"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... royal fleet at anchor in these strange countries and behold the Spaniards established, not only in the Tropic of Cancer, but almost on the equator,—contrary to the opinion of many scientists,—ready to settle ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... Alexandria, and placed at the head of the library. His great achievement was the determination of the circumference of the earth. This was done by measuring on the ground the distance between Syene, a city exactly under the tropic, and Alexandria, situated on the same meridian. The distance was found to be five thousand stadia. The meridional distance of the sun from the zenith of Alexandria he estimated to be 7 deg. 12', or a fiftieth part of the circumference of the meridian. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... ancient watery park, within that pathless chase of ocean, where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, from the rising to the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved! And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers—-young women how lovely, young men bow noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting toward us amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... the zephyr at eventide's hour; It falls on the heart like the dew on the flower,— An infinite essence from tropic to pole, The promise, the home, and ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... they had passed the southern tropic, as they neared the Cape, the climate changed suddenly, with so swift an alteration that from sultry heat of a torrid summer they plunged almost directly into the biting cold of winter. As they doubled the Cape a strong north-west gale met them, with icy cold in its blast. ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... planet has many millions of square miles of surface, and a single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to find by random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting for sport would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. So if they found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperate zone. Cattle would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The mine would not be on a prairie. The ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... enough to take her back single-handed, and what would he not have given to be on the bridge again, with Jo and the rest of the old crew on deck, and the Sea Eagle pushing her nose out through the Golden Gate, heading for the enchanted regions of the tropic seas. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar, In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost line back with tropic heat." ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... was with us, and the language, that Jimmy poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly, a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur was ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... indirectly of the mutual relations binding together the suns and systems of space. Thirteen observatories in Europe and America joined in the work, now virtually terminated. Its scope was, after its inception, widened to include southern zones as far as the Tropic of Capricorn; this having been rendered feasible by Schoenfeld's extension (1875-1885) of Argelander's survey. Thirty thousand additional stars thus taken in were allotted in zones to five observatories. Another important undertaking ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... natives of New Guinea. We now pass to the natives of Melanesia, the great archipelago or rather chain of archipelagoes, which stretches round the north-eastern and eastern ends of New Guinea and southward, parallel to the coast of Queensland, till it almost touches the tropic of Capricorn. Thus the islands lie wholly within the tropics and are for the most part characterised by tropical heat and tropical luxuriance of vegetation. Only New Caledonia, the most southerly of the larger islands, differs somewhat from the rest in its comparatively cool climate ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... revolution of a day and night, Diodorus Siculus computes ten days from the Palus Moeotis to Rhodes, and four days from Rhodes to Alexandria. The navigation of the Nile from Alexandria to Syene, under the tropic of Cancer, required, as it was against the stream, ten days more. Diodor. Sicul. tom. i. l. iii. p. 200, edit. Wesseling. He might, without much impropriety, measure the extreme heat from the verge of the torrid zone; but he speaks of the Moeotis ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... been such exceptional weather, although the weather of my acquaintance invariably is exceptional. No sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted and blended into the soft darkness of a summer night than we appeared to sail straight into tropic heat and a sluggish vapor, brooding on the water like steam from a giant geyser. This simmering, oily, exhausting temperature carried us close to the line. "What is before us," we asked each other languidly, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... the night was an altar with death for priest. The channel that sunders England from shores where never was man born free Was clothed with the likeness and thrilled with the strength and the wrath of a tropic sea. As a wild steed ramps in rebellion, and rears till it swerves from a backward fall, The strong ship struggled and reared, and her deck was upright as a sheer cliff's wall. Stern and prow plunged under, alternate: a glimpse, a recoil, ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Farquharson he spoke with precision and authority, for he had shared with Farquharson his bungalow there in Muloa—a period of about six months, it seemed—and there Farquharson had contracted a tropic fever and died. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... part of the world; in fact, a new insect manufacture of islands. They are of all sizes. We give the description of a small one of this order in the Capricorn Group, an assemblage of islands and reefs on the north-east coast of Australia, so called from the parallel of the Tropic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... 22nd parallel of south latitude we fairly entered into the region of flying fish, and dolphins as they are commonly called; tropic birds were now also frequently seen, which had not up to this moment been the case; we often also met hereabouts with a dark-coloured bird with bronzed wings, having a cry precisely like a Snipe. ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... irritated by an interloper. The spiritual lion was that Brant was connected with Lysbeth van Goorl, once known as Lysbeth de Montalvo, a lady who had brought her reputed husband no luck. Often and often during dreary hours of reflection beneath tropic suns, for which the profession of galley-slave gave great leisure, the Senor Ramiro remembered that very energetic curse which his new affianced wife had bestowed upon him, a curse in which she prayed that ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... musician. Quite as much as that of any other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, his magistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio of the scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeys and birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in the finale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields of Europe, smells of the hay, gives again the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... according to custom, we Ducked those that had never passed the Tropic before. The manner of doing it was to reeve a Rope in the Mainyard, to hoist 'em about half-way up to the Yard, and let 'em fall at once into the Water; they being comfortably Trussed by having a Stick 'cross through their Legs, and well fastened to the Rope, that they might ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... reported, regarded Enoch Arden as "more beautiful" than the other tracts which were read to her. It is indeed a tender and touching tale, based on a folk-story which Tennyson found current in Brittany as well as in England. Nor is the unseen and unknown landscape of the tropic isle less happily created by the poet's imagination than the familiar ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... resolutions melted before her approach, as the iceberg thaws and dissolves beneath the rays of a tropic sky. He had floated into the old latitudes of love and warmth again, and his cold heart once more began to beat—his hardness to pass away; leaving the ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... flower and everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and most men will swear they've seen a quill pen. So you saw that map among tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific Islands. It was ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... beginning of Aries and in the beginning of Libra; and it is divided by two arcs from it, one towards the North and one towards the South; the points of these two said arcs are equi-distant from the first circle in every part by twenty-three degrees and one point more, and the one point is the tropic of Cancer, and the other is the tropic of Capricorn; therefore it must be that Maria in the sign of Aries can see, when the Sun sinks below the mid-circle of the first Poles, this Sun to revolve round the Earth below, or rather the sea, like a millstone, ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... change. So far as he can see or learn, all the motion, all the seeming dance, is but a rush for death, a panic flight into the moveless silence. The summer wind, the tropic tornado, the softest tide, the fiercest storm, are alike the tumultuous conflict of forces, rushing, and fighting as they rush, into the arms of eternal negation. On and on they hurry—down and down, to a cold stirless solidity, where wind blows not, water ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... his head Returned my salutation; then resumed His station as before: and when I asked His history, the veteran, in reply, Was neither slow nor eager; but, unmoved, And with a quiet, uncomplaining voice, A stately air of mild indifference, He told in few plain words a soldier's tale— That in the Tropic Islands he had served, Whence he had landed scarcely three weeks past; That on his landing he had been dismissed, And now was traveling toward his native home. This heard, I said, in pity, "Come with me." He stooped, and straightway from ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... the doctor, "a journey inland right up into the cool country away from this tropic ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... of striding in two or three evenings in a week,—a big, fair, broad-shouldered six-footer, with sun-narrowed eyes of arctic blue, a short blond moustache, and skin permanently burned by the unshadowed glare of many and tropic days. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... hold serene Each its own star, far out at sea to mark Thy westward way, O Princess, through the dark. The rose-red sunset dies into the dusk, The silver dusk of the long twilight hour, And opal lights come out, and fiery gleams Of flame-red beacons, like the ash-gray husk Torn from some tropic blossom bursting into flower, Making the sea bloom ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... ears. Lester was brooding over the history of Egypt, its successive tides or waves of rather weak-bodied people; the thin, narrow strip of soil along either side of the Nile that had given these successive waves of population sustenance; the wonder of heat and tropic life, and this hotel with its modern conveniences and fashionable crowd set down among ancient, soul-weary, almost despairing conditions. He and Jennie had looked this morning on the pyramids. They had taken a trolley to the Sphinx! ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... horizon,—I was far above the earth,—then back to the beauteous snow in its sunset splendor. The rosy tinges lifted and vanished, and a cool twilight glow rested on the mountain summits. I looked upon the plain below. Far beneath, it lay in the evening shadow with its thousand fading tints of tropic foliage, with one spot of blue, almost immediately below, in all that mass of verdure—the lake. I knew then that I was almost exactly above the cave I had so long inhabited. And Pippity—Grilly—were ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... face and neck were not merely from time and exposure; there were those unmistakable signs where flesh or fat has fallen away, and the skin has become loose. The neck was simply an intricate surface of seams and wrinkles, and sun-scarred with the burning of the Desert. The Far East, the Tropic Seasons, and the Desert—each can have its colour mark. But all three are quite different; and an eye which has once known, can thenceforth easily distinguish them. The dusky pallor of one; the fierce red-brown of the other; and of the third, the dark, ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... been quite thoroughly studied with results of great interest. When heated with baryta-water or hydrochloric acid, it takes up a molecule of water and is split into tropine, C{8}H{15}NO, and tropic acid, C{9}H{10}O{3}. This latter is phenyl-oxypropionic acid. Tropine, when heated to 180 deg.C. with concentrated hydrochloric acid, splits off a molecule of water, and yields tropidine, C{8}H{13}N, a liquid base, with an odor resembling ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... artificially heated and moistened to reproduce the steaming jungle, is massed a splendid exhibit of those island trees and flowers that most of us know only through pictures and stories of southern seas. Around the central source of light, which is hidden under tropic vines, stands a circle of royal palms; and planted thickly over the remaining space are jungle trees, vivid enough to our imagination, but many of which have never before been seen in ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost line back with tropic heat; And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draft The great throat of the ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... area the mountains rise abruptly in parallel ranges lying in a general north and south direction, and they subside only in the foothills west of the great level bottom land bordering the Rio Grande de Cagayan. The Cordillera Central is as fair and about as varied a mountain country as the tropic sun shines on. It has mountains up which one may climb from tropic forest jungles into open, pine-forested parks, and up again into the dense tropic forest, with its drapery of vines, its varied hanging orchids, and its graceful, lilting fern trees. It has ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... beauties. There is no desert so barren, no mountains so bleak, no woods so wild that to those who dwell therein their home is not beautiful. The Esquimau would not exchange his blinding waste of snow and dark fields of water for the luxuriance of tropic vegetation. Why should we exchange the glories of the land we live in for the footworn and sight-worn, the thumbed and fingered beauties of other lands? If we desire novelty and adventure, seek it in the unexplored regions of the great Northwest; if we crave grandeur, ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... declination, and warms the lower half of the great African continent, the current of heated air ascending from the equatorial belt leaves a comparative vacuum, towards which the less rarefied atmospheric fluid is drawn down from the regions north, of the tropic, bringing with it the cold and dry winds from the Himalayan Alps, and the lofty ranges of Assam. The great change is heralded as before by oppressive calms, lurid skies, vivid lightning, bursts of thunder, and tumultuous ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... visited that land, And Summer's lap spilled o'er with fruits and flowers, And tropic trees cast shade on every hand, And twined ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... it was reported that tropic islands had been discovered and ruled by Archbishop Oppas, of Spain, who was fain to leave his country because he had betrayed his king to the Moors. He found a race friendly and gentle, sharing with ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... Hath it not a certain exquisite smoothness of rhythm like the ripple of a woodland stream clear-winding through the reeds? ... and is there not a tender witchery in the delineation of my maiden-heroine, so warmly fair, so wildly passionate? Methinks she doth resemble some rich flower of our tropic fields, blooming at sunset and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... sand storm the day before, followed by rain, and all the land was refreshed and sparkling. The pepper trees swung tassels of bloom and the flaming coral of the occotilla