendous. I grew dizzy as I looked downward and saw the endless zigzags yet to be traversed step by step before the bottom of the canyon could be reached, and then the equally interminable zigzags up the acclivity beyond, all of which I must trace, still step by step, before I could ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green

... precipice; for, on the extreme right wing of the rear of the house, it was no more than a gentle inclination of the soil, deepening rapidly towards the left, and there, directly under the extremity of that wing, assuming the appearance of a vast chasm, through the bottom of which a brawling stream chafed the pointed stones, on its way to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... of England must be one's only aim, even if it means abandoning what was the ideal of the Family for all these hundreds of years. You will advance with me, Sweetheart, will you not, even if it should seem to be a chasm we are crossing?" ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn

... yesterday your letter of the 2d instant, with the inclosed; which I return you, that there may be no chasm in your papers. I had heard before of Burrish's death, and had taken some steps thereupon; but I very soon dropped that affair, for ninety-nine good reasons; the first of which was, that nonody is to go in his room, and that, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... to get to the other side was to follow along these smaller cracks where they made a crooked natural bridge across the chasm. Even Seppi's stout heart quailed a little as he gazed down into the depths of the huge rifts. The walls of ice gleamed with wonderful greens and blues, but he had no heart to admire the ...
— The Swiss Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... shown no change. Elsewhere, improvements at every turn were living monuments to the tireless brain of her father. Stock-corrals, sturdily built, out-houses spotless in their gleaming whitewash, monster barns, fenced-off fields, bridges across the narrow chasm of the frothing river, telephone-poles with their wires binding into one sheaf the numerous activities of the ranch, a broad, graded road over which she and her father had come here the last time together ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory

... 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

... crossed the social chasm, he had seen the other side of the problem of riches and poverty. After that revelation, he would be more merciful in his judgements of his fellow-mortals; he would understand that the system in which we are trapped makes true happiness ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... said Perez, referring to an extraordinary cleft or chasm, of great depth, and extremely difficult and perilous of access, situated near the top of Little Mountain, a short ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy

... among the marble rocks; on the second day, just above this rapid; and on the third day, two miles further up at the cascade, when the whole body of the limpid stream of the Nerbudda, confined to a narrow channel of only a few yards wide, falls tumultuously down in a beautiful cascade into a deep chasm of marble rocks. This fall of their sacred stream the people call the 'Dhuandhar', or 'the smoky fall', from the thick vapour which is always seen rising from it in the morning. From below, the river glides quietly and imperceptibly for a ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... uproot the forest trees. Even the mighty mountains leave their places, And sink their haughty heads beneath strange seas; The great earth writhes in some convulsive spasm And turns the proudest cities into plains. The level sea becomes a yawning chasm— Nothing remains. ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... We are too much of the earth, earthy, and bound up in sensual interests. It is often needful that some shock of disappointment should shake our idea of terrestrial stability—should awake us to a sense of our spiritual relations—should strike open some chasm in this dead, material wall, and let in the light of the unlimited and immortal state to which we go. We need the discipline of bereavement in temporal things, to win us to things eternal. And so, in their departure, the loved accomplish for us a blessed and spiritual result, and instead of being ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin

... You have no life here; and that which would least content me would be this very repose—the absence of provocation—the strife—the triumph! These, I take it, are the deficiencies which you really feel when you speak of the want of crag, and chasm, ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... steepness of the rocks which I had climbed, and felt alarmed, as if I never should be able to get back again. But these thoughts were soon chased away. I turned from the seaward, and looked inland. I found that on one side of me there was a chasm between the rocks, the bottom of which was so far down that I could not see it; and on the other side the rock rose up as straight as a wall. My attention was soon diverted by discovering another plant, and I now commenced my task of digging them all up. I obtained, with the ferns, ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat

... said Yae, pirouetting on her white toes near the edge of the chasm, "and I love you and I love any man ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... tradition stood, permanently rooted in a school not twenty years old. Is it fanciful to hold that Brown's passion for 'continuity' had much to do with planting and confirming it? Mr. Irwin quotes for us a passage from one of his sermons to the school: "Suffer no chasm to interrupt this glorious tradition. . . . Continuous life . . . that is what we want—to feel the pulses of hearts that are now dust." Did this passage occur, I wonder, in the sermon of which I rather remember ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... 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 ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... the clouds, and the trees, and wind. If it would but creep into this dim, travelling prison, and help her; if it would but come, like sleep, and steal away dark sorrow, and in one moment make grief-joy. But it stayed outside on its wistful wings; and that grand chasm which yawns between soul and soul remained unbridged. For what could she say? How make him speak of what he was going to do? What alternatives indeed were now before him? Would he sullenly resign his seat, and wait till he could find Audrey Noel again? But even if he did find her, they ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... grandeur, the novelty, and the variety of the scenery repaid us; and Le Mire loved the danger for its own sake. Time and again she swayed far out of her saddle until her body was literally suspended in the air above some frightful chasm, while she turned her head to laugh gaily at Harry and myself, ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout

... smiled. Between Bartholomew Storr's elegies and William Young's "Wish-makers' Town" stretches an infinite chasm. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... 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 ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... our shed lies open at either end. On one hand is a steep mountain side down which there comes, now bridging a chasm, now a mere straight groove across a meadow, now hidden among green branches, the water-slide that brings our trees from the purple forest overhead. Above us, but nearly hidden, hums the machine shed, but we see a ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... unnoticed, and with a quiet step pursued the winding path to the chapel, and afterwards thence to the grave. When all was over, and the relatives and idlers had withdrawn, she stepped to the edge of the chasm. From beneath her mantle she drew a little bunch of forget-me-nots, and dropped them in upon the coffin. In a few minutes she also turned and went away from the cemetery. By five o'clock she ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.

... wear them down so that they would become like the rounded hills of the Appalachian Mountain chain, yet this is what will happen unless nature's ways suddenly change to something which they are not now. A visitor to the Grand Canon of the Colorado sees a magnificent chasm over a mile in depth and two hundred miles long which has actually been carved through layer after layer of solid rock by the rushing torrents of the river. Perhaps it is easier to estimate the geological effects of a river in such a case as Niagara. Here ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... qualities of the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could even directly apply to myself: they exhibited my confession of faith in a false light; and I felt that if written without particular attention to me they were still worse; for in that case, the vast chasm which lay between us, gaped but so much the more distinctly.' After a casual meeting at a Society for Natural History, they walked home and ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... only one at a time; they proceeded with caution, not knowing sometimes in the darkness if they were putting their feet on the flakes or into a chasm; for there were places where they were obliged to clear large crevices, and jump from one piece of ice to another, at the risk of falling between them and disappearing for ever. The first hesitated, but those who were behind kept calling ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... round, You strove for every inch of ground; Then, by a soldierly retreat, Retired to your imperial seat. The victor, when your steps he traced, Found all the realms before him waste: You, o'er the high triumphal arch Pontific, made your glorious march: The wondrous arch behind you fell, And left a chasm profound as hell: You, in your capitol secured, A siege as long ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... was here that the French engineers encountered their most difficult problems. We wound up the narrow valley in splendid loops and curves, turning upon our tracks, running through numerous tunnels, and at one time crossing a chasm so narrow and with sides so steep and precipitous that it was found necessary to build the bridge in two parts, each against the face of the cliff, and then gradually lower them until they met above the river, three hundred and fifty feet below. Finally by an almost intolerable ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall

... of falling down into the chasm I lay full length along the ledge, and that awful goat walked over my body to get away ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

