"Northern lights" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Again the silence. The northern lights flashed and swept in fantastic shapes across the sky, illuminating the fir tops in the valley and making the white lichens gleam on the barren hill above us. We thought of the lake ahead with its old wigwams, and the promise it held out of an easy trail to Michikamau ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... none of you are familiar with the far North, where it is day six months of the year and night the other six. But though the sun does not shine, don't think for a moment that we live in pitch darkness, for the stars and the Northern Lights make our nights most beautiful. In fact, they are more beautiful and varied than our days. Instead of the blazing rays of the sun that blind one, we have the ever varied, many colored rays of the ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... "Northern lights and moonshine!" growled Alderman Van Beverout, for it was no other than the uncle of the heiress, whose untimely and unexpected visit had caused her so much alarm. "This sky-watching, and turning of night into day, will ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... intellect into the human nature of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more interesting—shy, delicate, evanescent—shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the colored pencillings on a frosty night from the northern lights, than in the ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Ayrshire sloops danced like bobbins on the water; past the isles, where overhead drove the wedges of the wild swans, trumpeting as on a battle-field; past the Hebrides, where strange arctic birds whined like hurt dogs; northward still to where the northern lights sprang like dancers in the black winter nights; eastward and southward to where the swell of the Dogger Bank rose, where the fish grazed like kine. Over the great sea he would go as though nothing had happened, not even the snapping of a stay—down to the sea, where the crisp winds ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... character depends very much on the face through which it beams. And it cannot be counterfeited. Its ring defies imitation. Like the clouded sun of April, it can pierce through tears of sorrow; like the noontide sun of summer, it can blaze in warm smiles; like the northern lights of winter, it can gleam in depths of woe;—but it is always the same, modified, doubtless, and rendered more or less patent to others, according to the natural amiability of him or her who bestows it. No one can put it on; still less can any one put it off. Its range is universal; it embraces ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... warriors polish their good blades by the bright beams of the morning; and gird them on to their brave sirloins; and watch for rust spots as for foes; and by many stout thrusts and stoccadoes keep their metal lustrous and keen, as the spears of the Northern Lights charging over Greenland. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... upon us from amidst fleecy clouds, which drifted ever and anon across her face. Away in the north tremulous rays of light flickered up into the heavens, coming and going like long, quivering fingers. They were the northern lights, a sight rarely seen in the southland counties. It is little wonder that, coming at such a time, the fanatics should have pointed to them as signals from another world, and should have compared them to that pillar of fire ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... deep layers, blue by day and night, lilac in the brief intervals of sunrise and sunset. The pale, powerless sun seemed far away and strange during the three short hours that it showed over the horizon. The rest of the time it was night. The northern lights flashed like quivering arrows across the sky, in their sublime and awful majesty. The frost lay like a veil over the earth, enveloping all in a dazzling whiteness in which was imprisoned every shade of colour under the sun. Crimsons, purples, softest yellows, tenderest greens, and exquisite ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... "aurora," or "northern lights," and know that electricity causes it, but the twins' mother couldn't know that. She told them just what had been told her when she was ...
— The Eskimo Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... vein albuminous seas, or an egg-like composition in the incubation of which this earth is a local center of development—that there are super-arteries of blood in Genesistrine: that sunsets are consciousness of them: that they flush the skies with northern lights sometimes: super-embryonic reservoirs ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... "Northern lights your eye!" sneered Handy Solomon. "You may have seen them in the Behring Seas, but never this far south, and in August, and you can, kiss the ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... found and set in order By grave M. D.'s beyond the Border, To make them for some months eternal, Were entered monthly in a journal, That many a northern sage still writes in, And throws his little Northern Lights in, And proves and proves about the phrenos, A great deal more than I or he knows: How Music suffers, par exemple, By wearing tight hats round the temple; What ills great boxers have to fear From blisters put behind the ear; And how a porter's Veneration Is hurt ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... making currents, the direction of which are indicated by these magnetic poles. The same silent fluid which makes this needle point down to the deck makes the telegraphic instrument click, makes the northern lights, and makes the lightning." ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... is now so old and gray He's nigh lost his wits. With a bridge of white mist Columbkill he crosses, On his stately journeys From Slieveleague to Rosses; Or going up with music On cold starry nights To sup with the Queen Of the gay Northern Lights. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... Warburton, Johnson said he had more literature than had been imported from Scotland since the days of Buchanan. Upon the other's mentioning other eminent writers of the Scotch; "These will not do," said Johnson, "Let us have some more of your northern lights; these are mere farthing candles."' Johnson's Works (1787), xi. 208. Dr. T. Campbell records (Diary, p. 61) that at the dinner at Mr. Dilly's, described ante, ii. 338, 'Dr. Johnson compared England and Scotland to two lions, the one saturated with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the snow, covering everything, and even at the darkest time of year there is sufficient light, if the sky be clear, to see to read for an hour before and an hour after midday. Then there is the light given by the moon and stars, and lastly the cheering glow of the aurora borealis,or northern lights. It is not, therefore, always dark, though when snow falls or the clouds block out the sky the darkness becomes intense. At such times the picture is truly a ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... of the ordinary sort. It's in my brain— that's where it is. Think of it— nine months up here, and never a glimpse of a white man's face except yours. Nine months without the sound of a woman's voice. Nine months of just that dead, gray world out there, with the northern lights hissing at us every night like snakes and the black rocks staring at us as they've stared for a million centuries. There may be glory in it, but that's all. We're 'eroes all right, but there's no one knows it but ourselves and the six hundred and forty-nine other men of the Royal Mounted. My God, ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... grandfather, received his appointment on the Board of Northern Lights the art of lighthouse building in Scotland had just begun. Its bleak, rocky shores were world-famous for their danger, and few mariners cared to venture around them. At that time the coast "was lighted at a single point, the Isle of May, in ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... out of his turn; for the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning, and flick away an inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast growled, snapped, choked once over his portion, and hurried back to the protection of the passage, while the boy stood upon the snow under the blazing Northern Lights and dealt out justice. The last to be served was the big black leader of the team, who kept order when the dogs were harnessed; and to him Kotuko gave a double allowance of meat as well as an extra ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... they have the stars to light them, and bright flashing colors in the sky, such as we call the 'Northern Lights.' When the sun comes back, he makes them a long visit; but never gets so high in the sky as he does with us, and never ...
— The Nursery, March 1878, Vol. XXIII. No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... the land was illuminated for a while every night by the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights. Sometimes the aurora seemed to imitate the waves of the sea and moved like big heavy swells, changing colors, bluish, white, violet, green, orange. These colors seemed to blend together. Then the ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... with their respective distances as to produce a uniform steady light from a light in rapid motion. The argument, therefore, proves too much, and as it is in the very nature of electric light thus to corruscate, as we see frequently in the northern lights, we must be permitted still to believe that not only the tails, but also the heads of comets do really ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... and seasons, which we ascribe to the operations of law, were to them the visible tokens of the wrath or favor of the Almighty. On December 11th, 1719, for the first time in the history of the Colony, the northern lights were seen here. They shone with the greatest brilliancy. The consternation they caused was fearful. The people had never heard of such a phenomenon. They considered it the opening scene of the day ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... mine who knew that, and who had happened to drive past the house, had written to me to suggest it as a likely place. I had got into the train at midnight, and had fallen asleep, and had woke up and had sat looking out of window at the brilliant Northern Lights in the sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to find the night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I hadn't been to sleep at all;—upon which question, in the first imbecility of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would have done wager by battle with ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... seemed to be some mighty veteran, the patriarch of the pack, for his effort was so thrilling and awe-inspiring that it always sent the gooseflesh rushing up and down my back. Many a time, night after night, beneath the Northern Lights, I have gone out to the edge of a lake ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... the little flicker that comes for a moment and is gone, like in most of our lives, but the pure fire. The love that mankind tries to find in God—the final wonder. Some of us, at most, have a day or hour—a vision that's as far off and dim as northern lights. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various |