glowed like tropic birds poised on wide-reaching wands of green. Meadow larks echoed each other in the tender calls of nesting time, and from the jagged peaks on the east, to far low hills rising out of a golden haze in the west, there was a great quiet and peace brooding ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... were golden and opal-coloured—and BARE. There were wreaths of tropic seaweed, there were rich tropic shells of the kind you would not buy in the Kentish Town Road under at least fifteen pence a pair. There were turtles basking lumpily on the water's edge—but no cook, no ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... like fading flowers, and shedding their chorus-girls on every outward breeze; the tables d'hote express a relaxed enterprise in the nonchalance of the management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow rooms; the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of their windows in a show of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with their retarded displays of butcher's meats ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the Land to which yon Ship must go? Festively she puts forth in trim array; As vigorous as a Lark at break of day: Is she for tropic suns, or polar snow? What boots the enquiry? Neither friend nor foe She cares for; let her travel where she may, She finds familiar names, a beaten way Ever before her, and a wind to blow. Yet still I ask, what Haven is ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... stocks or families found in North America above the Tropic of Cancer, about five-sixths were confined to the tenth of the territory bordering Pacific ocean; the remaining nine-tenths of the land was occupied by a few strong stocks, comprising the Algonquian, Athapascan, Iroquoian, Shoshonean, Siouan, and ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... in the densely packed quarters of the slave ships may be imagined by any who have sailed on tropic seas. With seasickness added it was wretched; when dysentery prevailed it became frightful; if water or food ran short the suffering was almost or quite beyond endurance; and in epidemics of scurvy, small-pox or ophthalmia the misery ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... at the wharf at Harrison's Landing, whence, taken on a primitive ferry, they in an hour or more arrived at a long wooden pier extending into the river. It was nearly six o'clock when the carriage entered a solemn aisle of pines ending in a labyrinth of oleanders and the tropic-like plants of the South. Then an old-fashioned porticoed mansion came into view, and on signal from the driver a posse of colored servants came trooping out noisily to carry the invalid in. Mrs. Atterbury was on the veranda, and stepped ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... sound, half-angry cry, half growl, caught up his cap, and marched out, as if in high dudgeon, while Mark lay back, staring at the open port-hole, through which came the warm glowing light of the tropic sunshine. ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... streets, with their high collars and nice clothes, their newspapers and walking-sticks and gloves. What did they know? I'd been like that, just as ignorant, just as conceited and narrow-minded. And I thought of the Corydon and the blue tropic sea! ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... The water steaming hot! A spoonful for each man of us, Another for the pot! We shall not drink from amber, Nor Capuan slave shall mix For us the snows of Athos With port at thirty-six; Whiter than snow the crystals, Grown sweet 'neath tropic fires, More rich the herbs of China's field, The pasture-lands more fragrance yield; For ever let Britannia wield The ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... a few white houses, giving signs of life thrice a day in tiny threads of smoke rising from their prim chimneys; and over all, the pallid skies of New England, where the sun wheeled his shorn beams from east to west as coldly as if no tropic seas mirrored his more fervid glow thousands of miles away, and the chilly moon beamed with irreproachable whiteness across the round gray hills and the straggling pond, beloved of frogs and mud-turtles, that Greenfield held in honor under the name ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... and grand, forever wrapt in myth and mystery. Lo he laughs along the highlands, leaping o'er the granite walls: Lo he sleeps among the islands, where the loon her lover calls. Still like some huge monster winding downward through the prairie plains, Seeking rest but never finding, till the tropic gulf he gains. In his mighty arms he claspeth now an empire broad and grand; In his left hand lo he graspeth leagues of fen and forest land; In his right the mighty mountains, hoary with eternal snow. ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... of Venus present the greatest anomaly, if its assigned inclination of axis (75 deg.) can be relied on as correct, which is doubtful. Its tropic zone extends nearly to the pole, and at the same time the winter at the other pole reaches the equator. The short period of this planet causes it to present the south pole to the sun only one hundred and twelve days after it ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... Spaniards reft As his last legacy to Britain left. The ocean, which so long our hopes confined, Could give no limits to his vaster mind; Our bounds' enlargement was his latest toil, Nor hath he left us pris'ners to our isle; 20 Under the tropic is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath received our yoke. From civil broils he did us disengage, Found nobler objects for