... invalid. The girls shyly made friends in their own way, the mammas told thrilling tales of the accidents their darlings had survived, several gentlemen kindly offered their boats, and the boys, with the best intentions in life, suggested strolls of two or three miles to Rafe's Chasm and Norman's Woe, or invited her to tennis and archery, as if violent exercise was the cure for all human ills. She was very grateful, and reluctantly went away to bed, declaring, when she got upstairs, that these ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... still nearly a column wanting. How is this chasm to be filled?" exclaimed the critic. "Since you are here supply me with ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... scarcely spoken, when the middle of the lake became intensely black and scored with dark streaks. This, though not quite obvious at first from the point where they stood, was caused by the slow formation of a great chasm in the centre of the seething lake of mud. The lake was sinking into its own throat. The blackness increased. Then a dull sullen roar was heard, and next moment the entire lake upheaved, not violently, ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... lad gazed across the chasm, an' as he looked he saw a shinin', misty light, an' in it the form o' a beautiful woman, an' he bared his heid an' bowed ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke

... marvel that the land-acquiring passion becomes a mania among our farmers, and particularly we do not wonder at a passion for wood land. That wide, deep chasm of conscious self-poverty and emptiness which lies at the bottom of every human heart, making men crave property as something to add to one's own bareness, and to ballast one's own specific levity, is sooner filled by land ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... sheer and bold and bare, stood the walls and towers of Castle Drachenhausen. A great gate-way, with a heavy iron-pointed portcullis hanging suspended in the dim arch above, yawned blackly upon the bascule or falling drawbridge that spanned a chasm between the blank stone walls and the roadway that winding down the steep rocky slope to the little valley just beneath. There in the lap of the hills around stood the wretched straw-thatched huts ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle

... and Alicia saw her father gradually lured across the gulf that divided Lady Audley from her step-daughter, until he stood at last quite upon the other side of the abyss, and looked coldly upon his only child across that widening chasm. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon

... Flume is one of those rifts in the solid rock caused by some titanic force in ages long since. For many years there hung suspended far up above the path a huge granite boulder. In 1883 a sudden mountain storm caused a torrent to dash through the chasm, and the boulder became a subject for history. It disappeared, thus partially explaining how it was originally lodged in its former resting place. A short distance below the Flume are the Georgiana Falls, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various

... promptly displaced Marie, and looked out. When my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom I discerned a dark chaos of roofs and gables stretching as far as I could see before me. Nearer, immediately under the window, yawned a chasm—a narrow street. Beyond this was a house rather lower than that in which we were, the top of its roof not quite reaching the level of ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman

... of the captain as he grinds in his gears. Then you realize that the thing is actually moving, that the bosses on the belt have managed to find a grip on the slime—and presently you come to the brink of what appears, to your exaggerated sense of perception, a bottomless chasm, with distant steep banks on the farther side that look unattainable and insurmountable. It is an old German trench which the rains have worn and widened. You brace yourself, you grip desperately a pair of brass handles in front of you, while leviathan hesitates, seems to sit ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... stream danced and sang over scattered stones at the bottom of this grim chasm, constantly twisting and curving from wall to wall, generally half concealed from view by the dense growth of overhanging bushes shadowing its banks. High up along the brown rock wall the gleam of the afternoon sun rested warm and golden, but deeper down within those dismal, ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish

... of the chasm had never as yet been the channel of a stream, indications were not wanting that at some future time it would be the natural outlet of accumulated waters; for already, in many places, thin layers of snow were glittering upon the surface ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne

... in that case continue to be and to be executed under such rules and regulations as previous statutes had prescribed or had enabled the executive department to prescribe for that purpose, leaving the supposed chasm in the revenue laws just as it ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... precipice 2,500 feet in depth, it is correct to be frightened, and a fashion of holding the breath and shutting the eyes prevails, but my fears were reserved for the crossing of a trestle bridge over a very deep chasm, which is itself approached by a sharp curve. This bridge appeared to be overlapped by the cars so as to produce the effect of looking down directly into a wild gulch, with a torrent raging along it at an ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... impelled by the mysterious influence of their strange faculty, were again pressing forward. This time the track ascended. Soon we lost sight of the valley, and an hour's upward scrambling over loose rocks and sharp crags brought us to a chasm, the two edges of which were separated by a precipitous gulf some twenty feet across. This chasm was probably about eight or nine hundred feet deep, and its sides were straight and sheer as those of a well. Our ladders were in requisition now, and with the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... and incalculable boon will be conferred on the country, if we can bridge over the chasm that has hitherto divided the Highlands and Islands from the labour markets of the south. It was indeed a strange anomaly, that strong men should be lying down to die in the Isles, or even on the mainland of Scotland, and that within ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... after breakfast, they 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 the centre of ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade

... heads of its tributary streams; though he often found the open country so encumbered by volcanic rocks, as to render travelling extremely difficult. Whenever he approached Snake River, he found it running through a broad chasm, with steep, perpendicular sides of basaltic rock. After several days' travel across a level plain, he came to a part of the river which filled him with astonishment and admiration. As far as the eye ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving

... and so sheer was the side, that from a horse's back you might sometimes have dropped a stone into the apparently bottomless ravine—bottomless, for the rays of a noon-day sun have never broken the eternal darkness of the awful chasm beneath. Had horse, camel, or man missed their footing whilst scrambling up the steep and stony pathway, nothing could have saved them from being dashed to pieces. Frequently, when rounding some projecting crag, the small treasure-box fastened on the camel literally overhung the abyss, and I held ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem

... a sudden sensation of heat in his face as he passed the chasm between the withdrawal of Dan and Biddy from the firm and his solution of the amalgam. He did not care to dwell upon that, because Eldred had sued him to recover his stock, claiming that it was ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland

... anxious he seemed to complete his task and get back to the safety and shelter of the gorge. He was not frightened now, not he. He would have leaped double that distance if he could for Hollyhock the brave. He prepared himself for the return leap. He sprang out over the awful chasm. ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade

... hill which took us three hours hard walking. The river is now very narrow and rapid, not above twelve feet across; it is a succession of waterfalls every three or four yards. After this our road was intricate, winding, and bad. We had to ascend a high chasm formed in the rock, which was effected by ladders from one shelf to another. Arrived at the foot of Bukit Pandang, where we found huts, and occupied them for the night. We have been ascending the whole of this day. Very cold ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... delightful prospect of the circumjacent country. Animated with this hope, I resolved, if possible, to gain the summit, which I at length effected by means of the ivy, though not without great difficulty and danger; the top I found covered with this evergreen, except a large chasm in the middle. After I had surveyed with pleasing wonder the beauties of art and nature that conspired to enrich the scene, curiosity prompted me to sound the opening in the middle, in order to ascertain its depth, as I entertained a suspicion ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... officer, in a more peremptory tone, demanded admission. Rousing from his stupor, and mortified at the folly of these girlish fancies, he struck the spring: in a trice, a portion of the bed's head flew open, displaying a dark chasm beyond. Swift as thought the officer darted through the aperture; but the door was immediately shut, and with great violence. A scuffle was heard within, but not a word was spoken. Holt, in doubt and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... came to their ears. A swarm of monoplanes roared past just beneath them. The streets were crowded with rapidly moving vehicles, the roof-tops with air-craft. Then suddenly the scene darkened; a deep rumbling came from the sea. As they watched in fascinated wonder, a great chasm opened up through the heart of the city. Tall buildings swayed and crumbled, falling into heaps of twisted metal and crushed masonry and burying hundreds of the populace in their fall. The confusion was indescribable, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... Like the rugged pedestal of some mammoth column, its cliffs rose sheer threescore feet from the water's edge to the foot of the outermost of its triple walls. From the notch in the hills a great stone causeway climbed with a long and easy grade to the level of the first great gate, spanning the chasm over the river by means of a crazy ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... and on my raw nerves, and I followed the poems, loathing the music all the while, with intense interest. Indeed, I couldn't let go the skein of the story for fear that I might fall off somewhere into a gloomy chasm and be devoured by chromatic wolves. I recalled one extraordinary moment at the close of the composition when a simple major chord was sounded and how to my ears it had a supernal beauty; after the perilous tossing and pitching on a treacherous sea of no-harmonies it was ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... her with a shudder, as the gig passed across a narrow wooden drawbridge that spanned an enormous chasm in the craggy hill-side. ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... the second ridge into view of the booming chasm in the top of the plateau, he saw the others down near the brink. The baby had been laid on a soft bed of pine needles, and Blake was leading the ladies down to look over into the abyss, one on ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet

... himself fighting for a forlorn hope, his grinning little Goorkhas gallantly and intrepidly following wherever he would lead, and he saw the awful darkness down which his feet had stumbled, a terrible chasm that had ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... now!" he shouted aloud; and leaping from crag to crag he galloped by valley and chasm, by torrent-bed and scar of avalanche, until he came to the wandering leagues of the plain, and left behind him for ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany

... and back again, to see a waterfall, which fully answered our expectations: you see, I am very strong. I had taken another walk in the morning to see the Bridge of Brackland, another beautiful waterfall, with a six-inch bridge over a chasm of rocks, which looked as if they had been ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... ordination ministered by him who first bore the Apostolic commission to this nation, was an ordination—not of seven indeed, but of four—to the diaconate. The authority, the ministration, and the order imparted were in both cases the same, separated though the acts were by the great chasm of seventeen centuries. It is good to commemorate such an event. It is right to commemorate it in the place in which it occurred. Such a commemoration fitly ends the series of centenary observances which we began ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut

... loch, made longer and narrower by the steep hillside of rock and heather which flanked its chilly surface on either side, and whose inequalities were lost in the firs and larches that filled ravine and chasm. The fragrant road which ran sinuously through their shadowy depths was invisible from the loch; no protuberance broke the seemingly sheer declivity; the even sky-line was indented in two places—one where it was cracked into a fanciful resemblance to a human profile, the ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... Let nine o'clock strike, but bring no stealthy footstep to the door, no muffled voice making respectful application for his Kam. From nine to ten breakfast will fill the breach, and you may allow another hour for the butler's account and the godown; but there is still a yawning chasm of at least two hours between eleven and tiffin. I cannot bridge it. Imagination strikes work. The joyful sound of the Borah's voice brings promise of relief; but no! for what interest can there be in the Borah if you have no Dirzee? In the spirit of fair play, however, I must mention that ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... things continued Dorothy could not even guess, she was so greatly bewildered. But bye and bye, as she stared ahead into the black chasm with a beating heart, she began to dimly see the form of the horse Jim—his head up in the air, his ears erect and his long legs sprawling in every direction as he tumbled through space. Also, turning her head, she found that she ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... made this turning, when, above the noise of the cataract, they heard the yelping of a deer hound. Kenric was now in advance of his companion, and they were just above the point where the waterfall turned over into a deep chasm. ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton

... vapour, was an ideal position for defence. In its front was a valley forming a natural ditch so deep that the eye could scarcely pierce its depths. The ravine at one point was so narrow that the English and French guns waged duel across it, but on the British side the chasm was ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett

... catlike ability to cling to the trail where was no trail. The sensation of the long swinging upward movement was unutterably alien to anything in life or in dreams, and the sheer height above and the momently-deepening chasm below ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... wonderful how near we may stand to the brink and look far away beyond the chasm. Years afterwards they remembered this conversation, and it is possible that Jack Meredith wondered then what instinct it was that made him change the direction of ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... the poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the prophet." Such is the first act of knowing, and in this first act the mind passes from idea to being without ever suspecting the depth of the chasm it has passed. It passes by means of the power which is in it, and is not astonished at what it has done. It is subsequently astonished when by reflection it returns to the analysis of the results, and, by the aid of the liberty with which it is endowed, to do the opposite of what ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... other evil, that which acts upon church establishments, not through simple failure in the guarantees of public opinion, but through their own internal vices of composition; here undeniably we see a chasm traversing the Scottish church from the very gates to the centre. And unhappily the same chasm, which marks a division of the church internally, is a link connecting it externally with the Seceders. For how stands the case? Did the Scottish Kirk, at the last crisis, divide broadly into ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various

... prevent a surprise. Here we displayed our colours, and Mr Forster and his party began to collect plants, &c. The coast was so over-run with woods, bushes, plants, stones, &c. that we could not see forty yards round us. I took two men, and with them entered a kind of chasm, which opened a way into the woods. We had not gone far before we heard the natives approaching; upon which I called to Mr Forster to retire to the party, as I did likewise. We had no sooner joined than the islanders appeared at the entrance of a chasm not a stone's throw from us. We began to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... helpless. Perhaps she would be frightened at the darkening solitude, and try to find her path homeward, on the edge of that slippery, beetling rock. With no hand to sustain, no eye to guide, how could she help falling into the watery chasm below? In her fears for Alice, she forgot her own imaginary danger, and flew on, sending her voice before her, bearing on its trembling tones the sweet name ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz

... surprised eyes, luminous in the dusk. He 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 back again at the ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... the obstacles to union among the seceding states, how is it possible to take the first step to actual separation! The separation, at the worst, can only be political. There will be no chasm—no rent made in the earth between the two sections. The natural and ideal boundaries will remain unaltered. Mason and Dixon's line will not become a wall of adamant that can neither be undermined nor surmounted. The Ohio river will not be converted into flame, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... the outer edge of the bank and displaced stones that shot a thousand feet down into the dizzy depths of the valley! and now, one of them, the girl, had actually rolled out of the slide and was hanging over the chasm supported only by a clump of chimasal to ...
— The Queen of the Pirate Isle • Bret Harte

... owing to this long interregnum of science, and to no other cause, that we have now to look back through a vast chasm of many hundred years to the respectable characters we call the Ancients. Had the progression of knowledge gone on proportionably with the stock that before existed, that chasm would have been filled up with characters rising superior ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... they arrived at a stretch of the path where the road was carried in mid-air over a deep chasm in the bed of the pass. They had already passed two such places, and at each point the road was constructed in the same manner. Holes had been cut horizontally in the sheer face of the precipice and huge beams driven into them. About six feet of ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... writers, however, acknowledge that the chasm was afterwards filled up with earth and rubbish. (Livy, l. 7. c. 6. Val. Maximus, l. ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... supposition that the facts are gratuitously assumed, though often urged, is, in reality, nothing to the purpose.* If it should ever be shown, for example, that supposing as many geological eras as the philosopher requires to have passed in the chasm between the first verse, which asserts the original dependence of all things on the fiat of the Creator, and the second, which is supposed to commence the human era, any imaginable condition of our system—at the close, so to speak, of a given geological period—would harmonise with ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... hand, and was in the act of stepping forward, when Rachael caught her in both arms with a scream that resounded over the wide landscape. Before them, at their very feet, was the brink of a black ragged chasm hidden by the thick grass. They sprang back, and fell upon their knees, each hiding her ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*

... sorry it is so, on every account," returned Mary, in a low and saddened tone. "Sorry, that one of so frank, ingenuous a mind, should find it impossible to accept the creed of his fathers, and sorry that it must leave so impassable a chasm between ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... she commanded, and resting one hand on her staff pointed to the south-west, where, over the coping of the wall, out of a pure green chasm infinitely deep between reddened clouds of sunset, the evening star ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Vandycks looking down on the dinner-table, the crowd of guests and servants, the costly food, the dresses, and the diamonds—with, in the distance, her Arthur, divided, as it seemed, from her by a growing chasm, never remembering to throw her a look or a smile, drinking in a tide of flattery he would once have been the first to scorn, captured, exhibited, befooled by an unscrupulous, egotistical woman, who would drop him like a squeezed ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward

... middle path we come to an awful yawning chasm in the earth, called La Creux Terrible. Its sides are so sheer that one shudders to approach its crumbling brink for fear a slip should mean a step into eternity. No man could fall here and live to tell the sensation. Standing near the brink one can just discern the bottom, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling

... easy matter to get across the chasm of Seven Centuries, filled with such material. But here, of all helps, is not a Boswell the welcomest; even a small Boswell? Veracity, true simplicity of heart, how valuable are these always! He that speaks what is really in him, will find men to listen, though under never such impediments. ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... some time been glutted with the world, and 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 I am not likely, like ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... her warm, violet breath on my cheek. I was just planting my feet on the further side of the glacier, and going to clasp her in my arms, when—the frail platform on which I was crossing gave way:—I fell downward through the chasm with a shriek of terror that she ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... afternoon and through the comfortless night in the packed and noisome day coach, while the fussy, self-sufficient little train went looping, like an overgrown measuring worm, up through the blue grass, around the outlying knobs of the foothills, on and on through the great riven chasm of the gateway into a bleak, bare clutch of undersized mountains. Anse Dugmore had two bad hemorrhages on ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... set, and darkness covered the City of the Dead, but the moon shone above the valley of the kings' tombs, and the projecting masses of the rocky walls of the chasm threw sharply-defined shadows. A weird silence lay upon the desert, where yet far more life was stirring than in the noonday hour, for now bats darted like black silken threads through the night air, owls hovered aloft on wide-spread wings, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... original in shifting the scene of its social life. The Attic Athens of to-day occupies a different site from that of the city of Pericles. New Edinburgh {85} has reared itself on the other bank of that chasm where once the North River flowed, and where now the trains run. Edinburgh, however, more fortunate than the city of Cecrops, while founding a new town has not lost the old. But at the time of the Hanoverian accession, and for generations later, not a house of the new town had been ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... and file, the thousand unnoticed ones, who have left warm fires, dear wives, loving little children, without even the hope of glory or fame,—without even the hope of doing anything remarkable or perceptible for the cause you love,—resigned only to fill the ditch or bridge the chasm over which your country shall walk to peace and joy! Good men and true, brave unknown hearts, we salute you, and feel that we, in our soft peace and security, are not worthy of you! When we think of you, our simple comforts seem luxuries all too good for us, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... omnipotent that Power must be, That wings the whirlwind and directs the storm, That, by a strong convulsion, severed thee, And wrought this wondrous chasm in thy form. ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney

... There are many traditions of his wonderful feats in hunting still existing, which are related by old Christy, the huntsman, who gets exceedingly nettled if they are in the least doubted. Indeed, there is a frightful chasm, a few miles from the Hall, which goes by the name of the Squire's Leap, from his having cleared it in the ardour of the chase; there can be no doubt of the fact, for old Christy shows the very dints of the horse's hoofs on the rocks on each ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving

... youth lay at the edge of the chasm, paralyzed with terror. When he recovered his consciousness, a feeling of alarm and distress overwhelmed him. He wept, and wrung ...
— Harper's Young People, December 2, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... looked out upon a prospect which had been a fit setting for the witch scene in Macbeth. Thunder clouds hung low over the moor, but through them ran a sort of chasm, or rift, allowing a bar of lurid light to stretch across the drear, from east to west—a sort of lane walled by darkness. There came a remote murmuring, as of a troubled sea—a hushed and distant chorus; ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... grew warmer, and a fire had been lighted, food cooked, and a hearty breakfast made, the troubles of the past night were forgotten, and in the best of spirits they went on again, after a detour to avoid the chasm, the moistened earth smelling delicious, and the birds twittering and singing ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn

... poem to its present state, which, without considering the chasm, is not perfect, he wrote to London an account of his design, and informed his friend[89], that he was determined to print it with his name; but enjoined him not to communicate his intention to his Bristol acquaintance. The gentleman, surprised at his resolution, endeavoured ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... under the September moon, seeing his picture everywhere before him, and thinking his young, exultant thoughts. The maples were set so thick along the main street that they stood like a high, dark wall on either side, and he looked up at the sky as from the bottom of a chasm. The village houses lurked behind their door-yard trees, with breadths of autumnal bloom in the gardens beside them. Within their shadowy porches, or ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells

... appearance, more liberal attitude towards modern ideas of progress has raised the hopes of many in the Roman Church whose minds and consciences are troubled by the ever-widening chasm which separates traditional dogma from secular knowledge. While dogma was stationary—immobilis et irreformabilis—there seemed to be no prospect except that the progress of human knowledge would leave theology further and further behind, till the rupture between Catholicism ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... square down the launching-way, through the yawning gates where the track abruptly ended at the brow of the Palisades—the empty chasm where, if all went right and no mistake had been made in build, engine-power, or control, the initial leap of Nissr Arrib ela Sema was ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... downfall of the older civilization. Yet the differences are many, and some of them are quite as striking as the similarities. The single fact that the old civilization was based upon slavery shows the chasm that separates the two. Let me point out one further and very significant difference in the development of the two civilizations, a difference so obvious that it is astonishing that it has not been dwelt ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... On the other side, and on a level but one step lower down, stands the vanguard of the long procession of "Lower" Animals, led by the chimpanzee, the orang and the gorilla. The natural bridge that almost spans the chasm lacks only ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... Down a chasm appalling Thou to death art falling; One thy foe: yet galling Weapons press thee sore. Proud thou wert but lately, Strife shall change thee greatly, Thee as champion stately ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy

... She could reach the aperture easily, and it would have been the simplest thing in the world to climb into it, but for the yawning chasm beneath. Holding firmly to the friendly holly, and resisting, with an effort, the temptation to look down, she swung herself bravely over the edge and scrambled into the hole with a gasp of relief. It was, after all, ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce

... me—a castaway uprooted from my ancestral soil, adrift in a homeless current of indignity? Why set a bottomless chasm between Arjuna and myself, turning the natural attachment of kinship to the dread attraction of hate? You remain speechless. Your shame permeates the vast darkness and sends invisible shivers through my limbs. Leave my ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore

... all its issues to be harboured long in her slight nature, came over her now and then. She had been so near to him all these years, and had yet known nothing. It was the separateness of the individual lot—that awful and mysterious chasm which divides even lover from lover—which touched her here and there like a cold ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... thunder and lightning incomparably more destructive than those of nature; and have put fire and earthquake under the fortifications; shouting, "to make the welkin ring," at sight of the consequent ruin and chasm, which have opened an entrance for hostile rage, or compelled an immediate submission, if, indeed, it would then be accepted to disappoint that rage of its horrible consummation. They have taken the place,—and they have ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster

... could only be fired seven times in one day, but the weight and repetition of the shots made some impression on the walls. The Turks rushed to the edge of the ditch, attempted to fill the enormous chasm and to build a road to the assault. In the attack, as well as in the defence, ancient and modern artillery was employed. Cannon and mechanical engines, the bullet and the battering-ram, gunpowder and Greek fire, were ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... people generally were in favour of an expedition to Hawk's Head, or to the more distant, but more accessible wonders of Clough's Chasm, where in a sudden deep division of the hills lay a clear, still lake, whose depths it was said had never yet been sounded. Others approved rather of some plan that would allow a far larger number ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson

... bridge, made famous in Scott's "Lady of the Lake." "Bracklinn's thundering wave" is a beautiful cascade made at a place called the Bridge of Bracklinn, by a mountain stream called the Keltie, about a mile from the village of Callender, in Mentieth. Above a chasm where the brook precipitates itself from a height of at least 50 feet, there is thrown, for the convenience of the neighborhood, a rustic foot bridge, of about three feet in breadth, and without ledges, which is scarcely to ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman



Words linked to "Chasm" :   opening, gap



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