"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... during decay of organic substances which once gave rise to the ancient superstition of "corpse lights" and the will-o'-the-wisp. It was really due, I knew, to living bacteria. But there surely had been no time for such micro-organisms to develop, even in the almost tropic heat of the Novella. Could she have been poisoned by these phosphorescent bacilli? What was it—a strange new mouth- malady that had attacked this notorious adventuress ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... oars within a few strokes of her. She was floating as placidly as though she were in the harbour of San Francisco; the green water showed in her shadow, and in the green water waved the tropic weeds that were growing from her copper. Her paint was blistered and burnt absolutely as though a hot iron had been passed over it, and over her taffrail hung a large rope whose end was lost to sight in ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... 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
... a tropic isle, The hush of the forest, the ocean blue, A lament for all that is false and vile, A paean for all that is good and true. Pompadour's fan, or Louis's queue, Mournful or merry, right or wrong. Subjects, you'll find, are ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... sun had just begun to pierce the misty tropic haze of early dawn, a small, white-painted schooner of ninety or a hundred tons burden was bearing down upon the low, densely-wooded island of Mayou, which lies between the coast of south-east New Guinea and the murderous Solomon Group—the grave of the ...
— The Tapu Of Banderah - 1901 • Louis Becke
... never been notable as a place of residence even in Adelle's childhood, but now it was almost completely converted to industrial uses. The stove factory had grown like a tropic plant, and had spawned about itself a number of parasitic industries, such as tack-mills, paper-box factories, and other occupations that use the labor of women and children. It was one long, smoky, grimy thoroughfare, where ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... with large bows of satin ribbon of the same intense color and adorned with a bird of paradise. I can see it now and can recall the images it suggested to my mind at the time. These were of cardinals and kings, of sealing-wax and wafers, of tropic noons and tangled marshes, of hell and judgment and the conventional Zamiel. It looked fit to be worn by a Mrs. Zamiel, if there be such a person. I looked so long and earnestly that I evidently attracted the notice of ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... impetuous, casting their youth away as if it were a thing of no account, a careless trifle, life and all its promises! But yesterday in the flush of strength and beauty; to-night the winds from tropic seas stir the grass above their graves, the southern stars look down upon the place of their rest. For this ideal they have died—"in their youth," to borrow the phrase of a Greek orator, "torn from us like the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... take the wings of the morning, and follow that flying zone of light, as swiftly as the air, one could pursue the same sunset all the world over, and see the fiery face of the sun ever sinking to his setting, over the broad furrows of moving seas, over tangled tropic forests, out to the shapeless wintry land of the south. Day by day has the same pageant enacted itself, for who can tell what millions of years. And in that vast perspective of weltering aeons has come the day when God has set me here, a tiny sentient point, conscious, in a sense, of ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to be on the eve of swamping us, we bent to our oars and headed for the northwest. It is hardly necessary to say that we had lost our reckoning; but, after a manner, we made out that we were nearly in longitude 136.30 west, and about upon the Tropic of Capricorn. This would have made our situation about a hundred and seventy miles from a number of small islands lying to the eastward of the one hundred and fortieth meridian. The prospect was discouraging, as there was hardly a sound person in the boats to pull an oar, so ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... wanting in the breast of the young bard. The climate of Caledonia is cold, but that the hearts of her sons are susceptible of tropic warmth is shewn by a large proportion of her lyric treasures. Heroism, pathos, satire, and a peculiar quaint humour, present little more than an equal division, and the attributes of the wholly embodied Scottish muse attest the truth of the remark on the characteristic ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... 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 one another whatever was given to them, as not knowing selfishness. ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... a minute after, and the chess board came into requisition. If Miss Morris found little skill necessary to discomfit her opponent, and wondered thereat, she could not see, as he saw, a dark face, bowed on tropic blooms, flushed with unwonted glad color, lips apart and aquiver, wide eyes lustrous with purple light, shining through the tears that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 driftwood and astride they leapt ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... strength you boast of seems a weakness; manhood leans into childish memories, and melts—as Autumn frosts yield to a soft south-wind coming from a Tropic spring. You feel in a desert, where you once felt at home,—in a bounded landscape, that ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... realize that no two souls are exact duplicates of each other; and that behind every human eye there lies an undiscovered country, as mysterious, as fascinating, as that which Alice found behind the looking-glass,—a country like, and yet unlike, the one we know, where dreams grow beautiful as tropic plants, and passions crouch like wild ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... latitude on either side of the equator, which mark the limits N. and S. of the sun's verticality to the earth's surface, the distance being in each case 231/2 deg.; the northern tropic is called the Tropic of Cancer, and the southern the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... charts that, torn and soiled by long usage, had patiently guided generations of boys and girls through the mysteries of lands and seas, icebergs, trade winds, deserts, and plains. Still patiently they marked for the boy's bewildered brain latitude and longitude, the tropic of cancer, the arctic circle, and the poles. Were they hanging there still? the man wondered. Were they still patiently leading the way through a wilderness of islands and peninsulas, capes and continents, rivers, lakes, and sounds? Or had they, in the years that had ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... from Panama westward and northward, without any remarkable irregularity in its outline, to the tropic of Cancer, almost immediately under which is the entrance of the great Gulf of California, separating the Peninsula of California from the main continent on the east. From the southern extremity of this peninsula the coast runs generally north-westward to Mount Saint Elias, ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... 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 her ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... magnificent even than that from the "Notch." At the foot of the precipice below us lay a lovely lake, wood embosomed, from or near which the bright St. Vrain and other streams take their rise. I thought how their clear cold waters, growing turbid in the affluent flats, would heat under the tropic sun, and eventually form part of that great ocean river which renders our far-off islands habitable by impinging on their shores. Snowy ranges, one behind the other, extended to the distant horizon, folding in their ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... varies in different parts from a pure blue somewhat lighter than that of the sky, as seen about the northern tropic in the Atlantic, to a deep indigo tint, as seen in the north temperate portions of the same ocean: owing, probably, to differences in the nature, quantity, and distribution of the solid matter which causes the colour. The Mediterranean, and the deeper Swiss lakes, are also a blue ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... that would have delighted the eyes and beasts of any husbandman and that extended, on and on, for leagues and leagues of velvet verdure, to the backbone of the great island, the towering mountain range flung up by some ancient earth-cataclysm, serrated and gullied but not yet erased by the erosive tropic rains. But the grass! He had crawled into it a dozen yards, buried his face in it, smelled it, and broken down in a fit ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... had set out to be the most gorgeous cinema in the Five Towns; and it simply was. Its advertisements read: "There is always room at the top." There was. Over the ceiling of its foyer enormous crimson peonies expanded like tropic blooms, and the heart of each peony was a sixteen-candle-power electric lamp. No other two cinemas in the Five Towns, it was reported, consumed together as much current as the Imperial de Luxe; and nobody could deny that the degree of excellence of a cinema is ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... is broken 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
... dreamy reverie I ate, By magic pinions as it were Transported from this realm of snows To be a happy sojourner Away down where the orange grows; Amid the bloom, the verdure, and The beauty of that tropic land, While redolence seemed wafted ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... and where white-aproned stewardesses took care of the galley and the cleaning of the floating hearthside, sharing the dangers of the ruddy and tranquil sailors exempt from the temptation that contact with women provokes. On Sundays, under the tropic sun or in the ash-colored light of the northern heavens, the boatswain would read the Bible. The men would listen thoughtfully with uncovered heads. The women had dressed themselves in black with lace headdress and ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Barganaza, d'Ancut, Dargaly, Ambiacatina, Caracogly, Amara, Maon (sic), Guegiera, Bally, Dobora, and Macheda. All of these provinces are situated directly under the equinoctial line between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer; but they are two hundred fifty leagues nearer our tropic than the other. The name of Prester John signifies Great Lord, and is not Priest [Presbyter] as many think. He has always been a Christian, but often schismatic. At the present time he is a Catholic and recognizes the Pope as sovereign pontiff. I met one of his bishops in Jerusalem, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... "Stranger's Fever" when his youth Had scarcely melted into manhood, so The chiselled legend runs; a brother's woe Laid bare for epitaph. The savage ruth Of a sunny, bright, but alien land, uncouth With cruel caressing dealt a mortal blow, And by this summer sea where flowers grow In tropic splendor, witness to the truth Of ineradicable race he lies. The law of duty urged that he should roam, Should sail from fog and chilly airs to skies Clear with deceitful welcome. He had come With proud resolve, but still his lonely eyes Ached with ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... wide their sturdy honors bend, The pines, the liveoaks to the shores descend, There couch the keels, the crooked ribs arise, Hulls heave aloft and mastheads mount the skies; Launcht on the deep o'er every wave they Feed tropic isles and Europe's ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... have remarked and understood a thousand things of interest and beauty that escaped my ignorance; and the brilliant colours of your style would have carried into a thousand sickrooms the sea air and the strong sun of tropic islands. It was otherwise decreed. But suffer me at least to connect you, if only in name and only in the fondness of imagination, with the ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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. Where a thousand ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... 