abysm

One end awaits for all that mortal be; Pride and despair shall find a common grave: The Yang-tse-kiang renders wave and wave To mingle with the abysms of the sea.

Once returned from the abysms of the utter North to that little house upon the outskirts of Meudon, it was not the philosopher, the daring observer, the man of iron energy that imposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintive jester, a farceur incarnate and kindly, the co-equal of his children, and, it must be written, not seldom the comic despair of Madame Lavalle, who, as she writes five years after the marriage, to her venerable mother, found "in this unequalled intellect whose name I bear the abandon of a large and very untidy boy." Here is her letter:

And all my austere nights of midnight oil, all the books I had read, all the wisdom I had gathered, went glimmering before the ape and tiger in me that crawled up from the abysm of my heredity, atavistic, competitive and brutal, lustful with strength and desire to outswine the swine.

He was describing people who did not know each other, whose provenance and background were extremely varied but who nonetheless had joined the common cause of the Union: "Down in the abysms of New World humanity there had form'd and harden'd a primal hard-pan of national Union will, determined and in the majority" (Kaplan 1982: 707).

Borges is referred to as an intellectual author of fantastical stories: "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" ("The reader of books, the catcher of abysms"), "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" ("The great mystifier").

the womb and the moon, joined by mysterious "abysms" in

The use of a Nesbit-style group of children, as with Lewis's Pevensies, makes possible various kinds of conflict and interaction in a kind of social comedy that before Nesbit was more likely to appear in realistic fiction (e.g., Louisa May Alcott's Little Women), and, without her influence, was not as likely to be joined to the mythic, romantic sweep of the abysms of time that both Lewis and Tolkien loved.