our martial rage; And, with wise conduct, to his country show'd The ancient way of conquering abroad. Ungrateful ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... of ancestry,—of finding hints of the Powwow or the Grand Custom in each grotesque development. We were conscious of something warmer in this old soul than in ourselves, and something wilder, and we chose to think it the tropic and the untracked forest. She had scarcely any being apart from her affection; she had no morality, but was good because she neither hated nor envied; and she might have been a saint far more easily ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... best representation of the divine was the human. Now, conceive such an idea taking hold, however slowly, of a people of rare physical beauty, of acutest eye for proportion and grace, with opportunities of studying the human figure such as exist nowhere now, save among tropic savages, and gifted, moreover, in that as in all other matters, with that inmate diligence, of which Mr. Carlyle has said, "that genius is only an infinite capacity of taking pains," and we can understand somewhat of ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... as divinely as the true May. Autumn has golden-rod and all the tribe of asters, pink, lilac, and creamy white, by the double armful. When these go the curtain comes down, and whatever Powers shift the scenery behind, work without noise. In tropic lands you can hear the play of growth and decay at the back of the night-silences. Even in England the tides of the winter air have a set and a purpose; but here they are dumb altogether. The very last piece of bench-work this season was the trailed end of a blackberry-vine, most daringly ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Aurora Borealis and others who have delved for diamonds on the South African veldt. Some have ridden range on the plains of Texas and others on the plains of Queensland. When, in the recreation huts, the phonograph plays "Home, Sweet Home" the thoughts of some drift to nipa-thatched huts on flaming tropic islands, some think of tin-roofed wooden cottages in the environs of Sydney or Melbourne, others of staid, old-fashioned, red-brick houses ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... a man possessed by a devil, who is ready at any moment to break out and tear him to pieces. At night I become a satyr. While in this torment I at once hate and fear myself. One fair face is ever before me, gleaming through my hot dreams like a flying moon in the sultry midnight of a tropic storm. I dare not trust myself in the presence of those whom I love and respect, lest my wild thoughts should find vent in wilder words. I lose my humanity. I am a beast. Out of this depth there is but one way of escape. Downwards. I must drench the monster I have awakened ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... the Cumberland sailed south through and past the Tropic of Cancer, almost to the equator, without a sign of an enemy. It was in fact just a day's sail from the equator before ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... of Wadai from what constituted in 1882 the province of Darfur,'' but in no case was it to be drawn west of the 21st degree of east longitude, or east of the 23rd degree. From the 15th parallel the line was continued north and north-west to the intersection of the Tropic of Cancer with 16 deg. E. French influence was to prevail west of this line, British influence to the east. Wadai was thus definitely assigned ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... nights on the earth while the sun is in its plane. On each side are the two tropics, at the distance of 23 deg. 30 min., and described by the sun when in his greatest declination north and south, or at the summer and winter solstices. That on the north side of the equinoctial is called the tropic of Cancer, because the sun describes it when in that sign of the ecliptic; and that on the south side is, for a similar reason, called the tropic of Capricorn. Again, at the distance of 231/2 degrees from the poles are two other ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... of that tropic season soon wore away, and, when I looked landward, at day-dawn, I perceived two strange boats at anchor near the key. As this gave me some uneasiness, I mentioned it to the captain and his wife, but they laughed at ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... made in evil wise and spent in evil fashion. But it was not so much the particulars as the generalities of their talk that delighted me. I loved to hear of islands where the cocoa trees grew, and where parrots of every hue under heaven squealed and screamed in the tropic heat; where girls as graceful as goddesses and as yellow as guineas wore robes of flaming feathers and sang lullabies in soft, impossible tongues; lands of coral and ivory and all the glories of the earth, where life was full of golden possibilities and a world away from the drab respectability ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... morning a week later. The Southern Cross was now in sub-tropic waters, steaming steadily along under blue skies and through smooth azure water flecked here and there with masses ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... was about sunset when the first boat put off from the "Sumter" to visit the captured ship. The two vessels were lying a hundred yards apart, rising and falling in unison on the slow rolling swells of the tropic seas. The day was bright and warm, and in the west the sun was slowly sinking to the meeting line of sky and ocean. All was quiet and peaceful, as only a summer afternoon in Southern seas can be. Yet in the midst of all that peace and quiet, a scene in the great drama of war was being enacted. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... the water casks were empty, and that we were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, with not the slightest chance of obtaining a fresh supply—that it would be weeks before we could possibly reach land—that under the burning tropic sun that was shining constantly down upon us, one week would be enough for thirst to do its work; but if any should survive that period, then a second week would finish them—in short, within two weeks one and all ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... with age and careless usage. The chairs were common kitchen chairs, and the table a plain deal one. But the driftwood burned with flames whose forked tongues sang silently but eloquently of wanderings under many skies, of rainbow isles in sunny seas, of vivid golden days and the black wonders of tropic nights, of storms and calms, and all the untold mysteries of the ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... a depressing time, for as the hours passed on, the rain never ceased for a moment, but kept on in a regular tropic deluge; while, in spite of food and stimulants, exhaustion and suffering from their wounds told more and more, till one by one the men gave up, and the boat at last drifted with the swift current into which they ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... the forgetting of some treasures to remember others; and the conveyance of them all down stairs to the big sitting-room where the sun came in over the geraniums in the bay-window, and where the Franklin heater made the air tropic. The rocking-horse was led and pushed by both boys; but to Clytie's responsible hand alone was intrusted the ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... seated in the friendly ring, O restless Pilgrim? Haply now thou ridest O'er the long tropic-wave; or now abidest 'Mid seas with ice eternal glimmering! Thrice happy voyage!... With a jest thou leapedst From the Lyceum's threshold to thy bark, Thenceforth thy path aye on the main thou keepedst, O child beloved of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... the window, and seem almost— So still lies the ocean—to hear the beat Of its Great Gulf artery off the coast, And to bask in its tropic heat. ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... far behind the point which our ancestors had reached even thirty generations ago. In dealing with the Philippine people we must show both patience and strength, forbearance and steadfast resolution. Our aim is high. We do not desire to do for the islanders merely what has elsewhere been done for tropic peoples by even the best foreign governments. We hope to do for them what has never before been done for any people of the tropics—to make them fit for self-government after the fashion of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... from its moorings and drifted off on seas that soon grew tropic: should it be Bermuda, after all? Oleanders and a turquoise bay—what a relief ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... that in the mingled sounds of dock and river which came to her she could hear the roar of surf upon a golden beach. The stuffy air of Limehouse took on the hot fragrance of a tropic island, and she sighed again, but this time rapturously, for in spirit she was a child once more, lulled by the voice of the ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... their own special treasure from the grasp of man. Surely that Water of Life was to be sought for far away, amid trackless mountain-peaks, guarded by dragons and demons. That Fount of Youth must be hidden in the rich glades of some tropic forest. That Cup of Immortality must be earned by years, by ages, of superhuman penance and self torture. Certain of the old Jews, it is true, had had deeper and truer thoughts. Here and there a psalmist ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the trainless and workless dam to the Spillway, over which already some overflow from the lake was escaping to the Caribbean. My friends "Dusty" and H—— had carried their canoe to the Chagres below, and before nine we were off down the river. It was a day that all the world north of the Tropic of Cancer could not equal; just the weather for a perfect "day off." A plain-clothes man, it is true, is not supposed to have days off. Some one might run away with the Administration Building on the edge of ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... The tropic of Capricorn runs through the bay of St Augustine, being 23 deg. 30' S. rather nearer the south point of the bay; so that the latitude in the text must err ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... self-possessed eye. He was elegantly and somewhat extravagantly dressed as a civilian; he carried himself with a rustic, barbaric jauntiness, strangely dashed with a superinduced touch of the Parisian salon. His tawny cheek, like a date, spoke of the tropic, A wonderful atmosphere of proud friendlessness and scornful isolation invested him. Yet there was a bit of the poet as well as the outlaw in him, too. A cool solemnity of intrepidity sat on his lip. He looked like one who of purpose ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... not be such; that it may save many lives—they may revive: but were it not so, I would still say Give. Let them go, even if every soul in that ship were doomed. Let them go. Let them drink the fresh sea breeze before they die; let them see the green tropic world; let them forget their sorrow for a while; let them feel springing up afresh in them the celestial fount of hope. We let the guilty criminal eat and drink well the morn ere he is led forth to die—shall we not do as much ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... the sand. The palm trees' plume uplifted dauntlessly To call the morning. At the forest's brim The day was made alive by human flowers, Sweet maidens who against the emerald Showed warm and brown in purest harmony. The fierce bright flame that is the tropic sea Burned on their eyes and called them to its heart. Like eager sea birds they forgot the land, And, happy as the amorous waves, they gave Their slim brown bodies to the sea's embrace. They found them ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... by this warning from the primitive powers that counterbalance each other behind the peace of the tropic night. By and by, one grows accustomed to the uncanny neighbourhood of the volcano, and only the more formidable eruptions attract notice. Sometimes, while at work, I hear one of the boys exclaim, "Huh, huh!" to call my attention to the fact that a particularly ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... restaurant a little way off Broadway where one could be served almost al fresco in a tropic array of screening flora. Quiet and luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal place in which to take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon I was there picking my way to a table among the ferns when I felt my ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... were, from days immemorial, represented in Africa; but these were not then, nor are they now, known as "Negroes," but "Africans," subdivided into families and tribes. Those families that were known as true Negroes dwell between the Tropic of Cancer on the north and the equator on the south, and between the Nile (extremely north) and the Atlantic Ocean. These were divided into three classes—viz., true "Negroes," "Negroids," and the "Negrillos." ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... Jack Cockrell to see how quiet a pirate ship could be. The ruffians were bone-weary, for one thing, after the struggle to bring the vessel through the storm. And the scourge of tropic fever had left its marks. Moreover, the rum was running short because some of the casks had been staved in the heavy weather and Blackbeard was doling it out as grog with an ample dilution of water. There was no more dicing and brawling and tipsy choruses. Sobered against their will, some ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... had fallen and he traveled high along the upper terrace where the gorgeous tropic moon lighted the dizzy pathway through the gently undulating branches ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "And either tropic now 'Gan thunder and both ends of heaven; the clouds From many a horrid rift abortive poured Fierce rain with lightning mixed, water with fire In ruin reconciled; nor slept the winds Within their ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... literally, reedtail, is the tropic bird or Phaethon. The name "boatswain-bird" is applied to some other kinds of birds, besides the tropic bird. Cf. Alfred Newton, Dictionary of Birds (London, 1896). Ferdinand Columbus says: rabo di giunco, "a bird so called because it has ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... Mean Height, in within 1 French foot Temperature English Tropic [1.006 of the of the feet, above Zones. English foot] air. the level below the of the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... flavor, made so by the constant nurturing and subtle ripening of the chimney's gentle heat, distilled through that warm mass of masonry. Better for wines is it than voyages to the Indias; my chimney itself a tropic. A chair by my chimney in a November day is as good for an invalid as a long season spent in Cuba. Often I think how grapes might ripen against my chimney. How my wife's geraniums bud there! Bud in December. Her eggs, too—can't keep them near the chimney, an account of the hatching. Ah, a ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... wild for song, Then rolled like tropic storms along, Where, through the garish lights that fly Dying along the troubled sky, Lay bare, through vistas thunder-riven, The blackness of the general Heaven, That very blackness yet doth Ring Light on the lightning's ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Nor did he see his way to hug the shore at home with Perpetua, while the curate braved the 'foam of perilous seas.' Would he ever have the heart to watch her fresh face spoiling in Africa? Could he bear to see it wizened and withered in the Tropic of ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... at the hulk of the Alcazar,—the blanched, wave-worn messenger sent by the tropic seas into the far North with a tale that the living had never dared to tell, and that had perished on the lips of the dead. Its shadow, spreading broad upon the beach, made the gathering twilight ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... of the Northern dawns, Their pure, pale light is thine; Yet all the dreams of tropic nights Within thy blue eyes shine. Not statelier in their prisoning seas The icebergs grandly move, But in thy smile is youth and joy, And in thy ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... model of the Mirabelle had been so painstakingly arranged inside a bottle. For the time seemed long between glimpses of shore and shore, or until they sailed for a time along some wild and beautiful tropic coast. Then Chris would lean on the side of the ship looking at the mountainous or jungled shore. A scent such as comes from the opened door of a hothouse would drift out to sea to the sailors, who looked yearningly toward the land and the greenness. A warm breath of flowers, damp moss, ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... tropic fever is a-shaking my spine, And they blow "boots and saddles" to chase the brown swine, He'll give me a leg-up and ride me in line, Will ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... The seasons required for those voyages are as follows: To go from Espana to Philippinas it is advisable to sail from Espana after the sun passes the equator in the direction of the Tropic of Capricorn, namely, from September twenty-third on; for, since one must mount to thirty-five degrees of latitude in the southern hemisphere, it is advisable to be in that hemisphere when the sun by its presence has put to flight the furies of the winds of those seas, since even with that care ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... darkness, through the streaming deluge of that tropic clime. For the seraphic frenzy had now come upon the mage in good earnest, and all the Thought-reader burned ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... lightly got and as lightly spent by the English in India. The Baron was accompanied by his wife, a native, we have somewhere read, of Archangel. This young woman, who, born under the Arctic circle, was destined to play the part of a Queen under the tropic of Cancer, had an agreeable person, a cultivated mind, and manners in the highest degree engaging. She despised her husband heartily, and, as the story which we have to tell sufficiently proves, not without reason. She was interested by the conversation ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... view of the Magellan Clouds and of the Southern Cross. The Magellan Clouds consist of three small nebulae in the southern part of the heavens,— two bright, like the milky-way, and one dark. They are first seen, just above the horizon, soon after crossing the southern tropic. The Southern Cross begins to be seen at 18 N., and, when off Cape Horn, is nearly overhead. It is composed of four stars in that form, and is one of the brightest constellations ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... upon the soul, As from these heights the Giant Stream we trace, And wander with its waters as they roll From hence, to their far ocean dwelling-place— Marking its birth in this bleak frigid zone, Its conquering march to yonder tropic shore, The boundless valley which it makes its own, With thousand tribute rivers as they pour! No classic page its story to reveal; No nymph, or naad, sporting in its glades; No banks encrimsoned with heroic steel; And haunted yet by dim poetic shades— Its annals linger ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... of rest. There was also Hallinan's Hotel, that was very far from being a mere country hotel. The stately bow-windows of its coffee-room have already been mentioned, but its wide verandah must not be forgotten, stone-paven, glass-roofed, umbrageous with tropic vegetation, beneath whose shade, on the sunny days that are enjoyed by the lesser world of men, sad anglers, in ancient tweed suits, lolled, broken-heartedly, in basket-chairs. And, finally, on the town's highest level, was The Mall, reserved, dignified, with ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... at two large establishment for making jellies, comfits, pickles, and all the varieties of tropic preserves. In each of them thirty or more persons are constantly employed, and a capital of some thousands of dollars invested. Several large rooms were occupied by boxes, jars, and canisters, with the apparatus necessary to the process, through ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... of the still, breathless nights of the tropic seas. Pedro's small strong hands had not grasped the helm for a half-hour before the wind freshened, and then a tremendous gust swept down upon the flagship hurling her right upon the unknown shore. Pedro strove desperately with the fearful odds, but before the ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... very goldfish in the fountain do not stir, and the long line of slaves against the marble wall, save for their branded foreheads, might be gaunt caryatides hewn in Egyptian wood or carved in ebony and amber. That gaudy tropic bird scarce ruffles a feather. What is the difference between life and death? A voice, a call, some sudden strange or familiar message on old paths, to the consciousness that lies under that apparent unconsciousness, will waken all these semblances of inanimation ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... harnessed at present, and a few days' rest was necessary. The departure was, therefore, put off for a week, until the 20th of November. The month of November in this latitude corresponds to the month of May in the northern zones. It was, therefore, the fine season. The sun was entering the tropic of Capricorn, and gave the longest days in the year. The time was, therefore, very favorable for the projected expedition, which, if it did not accomplish its principal object, would at any rate be fruitful ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... grumble because a hollyhock is neither a violet nor a rose. He had his enemies during his life and his detractors ever since, and we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. He was a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed, even to excess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He lived in a perpetual alternation of thunderstorm and blazing sunshine. He admitted himself that his "reason," by which he meant his judgment, "was exceeding weak," and his tactlessness constantly precluded a due ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse |
