"Thule" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with weird names (so different from poor Titania!), and from the three-thousand "Unities!" What "poetry" we do get is so vague and dim and wistful and forlorn that it makes us want to go out and "buy clothes" for someone. We veer between the abomination of city-reform and the desolation of Ultima Thule. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... cognizance of the pit had become known to the inquisitorial agents—the pit whose horrors had been destined for so bold a recusant as myself—the pit, typical of hell, and regarded by rumor as the Ultima Thule of all their punishments. The plunge into this pit I had avoided by the merest of accidents, I knew that surprise, or entrapment into torment, formed an important portion of all the grotesquerie of these dungeon deaths. Having failed to fall, it was ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... days in a roomy, old-fashioned house in Camberwell Grove; and here, in course of time, I spent many a pleasant evening with him. His second wife, a charming North-country lady, was, as most now know, the original of "The Princess of Thule," the heroine of the book of that name, and the portrait was far more true to life than most sketches of heroines drawn from reality are. Black's mother, a kindly old Scotswoman, justly proud of her son, was another inmate of the house. It was from her I learned that Coquette, ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... them of a region, hard, iron-bound and cold, Nor seas of pearl abounded, nor mines of shining gold; Where the wind from Thule freezes the word upon the lip, And the ice in spring comes sailing athwart the early ship; He told them of the frozen scene, until they thrilled with fear, And piled fresh fuel on the hearth to make them ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... only, between two phases of an industry which, in spite of differences of climate and condition, retain a similarity in all essential features. When the last steer of the first herd was driven into the corral at the Ultima Thule of the range, it was the pony of the American cowboy which squatted and wheeled under the spur and burst down the straggling street of the little frontier town. Before that time, and since that time, it was and has been the same pony and the same man who have traveled the range, guarding ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... two trusty negro men, and we started for the nearest point on the Ohio River, our destination being the new lands in the West. We embarked on the first boat, drifting down the Ohio, and up the other rivers, reaching the Ultima Thule of our hopes within a month. The land was new; I liked it; we lived on venison and wild turkeys, and when once we had built a log house and opened a few fields, we were ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... transcends all forms, shrank from returning to the dogmas, the limitations of a definite creed. In her eyes, it seemed a step backward. Belief in a personal God, above and beyond the Universe, was reckoned by her own faith a primitive conception; a stage on the way to that ultima Thule where the soul of man perceives its own inherent divinity, and the knower becomes the Known, as notes become music, as the river becomes the sea. It was this that troubled her logical mind and ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... in the Orkneys; the day before I was in the Shetland Isles, the "farthest Thule" of the Romans, where I climbed the Noup of the Noss, as the famous headland of the island of Noss is called, from which you look out upon the sea that lies between ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... As in a dream Pierce Phillips joined the drifting current of humanity that flowed through the long front streets and eddied about the entrances of amusement places. He asked himself if he were indeed awake, if, after all, this was his Ultima Thule? Already the labor, the hardship, the adventure of the trip seemed imaginary; even the town itself was unreal. Dawson was both a disappointment and a satisfaction to Pierce. It was not what he had expected and it by no means filled the splendid picture he had painted in ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... rigor aeternus caeli? quid frigora prosunt? Ignotumq; fretum? maduerunt Saxone fuso Orcades, incaluit Pictonum sanguine Thule, Scotorum cumulos fleuit ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (4 of 8) - The Fovrth Booke Of The Historie Of England • Raphael Holinshed
... very warm out there, I feel—I know not how—oh dear! I wish my mother 'ld come home, I declare! I feel a shudder all over me crawl— I'm a silly, timid thing, that's all! [She begins to sing, while undressing.] There was a king in Thule, To whom, when near her grave, The mistress he loved so truly A ...
— Faust • Goethe
... heard the name of a new tribe—the Caledonian Britons, who, according to report, lived upon fish and milk, clearly indicating a less advanced stage of civilisation than that of the tribes they had encountered hitherto. The unexplored territory in which they dwelt was vaguely called Thule. Tacitus, the historian, and son-in-law of Julius Agricola—the discoverer of Strathearn—imagined it to be an island formed by the meeting of the Firths of Forth and Clyde. But the time was now come when more accurate information was to ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... unconsciously upon the low banks of a great yellow river amidst a tangled brake of strange, reed-like grasses that were unknown to him. The river, broadening as it debouched through many channels into a lordly bay, seemed to him the ULTIMA THULE of his journeyings. Unyoking his oxen on the edge of the luxuriant meadows which blended with scarcely any line of demarcation into the great stream itself, he found the prospect "good" according to his lights and prairial experiences, and, converting his halted wagon into a temporary ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... the dear Nonjuror claims; Moliere's old stubble in a moment flames. Tears gush'd again, as from pale Priam's eyes, When the last blaze sent Ilion to the skies. Roused by the light, old Dulness heav'd the head Then snatch'd a sheet of Thule from her bed; Sudden she flies, and whelms it o'er the pyre, Down sink the flames, and with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... this gentleman's connections in particular, who welcomed me both as a stranger and a Scott, being duly tenacious of their clan. This young gentleman is high in the medical department of the navy. He tells me that the Ultima Thule is improving rapidly. The old clumsy plough is laid aside. They have built several stout sloops to go to the deep-sea fishing, instead of going thither in open boats, which consumed so much time between the shore and the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... beyond the glimmer of firelight. If they want an Indian village, where is there a better place than in the black space under the stairs, where it can be reached without great fatigue after supper? Farthest Thule may be behind the asparagus bed. The North Pole itself may be decorated by Annie on Monday afternoon with the week's wash. From whatever house you hear a child's laugh, if it be a real child and therefore a great poet, you may know ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... and when he meets an honest sailor who may have all his earnings on board his ship but who carries an enemy's flag, he plunders him of every cent and leaves him the poor consolation that it is done according to law.... When the Malay subjects of Abba Thule cut down the cocoanut trees of an enemy, in the spirit of private revenge, he asked them why they acted in opposition to the principles on which they knew he always made and conducted a war. They answered, and let the reason make us humble, 'The ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... disbelieve, he embraced little by little the beautiful truth particularly, on this occasion, reserved for himself, and took in the stupendous picture? For here above all had the thought and the hand come from far away— even from ultima Thule, and yet were in possession triumphant and acclaimed. Well, all one could say was that the way they had felt their opportunity, the divine conditions of the place, spoke of the advantage of some such intellectual perspective as a remote original standpoint alone perhaps can give. ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... London has a foretaste of infinity. There is a region beyond Ultima Thule. I know not how it was, but on this famous Sunday afternoon, my friend and I, passing through Canonbury came into something called the Balls Pond Road—Mr. Perch, the messenger of Dombey & Son, lived somewhere in this region—and so I think by Dalston ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... concluding most of the sea within the land, and making an end of the world northward, near the 63rd degree. The same opinion, when learning chiefly flourished, was received in the Romans' time, as by their poets' writings it may appear. "Et te colet ultima Thule," said Virgil, being of opinion that Iceland was the extreme part of the world habitable toward the north. Joseph Moletius, an Italian, and Mercator, a German, for knowledge men able to be compared with the best geographers of our time, the one in his half spheres of the whole world, the other ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... go?—under Game or Fish? They lay their eggs on the sandbanks in numbers, and these fetch quite a big price, four annas each. I'd willingly sacrifice a night's sleep to see one come out of the water up the sand, and to "turn it" would make me feel at the Ultima Thule of the world abroad. ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... Panbaeotia, a league of fools, weighs down upon the world with a pall of lead. Thou must fain despise even those who pay thee worship. Dost thou remember the Caledonian who half a century ago broke up thy temple with a hammer to carry it away with him to Thule? He is no worse than the rest.... I wrote in accordance with some of the rules which thou lovest, O Theonoe, the life of the young god whom I served in my childhood, and for this they beat me like a Euhemerus and wonder ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... snow-white linen, the home-made cleanly cheer, the sweet wife all kindness and anxiety, I half envied the worthy Dane the peace and contentment of his secluded lot, and it needed not a glass of excellent Copenhagen schiedam to throw a "couleur de rose" about this Ultima Thule of dear woman's dominion. ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... assumption may not be strictly true, yet it seems scarcely likely that it is so widely untrue as it would be had the inner part of the ring an angular velocity nearly thrice that of the outer. Yet this is implied. While the period of Thule is 8.8 years, the period of Medusa is 3.1 years. (3.) The eccentricity of Jupiter's orbit is 0.04816, and the eccentricity of Mars' orbit is 0.09311. Estimated by groups of the first found and last found of the planetoids, the average eccentricity of the assemblage is about three ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... her ear and the nape of her white neck, he suddenly became aware of the presence of a lady still further ahead in the aisle, whose attire, though of black materials in the quietest form, was of a cut which rather suggested London than this Ultima Thule. For the minute he forgot, in his curiosity, that Avice intervened. The lady turned her head somewhat, and, though she was veiled with unusual thickness for the season, he seemed to recognize Nichola Pine-Avon ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... week we washed about in the surf of a high, dark coast towards Tunis. We might have been on the windward side of Ultima Thule. Supposing you could have been taken miraculously from your fogs and midday lamps of London, and put with me in the Celestine, and told that that sullen land looming through the murk could be yours, if you could guess its name, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Arcadian rustic in Devonshire; the romantic rhymer takes a plastered habitation, with one back window looking into the Green Park; the soft votary of luxury endeavors to rise at seven, in some Ultima Thule of frosts and storms; and the rich stock-jobber calculates his percentages among the soft dingles and woody shores of Westmoreland. When the architect finds this to be the case, he must, of course, content himself with suiting his design to such a mind as ought to be where the ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... thrice-renowned sons to greet, With rustic song and pageant meet. For joy! the girdled robe around Eliza's name henceforth shall sound, Whose venturous fleets to conquest start, Where ended once the seaman's chart, While circling Sol his steps shall count Henceforth from Thule's western mount, And lead new rulers round the seas From furthest Cassiterides. For found is now the golden tree, Solv'd th' Atlantic mystery, Pluck'd the dragon-guarded fruit; While around the charmed ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... philosophy of Heyst's father—that fatalism which is beyond hope and beyond pity—overshadows, like a ghastly image of doom seated upon a remote throne in the chill twilight of some far Ultima Thule, all the events, so curious, so ironic, so devastating, which happen to his lethargic and phlegmatic son. It is this imaginative element in his work which, in the final issue, really and truly counts. For it is a matter ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... from this despatch of Captain McClure's, had been frozen up in the Bay of Mercy of Banks Land: Banks Land having been for thirty years at once an Ultima Thule and Terra Incognita, put down on the maps where Captain Parry saw it across thirty miles of ice and water in 1819. Perhaps she was still in that same bay: these old friends wintering there, while the "Resolute" and "Intrepid" were lying under Dealy Island, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... was the most interesting coup d'oeil that I ever caught in any country. Here, then, after weeks and months of travel on foot, I was at the end of my journey. Through all the days of this period I had faced northward, and here was the Ultima Thule, the goal and termination of my tour. The road to the sea diverged from the main turnpike, which continued around the coast to Thurso. Followed this branch a couple of miles, when it ended at the door of a little, quiet, one-story ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... thought at all, curious misconceptions existed of her subordination to Great Britain, of her hopelessly Arctic climate, and of her inevitable drift into the arms of the Republic. Elsewhere abroad, Canada was an Ultima Thule, a barren land of ice and snow, about as interesting and important as Kamchatka and Tierra del Fuego, and other outlying odds and ends of the earth which one came across in the atlas but never ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... governed that part of Spain now called Andalusia, sailed from thence with two squadrons. Hamilco, sailing towards the north, discovered the coasts of Spain, France, England, Flanders, and Germany; and some allege that he sailed to Gothland, and even to Thule or Iceland, standing under the Arctic circle, in 64 degrees north, and continued his voyage during two years, till he came to that northern island, where the day in June continues for twenty-two hours, and the nights in December ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... come in later years when the Ocean will unloose the bands of things, when the immeasurable earth will lie open, when seafarers will discover new countries, and Thule will no longer be the extreme point among ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... considerations that weighed with me at that time and in the weeks that followed. I knew that the ice had come far north that season and, after listening to the suggestions of the whaling captains, had decided to steer to the South Sandwich Group, round Ultima Thule, and work as far to the eastward as the fifteenth meridian west longitude before pushing south. The whalers emphasized the difficulty of getting through the ice in the neighbourhood of the South Sandwich Group. ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... object, it is supposed, he meditated as early as the year 1474, though as yet it lay crude and immatured in his mind. Shortly afterwards, in the year 1477, he made a voyage to the north of Europe, navigating one hundred leagues beyond Thule, when he reached an island as large as England, generally supposed ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... Georgia, Cook penetrated further to the south-east, amidst floating ice. The continual dangers of the voyage overcame the crew. Southern Thule, Saunder's Island, and Chandeleur Islands, and finally Sandwich Land were discovered. These sterile and deserted archipelagoes have no value for the merchant or geographer. Once certain of their existence, it was unnecessary ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Ocean, in vast whirls, Boils round the naked, melancholy isles Of farthest Thule; and the Atlantic surge Pours in ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... apartment was so covered with books that those who entered could not with due reverence approach his presence. He kept binders, illuminators, and writers, in his palaces. Petrarch says that he had once a conversation with him, concerning the island called by the ancients Thule; calling him 'virum ardentis ingenii.' While chancellor and treasurer, instead of the usual presents and new-year's gifts appendant to his office, he chose to receive those perquisites in books. By ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Christopher became a sailor, and acquired all the qualifications necessary to handle a ship. He gained great experience and a thorough knowledge of his new profession. He once sailed on an English vessel to Thule or Iceland, the longest voyage which mariners of that time dared attempt. Then he tried his fortune in Portugal, earning a living by drawing sea-charts and serving as skipper on Portuguese vessels sailing to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and to Guinea. In the Portuguese ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... (4000 miles) in circumference,—and he appears also to have coasted along Belgium and Holland, as far as the mouth of the Elbe. Pytheas is, however, chiefly known in the history of geography as having referred to the island of Thule, which he described as the most northerly point of the inhabited earth, beyond which the sea became thickened, and of a jelly-like consistency. He does not profess to have visited Thule, and his account probably refers to the existence of ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... "saw no dreams," but they studied astronomy and navigation; their priests may well have been those Druids whose temple-structures, the senams and cromlechs, have wandered from the Tripolitan frontier as far as the chilly coasts of Brittany, and Salisbury Plain, and Ultima Thule. And every day, as the sun passed over their heads, they saluted him not as the Giver of Life or Lord of Earth, but cursed him with imprecations long and loathsome, for his ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... by millions on millions of people possessed of souls, and therefore something in God's reckonings! It was no illusion. Twice he had seen the mysterious being. How did he come hither to the Ultima Thule, as it were, of the known world? Why did he come just at a juncture when the daughter of a king of his own favoured people was immured in a dungeon, and calling for his help? Because he must have known that a spark of the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... the first Icelandic play to be done into English. Very probably, the well-informed reader will wonder, not so much that a translation 'should be so late in forthcoming,' but that, of all things, there should exist a dramatic literature worthy the name in that Ultima Thule. He is, indeed, not in any way to be blamed for not suspecting the possibility of a highly developed drama under conditions such as obtain in Iceland, even though he may well be aware that lyric poetry has been cultivated ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... provision which Providence has made for their food and fuel. The sea and fjords are alive with fish, which are not only a means of existence but of profit to them, while the wonderful Gulf Stream, which crosses 5000 miles of the Atlantic to die upon this Ultima Thule in a last struggle with the Polar Sea, casts up the spoils of tropical forests to feed their fires. Think of arctic fishers burning upon their hearths the palms of Hayti, the mahogany of Honduras, and the precious woods of the ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... newer ones, the glory of their brief and discredited, their flouted and demolished age, the brown Metropolitan and the white St. Nicholas, were much further down) and rising northward to the Ultima Thule of Twenty-third Street, only second then in the supposedly ample scheme of the regular ninth "wide" street. I can't indeed have moved much on that night of revelations and yet of enigmas over which I still hang fascinated; I must have kept intensely still in my corner, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... equator, far into the opposite hemisphere, for purposes of irrigation there (which we see he again states in the present volume), Miss Clerke writes: "We can hardly imagine so shrewd a people as the irrigators of Thule and Hellas[6] wasting labour, and the life-giving fluid, after so unprofitable a fashion. There is every reason to believe that the Martian snow-caps are quite flimsy structures. Their material might be called snow ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... 31st several islands and a considerable extent of land were discovered, to which the name of Sandwich Land, or Southern Thule, was given, as it was the most southern land then known. It showed a surface of great height, everywhere covered with snow. While the Resolution was close in with this coast, the wind fell, and left her to the mercy of a great westerly swell, which set right ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... the schools and he were helpless as an infant abandoned in mid-ocean. He could not so much as distinguish between peas and beans, between dogs and wolves, by the descriptions furnished by naturalists. That man who has lived to learn wisely and well has reached the Ultima Thule of terrestrial knowledge, the ne plus ultra of human understanding. More can no college professor or 'varsity president impart. If he know not this he is uneducated, though he be graduate of every university ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... vigorous years of life have been actively spent? And a land, besides, of surpassing sunny beauty and of rare romance. Business calls are usually held to be imperative, even if they send us, willing or unwilling, to "Ultima Thule or the Pole." Accordingly, my later lot has been to return to the older, and not to continue in the newer, part of the common empire. But, at any rate, that rather enhances the enjoyment ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... Of Waverley he said, "It may really boast to be a tolerably faithful portrait of Scottish manners."[422] He interrupts the story of The Pirate to describe the charm of the leaden heart, and offers this excuse: "As this simple and original remedy is peculiar to the isles of Thule, it were unpardonable not to preserve it at length, in a narrative connected with Scottish antiquities."[423] His comment on Ivanhoe was as follows: "I am convinced that however I myself may fail in the ensuing attempt, yet, with more labour in collecting, or more skill in using, the materials ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... lilted, he rode and sang, Then met he by chance Sir Thule Vang; Sir Thule Vang, with his twelve sons bold, All cas'd in iron, the bright and cold. Look out, look ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... myself, and penetrated to that Ultima Thule where Mr. Bratley resides. His house already, at that early hour of two, smelt vigorously of dinner. Nothing but the urgency of my business could have induced me to brave these odors ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various |
