"Sirius" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... laws, and dwellings I divide by lot; When rising vapors choke the wholesome air, And blasts of noisome winds corrupt the year; The trees devouring caterpillars burn; Parch'd was the grass, and blighted was the corn: Nor 'scape the beasts; for Sirius, from on high, With pestilential heat infects the sky: My men- some fall, the rest in fevers fry. Again my father bids me seek the shore Of sacred Delos, and the god implore, To learn what end of woes we might expect, And to what ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... back on Terra," he said conversationally. "Naturally it would, seeing we're so far away from there. But I never get tired of looking at it, and trying to see if I can figure out some of the brighter suns." He pointed to one bright star directly overhead. "That's Sirius, I know. It's always directly ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... "And Sirius and the Bull and the River," added Gladys. "It's just like getting a peep at the actors in their dressing-rooms before it is time for them to come out on the stage, to ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... etincelle, Orion resplendit; L'essaim prodigieux des Pleiades grandit; Sirius ouvre son cratere; Arcturus, oiseau d'or, scintille dans son nid; Le Scorpion hideux fait cabrer au zenith ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... the very subsistence of its inhabitants, depended on the annual overflowing of the Nile; and they looked for it with the utmost anxiety. Its approach was announced by the appearance of a certain star—SIRIUS. As soon as that star was seen above the horizon, they hastened to remove their flocks to the higher ground, and abandoned the lower pastures to the fertilizing influence of the stream. They hailed it ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... your charts, the charts you use and you at sea, the charts of the heavens, where what stars we know are marked, the sun and the moon and Venus and Jupiter, and Sirius the dog star, and Saturn, and the star you steer your ship by, the polar star.... And all the constellations, the Milky Way, and the belt of Orion, and the Plow and the Great Bear and the great glory you see when you ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... terrestrial, one feels, naturally, rounder in his orbit, and a little more likely to see stars, after such a dinner as this, than before. Do I not, indeed, see around me now, all the stars of the intellectual firmament? Are not SIRIUS and ARCTURUS here, in their glory, as well as ORION and the rest? As my old friend CRISPIN would say, their name is legion! I would blaze, gentlemen, too, if possible, in honor of the occasion; ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... non-existence; but this is no reason for professing a solemn uncertainty as to its existence. We cannot prove that each time a cab drives down Regent Street a stick of barley-sugar is not created in Sirius. But we do not proclaim, to the world our eternal ignorance as to whether or no this is so. Why then should our positivists treat in this way the alleged immaterial part of consciousness? Why this ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... that they observed eclipses at least one thousand six hundred years before the commencement of our era. Nor is this improbable, if the speculations of modern philosophers respecting the age of the world are entitled to respect. The Egyptians discovered, by the rising of Sirius, that the year consists of three hundred and sixty-five and one quarter days, and this was their sacred year, in distinction from the civil, which consisted of three hundred and sixty-five days. They also had observed the courses of the planets, and could explain the phenomena of the stations ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... from my unprotected flesh? How shall I walk on the air, sink through the earth, pass through stone walls, or walk, dry-shod, on the floor of the ocean? How shall I visit the other side of the moon, jump through the ring of Saturn, and gather sunflowers in Sirius? There are persons now living who profess to do no less remarkable feats, and to regard them as incidental merely to achievements far more important. A school of hierophants or adepts is said to exist in Tibet, who, as a matter of daily routine, quite ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... celebrated Dutch astronomer, returning one evening from his laboratory to his dwellinghouse, was surprised to find a group of country people gazing at a star which he was sure did not exist half an hour before. This was the star in question. It was then as bright as Sirius, and continued to increase till it surpassed Jupiter when brightest, and was visible at midday. It began to diminish in December of the same year, and in March 1574 had ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... walking. This was a voice of beauty. Some lilac bud was singing in its sleep. Sirius had dropped a ray across its lips of blue and coaxed it out to dance. There was a murmur and a stir among the fruit-trees too. The apple blossoms painted the darkness with their tiny fluttering dresses, while old Aldebaran trimmed them silently with ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... half of the month of April can be called the most brilliant sidereal period of the year. At this time eleven first-magnitude stars are visible in this latitude at 9 P.M. From east to west they are: Vega, Arcturus, Spica, Regulus, Pollux, Procyon, Sirius, Capella, Aldebaran, Betelgeuze, and Rigel, truly a ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... only had some evidence of that; but it is all dark, dark, on the other side of death, and on the other side of life too. Whence came we—whither do we tend? What power sent Sirius and all that galaxy of suns marching serenely through space? We, in our little planet-ship, falling into line, going like comets one day, and then vanishing; but the worlds moving on unconscious of our departure, and yet some power controls them and us. Medoline, to have my faith anchored as yours ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... winds abounds' beneath high Jupiter Unvexed by storms abides a temperate air; And fruitful Venus' star contains the seeds Of all things. Ruler of the boundless deep The god (11) Cyllenian: whene'er he holds That part of heaven where the Lion dwells With neighbouring Cancer joined, and Sirius star Flames in its fury; where the circular path (Which marks the changes of the varying year) Gives to hot Cancer and to Capricorn Their several stations, under which doth lie The fount of Nile, he, master of the waves, Strikes ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... sun. The rays of this star spend close upon a century in travelling hither. Dr Chase's measures with the Yale heliometer indicated for it, in 1894, a parallax of about 0'' .035;8 and it must, accordingly, be of nearly four times the total brightness of Sirius, while its aerial lustre exceeds seventy- fold that of the solar photosphere. Variables of the Algol class are rendered difficult to discover by the incidental character of their fluctuations. At the end of 1905, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... her eyes to the patch of sky where her son had passed in his shining metal sarcophagus. Sirius blossomed there, blue-white and beautiful. She raised her eyes still higher—and beheld the vast parterre of Orion with its central motif of vivid forget-me-nots, its far-flung blooms of Betelguese and Rigel, of Bellatrix and Saiph ...
— Star Mother • Robert F. Young
... group of the first magnitude, which include all the brightest stars visible, as Sirius, Canopus, Alpha, Arcturus, ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... a sound Disturbed the icy air; No watchman on his midnight round Or traveller was there; But over All-Saints', high and bright, Pulsed to the music Sirius white, The Wain by ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... to believe that the great star Sirius, the brightest in the heavens, is about six times as far off as alpha Centauri. His probable diameter is twelve million miles, and the light he emits two hundred times more brilliant than that of the sun. Yet, even through the telescope, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... force was of no use whatever, and might as well have not existed. Their ruin could not have been more complete or more rapid if they had not possessed an ironclad or a regiment. And all this was accomplished by me, Captain John Sirius, belonging to the navy of one of the smallest Powers in Europe, and having under my command a flotilla of eight vessels, the collective cost of which was eighteen hundred thousand pounds. No one has a better right to tell ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the far swing of some of the comets), is insignificant compared to the distances of the stars. One of the nearest stars to the earth that we know of is Alpha Centauri, estimated to be some twenty-five million millions of miles away. Sirius, the brightest star in the firmament, is double this distance ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... by Bayle, that Aristaeus found out the solstitial rising of Sirius, or the dog-star; and he adds, it is certain that this star had a particular relation to Aristaeus; for this reason, when the heats of the dog-star laid waste the Cycl{)a}des, and occasioned there a pestilence, Aristaeus was entreated to put a stop to it. He went ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... space is filled with isolated atoms or planetary dust, is rendered very probable by a fact discovered by Struve, that there is a gradual extinction in the light of the stars, amounting to a loss of 1/107 of the whole, in the distance which separates Sirius from the sun. According to Struve, this can be accounted for, "by admitting as very probable that space is filled with an ether, capable of intercepting in some degree the light." Is it not as probable that this ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... to the other constellations, and talked of suns of the first and second magnitude, and pointed out Sirius, in whose honor great temples had once been built in Egypt, and Arcturus, the same old Arcturus that a Hebrew poet by the name of Job had sung about, and Vega and Capella and Rigel, which he said sent out eight thousand times more light than our sun, and ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... feel the heat That blazes in the days of Sirius, But men shall quaff thy soda sweet, And girls imbibe thy ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... beauty, which begun To warm us so when thou wert here, Now scorches like the raging sun, When Sirius does first appear. Oh, fix this flame! and let despair Redeem the rest ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... Neith, and make the sun travel in the lower or the superior hemisphere with the twelve diurnal and the twelve nocturnal baris under the conduct of the hawk-headed pilot and of Neb Wa, the Lady of the Bark; they know that in the second half of the month of Tobi, Orion influences the left ear, and Sirius the heart; but they are absolutely ignorant why a woman prefers one man to another, a wretched Israelite ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... blister or two. By Jove, wasn't it splendid, coming back in the moonlight with that silver lane flickering on the water in front of us? We were so completely alone. We might have been up in the interstellar spaces, you and I, travelling from Sirius to Arcturus in one of those profound gulfs of the void which Hardy talks about. ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... to eat up the abbe's dinner, but could not. People from Sirius might, but it was too ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... huddled together, helpless with mirth, while Berry, calling upon Sirius, clung desperately to the bookcase, and Nobby, clearly interpreting our merriment as applause, stood immediately below his victim, panting a little with excitement ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... not until the 6th of June, 1789, that Phillip resumed his labours in the field of exploration. The Sirius had then returned from the Cape of Good Hope, and he could reckon on the assistance of his friend, Captain Hunter, to re-investigate Broken Bay with the vessel's boats. Accordingly, two boats were sent on to Broken ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... flash and meteors glare, And Hell invade the spheral school; But Law and Love are sovereign there, And Sirius ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... exhaled. 2. Conclusions are drawn. 3. Industry will enrich. 4. Stars have disappeared. 5. Twilight is falling. 6. Leaves are turning. 7. Sirius has appeared. 8. Constantinople had been captured. 9. Electricity has been harnessed. 10. Tempests have been raging. 11. Nuisances should be abated. 12. Jerusalem was destroyed. 13. Light can be reflected. 14. Rain must have fallen. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... 'neath the Dragon's feet, With a whoop and a flutter they swing and sway, And surge pell-mell down the Milky Way. Betwixt the legs of the glittering Chair They hover and squeak in the empty air. Then round they swoop past the glimmering Lion To where Sirius barks behind huge Orion; Up, then, and over to wheel amain, Under the silver, ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... system altogether,—leave the whole group of sun, primary and secondary planets quite behind us in our flight, as a bird might leave its bush and sweep into the whole forest. Now what do you see, Lady Constantine?' He levelled the achromatic at Sirius. ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... baleful comet die, The brood of blazing Sirius fly: God's orb shall quench their sultry heats And drive them from their ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... the interstellar gloom And sits in Sirius' disc all night, Till day makes him retrace his flight, With smell of burning on every plume, Back past the sun ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost
... beaten. We moved out beyond Centaurus, and Sirius, and then we met the Jeks, the Nosurwey, the Lud. We tried Terrestrial know-how, we tried Production Miracles, we tried patriotism, we tried damning the torpedoes and full speed ahead ... and we were smashed back like ...
— The Stoker and the Stars • Algirdas Jonas Budrys (AKA John A. Sentry)
... should be rendered by careful exclusion of tints from the word-palette. The art of the etcher is more needed than that of the painter.) Heaven overhead is set with stars, shooting intensely, smouldering with dull red in Aldeboran, sparkling diamond-like in Sirius, changing from orange to crimson and green in the swart fire of yonder double star. On the snow this moonlight falls tenderly, not in hard white light and strong black shadow, but in tones of cream and ivory, rounding the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... system, though the comets no doubt will roam beyond these limits. To complete our map we ought of course to put in some stars. There are a hundred million to choose from, and we shall begin with the brightest. It is often called the Dog Star, but astronomers know it better as Sirius. Let us see where it is to be placed on our map. Sirius is beyond Neptune, so it must be outside somewhere. Indeed, it is a good deal further off than Neptune; so I try at the edge of the drawing-board; I have got a method of making a little calculation that I do not intend to trouble ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... steam, Dr. Lardner delivered a lecture before the Royal Society "proving" that steamers could never cross the Atlantic, because they could not carry coal enough to produce steam during the whole voyage. The passage of the steamship Sirius, which crossed in nineteen days, was fatal to Lardner's theory. When it was proposed to build a vessel of iron, many persons said: "Iron sinks—only wood can float:" but experiments proved that the miracle of the prophet ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... little compared to the giant orbs of Jupiter and Saturn, which again sink into insignificance by the side of the sun. The sun itself is almost as nothing compared with the dimensions of the solar system. Sirius is calculated to be a thousand times as great as the Sun, and a million times as far away. The solar system itself travels in one region of space, sailing between worlds and worlds, and is surrounded by many other systems as great and complex ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... and flourish after an extraordinary manner is by the poets expressed by the word [Greek omitted]. In this sense, Antimachus calls the city of Cadmeans flourishing with fruit; and Aratus, speaking of the dog-star Sirius, says ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... her very first step in that garret. During her entire stay there, he had lived that life of ecstasy which suspends material perceptions and precipitates the whole soul on a single point. He contemplated, not that girl, but that light which wore a satin pelisse and a velvet bonnet. The star Sirius might have entered the room, and he would not have been ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the double, triple, and quadruple stars, those which, though single to the naked eye, when viewed by the help of the glass showed that they were two, three, or four, perfectly separate. Then the various colours were studied, and diamond-like Sirius was viewed, as well as his ruby, topaz, sapphire, and emerald companions in the great sphere. The moon was journeyed over at every opportunity, with her silvery, pumice-like craters, and greyish-bottomed ring-plains, surrounded by their ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... Lance kept his head tilted backward. Alpha Centauri, the most popular target, was not visible at this latitude; and Barnard's star, besides being far too faint, lay on the other side of the sun. But there shone Sirius, just as bright as it had glittered for the Greeks, and frosty Procyon, a little to the north. Both orbs twinkled and beckoned, evoking ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... pleasure pass'd: at noon of day The sun with sultry beams began to play: Not Sirius shoots a fiercer flame from high, When with his poisonous breath he blasts the sky: Then droop'd the fading flowers (their beauty fled) And closed their sickly eyes, and hung the head; And rivell'd up with heat, lay dying in their bed. The ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... one of the stars—not by any means a specially large or bright one; Sirius we now know to be twenty times as big as the sun. The sun is one of the stars: then is it at rest? Herschel asked this question and endeavoured to answer it. He succeeded in the most astonishing manner. It is, perhaps, his most remarkable ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... greater miracle is that man should have been able to rouse the horse from his immemorial sleep, to fix and direct his attention and to interest him in matters that are more foreign and indifferent to him than the variations of temperature in Sirius or Aldebaran are to us. It really seems, when we consider our preconceived ideas, that there is not in the animal an organic and insurmountable inability to do what man's brain does, a total and irremediable absence of ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... swell! you power that does this work! You unseen force, centripetal, centrifugal, through space's spread, Rapport of sun, moon, earth, and all the constellations, What are the messages by you from distant stars to us? what Sirius'? what Capella's? What central heart—and you the pulse—vivifies all? what boundless aggregate of all? What subtle indirection and significance in you? what clue to all in you? what fluid, vast identity, Holding the universe with all its parts as ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... himself in one of the most sequestered parts of Kensington Gardens. It was a cold, frosty day, and as Vivian flung himself upon one of the summer seats the snow drifted from off the frozen board; but Vivian's brow was as burning hot as if he had been an inhabitant of Sirius. Throwing his arms on a small garden table, he buried his face in his hands and wept as men can but once weep ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... stars, Sirius is the brightest; but twenty thousand millions of such stars would be required to transmit to the earth a light equal to that of the sun. And if it were difficult to ascertain the nature and quality of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... where the first University of the United States was founded, is justly celebrated for its astronomical staff. There are assembled the greatest men of science; there is the powerful telescope which enabled Bond to resolve the nebula of Andromeda and Clarke to discover the satellite of Sirius. This celebrated institution was, therefore, worthy in every way of the ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... "Sirius is my love, and I am his, O son of Arrius. We have been comrades for twenty years—in tent, in battle, in all stages of the desert we have been comrades. I ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... adore these windless winter nights?—when the air is as if it had been distilled." She paused in the middle of the road and looked around. "What's that star, Thor—over there—the one like a great white diamond?" He told her it was Sirius, adding that its light took eight years to travel to the earth, and going on to trace with his finger the constellation of the Dog. The minute's return to the old habits took some of the feverishness from her sense of tension as they continued ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... discovered, in 1572, what appeared to be a new star in the constellation, Cassiopeia. It was a star of the first magnitude when first perceived, and daily it increased in brilliancy, till it out-shone Sirius, equaled Venus in lustre, and could be perceived, even by the naked eye, at noonday. For nearly a month the star shone; at first it had a white light, then a yellow, and finally it was a bright red. Then it slowly faded, and in about ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... small obelisk on a rock above, we follow a path cut in a mountain of very red marble, having on the left a marble wall forming a parapet about five feet high. At intervals solid pedestals rise from this wall, bearing every token of having served to support colossal statues of Sirius, the barking Anubis, or the Dog star. One hundred and thirty-three of these pedestals with the marks just mentioned are still in their places, but only two figures of the dog were recognizable when I was there; these, however, though ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... an early period, observed that the rising of the Nile coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius, the Dog-star, and hence they very plausibly referred it to celestial agencies. Men are ever prone to mistake coincidences for causes; and thus it came to pass that the appearance of that star on the horizon at the rising of the sun was not only viewed as the signal, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... on this philosophical speech and determination of Mr. Link. Had Mrs. Vrain been an imposter, her house of cards would have been knocked down, as soon as reared, by the searching inquiry instituted by the Sirius Assurance Company. It appeared that the life of the late Mark Vrain was on the books of the company for no less a sum than twenty thousand pounds; and under the will this was to be paid over to Lydia Vrain, nee Clyne. The widow, aided by her father—who was a shrewd business ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... Swim—For the attack on the Zeebrugge Mole: Vindictive, Iris, Gloucester. To block the Bruges canal: Thetis, Interprid and Iphigenia. To block the entrance to Ostend: Sirius and Brilliant. ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake
... had not yet arisen, but there was a beautiful clear sky. The great Southern Cross hung in the heavens like a giant lantern. On one side, and on line with each other, shone the two brightest stars in the heavens, the first being the Dog Star Sirius, and the next in order, Canopus, the one white, and ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... the radiation. This varies within wide limits. The faintest star which can give an impression on the photographic plates of the greatest instrument of the Mount Wilson observatory (100 inch reflector) is nearly 100 million times fainter than Sirius, a star which is itself more than 10000 million times fainter than the ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier
... people were busy in marriages and among their new fields; I was giving statutes and homesteads; when suddenly from a tainted space of sky came, noisome on men's bodies and pitiable on trees and crops, pestilence and a year of death. They left their sweet lives or dragged themselves on in misery; Sirius scorched the fields into barrenness; the herbage grew dry, and the sickly harvest denied sustenance. My father counsels to remeasure the sea and go again to Phoebus in his Ortygian oracle, to pray for grace and ask ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... arms): I fall, Sir, out of heaven! Now, would you credit it, that as I fell I saw that Sirius wears a nightcap? True! (Confidentially): The other Bear is still too small to bite. (Laughing): I went through the Lyre, but I snapped a cord; (Grandiloquent): I mean to write the whole thing in a book; The small ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... a pinguitude withal which makes the depth of winter to her the most desirable season. Her distress in the warmer solstice is pitiable. During the months of July and August she usually renteth a cool cellar, where ices are kept, whereinto she descendeth when Sirius rageth. She dates from a hot Thursday, some twenty-five years ago. Her apartment in summer is pervious to the four winds. Two doors in north and south direction, and two windows fronting the rising and the setting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... On the first day of April of the year of our Lord, 1962, Francis Farnsworth Pfleuger brought into being a Moebius coincidence field and established multiple contact with the twenty-first satellite of the star Sirius, thereby giving the people of Valleyview access, via their back doorways, to a New World. Here we have come to live. Here we have come to raise our children. Here, in this idyllic village, which the noble race that once inhabited this fair planet left behind them when they migrated ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... spheroidal bodies. The cluster of stars, to which our cosmical island belongs, forms a lens-shaped, flattened stratum, detached on every side, whose major axis is estimated at seven or eight hundred, and its minor one at a hundred and fifty times the distance of Sirius. It would appear, on the supposition that the parallax of Sirius is not greater than that accurately determined for the brightest star in the Centaur (0".9128), that light traverses one distance of Sirius ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... "Sirius IV got in first by a whisker, it seems, but Aldebaran II was so close a second that it was a photo finish, and all the channels have been jammed ever since. Canopus, Vega, Rigel, Spica. They all want you. Everybody, from Alsakan to Vandemar and back. We told them right off that we ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... through colossal telescopes," says Humboldt, "the contemplation of these nebulous masses leads us into regions from whence a ray of light, according to an assumption not wholly improbable, requires millions of years to reach our earth—to distances for whose measurement the dimensions (the distance of Sirius, or the calculated distances of the binary stars in Cygnus and the Centaur) of our nearest stratum of ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... PERSIA.—The ancient literature of Persia is mainly the exposition of its religion. Persia, Media, and Bactria acknowledged as their first religious prophet Honover, or Hom, symbolized in the star Sirius, and himself the symbol of the first eternal word, and of the tree of knowledge. In the numberless astronomical and mystic personifications under which Hom was represented, his individuality was lost, and little is known of his history ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Pere Lachaise; that of the Poet Moreau, in the cemetery Montparnasse; bust of Taglioni, in the foyer of the Grand Opera House, Paris; bust of the astronomer Leverrier, at the Institute, Paris; a statue, "The Spring," Museum of Bourges; "Sirius," in the Palais of the Governor of Algiers. Also busts of Prince Napoleon, General Boulanger, the Countess de Choiseul, the Countess de Vogue, and numerous statuettes ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... stars is inconceivably distant from the earth, and they are probably proportionably distant from each other. By a calculation of the velocity of light, Sirius is supposed to be at least 54,224,000,000,000 miles from the earth. (See Nicholson's "Encyclopedia", article Light.) That which appears only like a thin and silvery cloud streaking the heaven is in effect composed of innumerable clusters of suns, each ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... exhibit changes of complexion in themselves. Sirius, as before stated, was once a ruddy, or rather a fiery-faced orb, but has now forgotten to blush, and looks down upon us with a pure, brilliant smile, in which there is no trace either of anger ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... indeed, to enjoy being heckled, and conciliates his opponents by that bright pugnacity which a true Briton loves better than anything else in politics. I appreciate, too, the compliment he pays me. But I wish he would not choose to put his ardour in competition with Sirius and the dog-days; and I heartily wish he had not brought down Mr. Blank, M.P., to address ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... looking at the Milky Way. Through his perma-glas canopy, he could see it trailing across the black velvet of space like a white bridal veil. Below his SC9B scout-ship stretched the red dust deserts of Sirius Three illuminated by the thin light of two ice moons. He looked at ...
— The Quantum Jump • Robert Wicks
... not often preached to you, Rachel," said he, as he lay back on his chair, "that all these things were fixed ere Sirius was born? Yea," he added, as a smile played amid the seriousness of his face, "ere yet there was a space for the dog-star to wag his tail. The croppings out will now come thick, and you will know whether you are to be a lady ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... mutet habenas Phoebi pallens Lucifer ortu. Tu frondifluae frigore brumae Stringis lucem breuiore mora: 15 Tu, cum feruida uenerit aestas, Agiles nocti diuidis horas. Tua uis uarium temperat annum Vt quas Boreae spiritus aufert Reuehat mites Zephyrus frondes 20 Quaeque Arcturus semina uidit Sirius altas urat segetes. Nihil antiqua lege solutum Linquit propriae stationis opus. Omnia certo fine gubernans 25 Hominum solos respuis actus Merito rector cohibere modo. Nam cur tantas lubrica uersat Fortuna uices? Premit insontes Debita sceleri ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... Theory of the Fire-festivals, pp. 331-341.—Theory that the fire-festivals are charms to ensure a supply of sunshine, 331; coincidence of two of the festivals with the solstices, 331 sq.; attempt of the Bushmen to warm up the fire of Sirius in midwinter by kindling sticks, 332 sq.; the burning wheels and discs of the fire-festivals may be direct imitations of the sun, 334; the wheel which is sometimes used to kindle the fire by friction may also be an imitation of the sun, 334-336; the influence which the ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... hot season in the skies. Sirius held the ascendant, and under his influence even the radiant band of the Celestials began to droop, while the great ball-room of Olympus grew gradually more and more deserted. For nearly a week had Orpheus, the leader of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... battle-field, was pricked by his conscience for sitting at table where the guests numbered thirteen. But he was afraid to die at the dinner-table. He believed that the great God who makes suns and stars and blazing planets to fly from His hand as sparks beneath the hammer of a smith, the god of Sirius and Orion, always stopped his work at six o'clock to count the guests around each table, and if he found perchance there were thirteen, then would lift his arrow to the bow to let fly the deadly shaft upon these awful sinners against the law of ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... These molecules, according to the most competent judgment, were incapable of sub-division without change of substance, and were absolutely fixed for each substance. "A molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius, or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time." The relations of the parts and movements of the planetary systems may and do change, but "the molecules—the foundation-stones of the natural universe—remain unbroken ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... again crouch round the fire. Officers and privates press together for warmth. Other stragglers arrive, and sit at the backs of the first. With the progress of the night the stars come out in unusual brilliancy, Sirius and those in Orion flashing like stilettos; and ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... son's son. Then forth with eagle-speed Afront of that high wall he rushed, his ear Drawn by the immortal horses of his sire. As from the ocean-verge upsprings the sun In glory, flashing fire far over earth— Fire, when beside his radiant chariot-team Races the red star Sirius, scatterer Of woefullest diseases over men; So flashed upon the eyes of Ilium's host That battle-eager hero, Achilles' son. Onward they whirled him, those immortal steeds, The which, when now he longed to chase the foe Back from the ships, Automedon, ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... worst Of maladies? Terrific pest! that blasts 190 The huntsman's hopes, and desolation spreads Through all the unpeopled kennel unrestrained. More fatal than the envenomed viper's bite; Or that Apulian[10] spider's poisonous sting, Healed by the pleasing antidote of sounds. When Sirius reigns, and the sun's parching beams Bake the dry gaping surface, visit thou Each even and morn, with quick observant eye, Thy panting pack. If in dark sullen mood, The gloating hound refuse his wonted meal, 200 Retiring to some close, obscure retreat, Gloomy, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... still thick, but looking straight up he saw a single star, and tried vaguely to reckon whether it were Sirius, or—or—The effort tired him too much, and he closed his heavy lids and thought that he would sleep... The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... pages of his book, and "Taras Bulba" is covered with a glory well-nigh unattained in any language since the days of Homer. For "Taras Bulba," though only one of several stories in "Evenings on a Farm," is among them what the star Sirius is in the already glorious heavens of a November midnight. As a thing of beauty, of simple grandeur, of wild strength, of heroic nobility, as a song, in short, I do not hesitate to affirm that it finds its like only in the Iliad. It is an epic song, and a song not of ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... Oriental, had not hurried himself over his narrative, and it had been nine o'clock when we sat down to smoke. So I bade him good-night, and, musing on all I had heard and seen, retired to my own apartments, glancing at Sirius and at the unhappy-looking moon before I turned in ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... that from the supposed divine nature of the heavenly bodies their motions determined the periodical religious festivals. As instances of the one we have the observation of the Egyptians, that the rising of the Nile corresponded with the heliacal rising of Sirius; the directions given by Hesiod for reaping and ploughing, according to the positions of the Pleiades; and his maxim that "fifty days after the turning of the sun is a seasonable time for beginning a ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... size of the sun! Yet, notwithstanding this immense size, our sun is quite a small body as compared with some of the fixed stars, which, as perhaps you may know, are really suns at an inconceivable distance from us. The bright star Sirius, which is visible during our winter time, is not only very much brighter in reality than our sun, but must be many times larger; and there are others known to be very much larger than Sirius. It has been computed ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... one million times as far from us as the sun. If we take the distance of Sirius from the earth and subdivide it into one million equal parts, each of these parts would be long enough to span the great distance of 92,700,000 miles from the earth to the sun,' yet Sirius is one of the NEAREST ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... I believe that these two centres of civilization are just exactly the two points that close the circuit in the battery of our planetary intelligence! And I believe there are spiritual eyes looking out from Uranus and unseen Neptune,—ay, Sir, from the systems of Sirius and Arcturus and Aldebaran, and as far as that faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent in the distance that we call the nebula of Orion,—looking on, Sir, with what organs I know not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery fusion, the accidents and hindrances of humanity or ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... themselves that they like poetry but to whom its book is sealed; and who, in finding out what Browning means, imagine to their great surprise that they find out that they care for poetry. What they really care for is their own cleverness in discovering riddles, and they are as far away from poetry as Sirius is from the Sun. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... of much the same size and brilliance as our sun, we should be able roughly to calculate their distance from their faintness. We cannot do this, as they differ considerably in size and intrinsic brilliance. Sirius is more than twice the size of our sun and gives out twenty times as much light. Canopus emits 20,000 times as much light as the sun, but we cannot say, in this case, how much larger it is than the sun. Arcturus, however, belongs to the same class of stars as our sun, and ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... first hum and preparation of awakening spring—very faint—whether in the earth or roots, or starting of insects, I know not—but it was audible, as I lean'd on a rail (I am down in my country quarters awhile,) and look'd long at the western horizon. Turning to the east, Sirius, as the shadows deepen'd, came forth in dazzling splendor. And great Orion; and a little to the north-east the big ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... he watched the Six Flying Stars speed across the night sky—six glowing stars that moved in a direction opposite to the march of the other stars. Bright as Sirius seen from Earth, strung out one behind the other like jewels on a velvet string, ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer
... stay in this immense solar system in the Milky Way, I crossed the vast dome of the heavens and lighted on Sirius, the brightest star in all the canopy of night. Here I found the fire life of Alpha Centaurus repeated, but I did not pause to study the odd phases presented ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... religion is difficult to discern clearly: but we may recognise in it most of those beings or personifications of natural phenomena which were the chief objects of worship among all the ancient nations of Western Asia—the stars, Sirius, the moon, the sun, water and fire, plants, animals beneficial to mankind, such as the cow and the dog, good and evil spirits everywhere present, and beneficent or malevolent souls of mortal men, but all systematised, graduated, and reduced to sacerdotal principles, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... between the stars was possible. Without the Fitzgerald Contraction, the crew of a spaceship would age five years en route to Alpha C, eight to Sirius, ten to Procyon. More than two centuries would elapse in passage to a far-off ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... born of night, it is no longer night. Casseopeia's Chair and Orion were being tossed about the burning heavens like golden furniture out of a house on fire; and one great star-jewel had fallen on the apex of cruel Khufu's Pyramid. I should have liked to believe it was Sirius, the "lucky" star sacred to Isis and Hathor; but Monny's schoolgirl knowledge of astronomy bereft me of that innocent pleasure. No wonder that the ancient Egyptians, with such jewels in their blue treasure-house, were famous ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... "I shall not say like Renan, my beloved master: 'What does Sirius care?' because somebody would reply with reason 'What does little Earth care for big Sirius?' But I am always surprised when people who are adult, and even old, let themselves be deluded by the illusion of power, as if hunger, love, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... tin kettle at his tail rushes mad and jingling across the street, leaving behind him a new view of the wild tyranny of Ambition. A great personage loses much sawdust through a rent in his unfortunate nether garments. Sirius and the Pleiades look down from above. The book is everywhere, and everywhere at once. The asides seem to occupy more space than the main thesis, whatever that may be. Just when you think you have found the meaning of the author at last, another display ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... unrumpled on his head, in the profoundest silence of blue air, as if he had never in his life passed a more thoughtful, peaceful time than the very last night of all. To such feet as Ginevra's the cottage on Glashgar was for months almost as inaccessible as if it had been in Sirius. More than once the Daur was frozen thick; for weeks every beast was an absolute prisoner to the byre, and for months was fed with straw and turnips and potatoes and oilcake. Then was the time for stories; and often in the long ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... system had one genesis, and were part of the same nebulous mass. But this does not include the other systems and nebulae; for, compared with them, our sun, as we have seen, is itself advanced and small beside such stars as Sirius having diameters of twelve million miles." As they left Pallas between themselves and the sun, it became a crescent and finally disappeared. Two days later they sighted another asteroid exactly ahead. They examined it closely, and concluded it must be Hilda, put down in ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... the first to set the suns of space in motion; but in imagination only. His daring surmise was, however, confirmed in 1718, when Halley announced[3] that Sirius, Aldebaran, Betelgeux, and Arcturus had unmistakably shifted their quarters in the sky since Ptolemy assigned their places in his catalogue. A similar conclusion was reached by J. Cassini in 1738, from a comparison of his own observations with those ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... always put me here. That screen would set me dreaming—and the blue roses and the moon clock. I used to lie in that bed and send myself to sleep with more tales than are in the Arabian Nights. There's a rift in the poplars through which you can see a very bright star—Sirius, I believe. May you have pleasant dreams, Mr. Rand, in my old bed!" He glanced from Rand's flushed face to the papers strewn upon the counterpane. "You have been ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... built up on a belief in a God were collapsing, Europe had long inclined towards the religion of Progress as the last tenable. Now I perceived as I raised my eyes to the starry expanse and rejoiced in my favourite stars, Sirius in the Great Dog, and Vega in the Lyre or Altair in the Eagle, that it, too, was tottering, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... thundering field. Both armies start, and trembling gaze around; And earth and heaven re-bellow to the sound. As vapours blown by Auster's sultry breath, Pregnant with plagues, and shedding seeds of death, Beneath the rage of burning Sirius rise, Choke the parch'd earth, and blacken all the skies; In such a cloud the god from combat driven, High o'er the dusky whirlwind scales the heaven. Wild with his pain, he sought the bright abodes, There sullen sat beneath the sire of gods, Show'd ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... of war may be of interest at this time. Some one has called attention to the illuminating discourse between Micromegas, gigantic dweller on one of the planets revolving about Sirius, and a company of our philosophers, as reported in the seventh chapter of the amusing fantasy bearing the name of the above-mentioned Sirian visitor. A free translation of a part of this conversation is here offered. After congratulating his terrestrial hearers ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... Liverpool, said that on the first voyage of the Sirius steamship to America, only five letters were received at the post-office to go by her, while at least 10,000 were sent in a bag from the consignee of ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt |