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 than far more ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... warfare with the most potent empire upon earth, and which, during the progress of the struggle, becoming itself a mighty state, and binding about its own slender form a zone of the richest possessions of earth, from pole to tropic, finally dictates its decrees ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... frozen flesh with snow, So Spring will not her time forerun, Mix polar night with tropic glow, Nor cloy us with unshaded sun, Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance, But she has the temperance Of the gods, whereof she is one,— Masks her treasury of heat Under east winds crossed with sleet. Plants and birds and humble creatures ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... monotonous verdure of equatorial woodland scenery. In the north, to be sure, green is a very conspicuous colour; but that is only because for half the year our trees are bare, and even during the other half they lack that 'breadth of tropic shade' which characterises the forests of all hot countries. Therefore, in temperate climates, the common ground-tone of birds is brown, to harmonise with the bare boughs and leafless twigs, the clods of earth and dead turf or stubble. But in the evergreen ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Oh for some retreat Deep in yonder shining-Orient when; my life began to heat: Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, Breadths of tropic shady, and palms in clusters, Knots of Paradise. There the passions, cramp'd no longer, shall have scope and breathing space; I ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... day he sailed among these beautiful tropic islands, and of them and of the people who lived upon them he wrote to the king and queen of Spain: "This country excels all others as far as the day surpasses the night in splendor. The natives love their neighbors as themselves; their conversation ...
— The True Story of Christopher Columbus • Elbridge S. Brooks
... at the close of one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars that even Spain ever waged with her own colonists, the United States intervened, and in a brief summer campaign destroyed the last vestiges of the mediaeval Spanish domain in the tropic seas alike of the West ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... them wherever they go, and they reject as mistaken and unworthy the doctrine that we lose our own liberties by securing the enduring foundations of liberty to others. Our institutions will not deteriorate by extension, and our sense of justice will not abate under tropic suns in distant seas. As heretofore, so hereafter will the nation demonstrate its fitness to administer any new estate which events devolve upon it, and in the fear of God will "take occasion by ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... particular, a delightful pleasure-resort, whose beautiful, transparent waters, remarkable fishing-grounds, and soft, though tonic-giving air, which comes to it from every point of the compass over a semi-tropic sea, are so alluring that thousands of contented people often overflow its hotels and camp in ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... is to knit with loving lip The interests of land to land; To join in far-seen fellowship The tropic and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... whiteness of the lily, the turquoise eyes of water-plants,—all these gave her a pleasure intense as pain; and the songs of the winds, the love-whispers of June midnights, the gathering roar of autumn tempests, the rattle of thunder, the breathless and lurid pause before a tropic storm,—all these the Spark enhanced and vivified; till, seeing how blest in herself and the company of Nature the Child of the Kingdom grew, Queen Lura deliberated silently and long whether she should return the gift of the Fairy Cordis, and let Maya live so tranquil and ignorant forever, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... 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 English cliffs ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... know, first, where this wonder is. Get out the map of the Western Hemisphere, put your finger on any of the lines running north and south, through North America, and called meridians; follow it south until you come to the Tropic of Cancer, running east and west; then "left-about-face!" and, following the tropic, sail out into the calm Pacific. After a voyage of about two thousand miles, you'll run ashore on one of a group of islands marked Sandwich. We will call them Hawaiian, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... and Arawaks showed a strictly tropical distribution from Hayti to the southern watershed of the Amazon. The Tupis, moving down the Parana-La Plata system, made a short excursion beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, though not beyond the hot belt, then turned equator-ward again along the coast.[195] In North America we find some exceptions to the rule. For instance, though the main area of the Athapascan stock is found in the frigid belt of Canada and Alaska, north of the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... every detail, from the dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and the white-painted, green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistressly waitresses in the dining-room, has a clump of palmettos beside it, swaying and sighing in the tropic breeze, and you know that when it migrates back to the New England hill-country, at the end of the season, you shall find it with the palmettos still before its veranda, and equally at home, somewhere ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... since, amongst other imaginary characteristics of Taprobane, they make it extend considerably to the south of the line. Now, with respect to Ceylon, this is notoriously false; that island lies entirely in the northern tropic, and does not come within five (hardly more than six) degrees of the equator. Plain it is, therefore, that Taprobane, it construed very strictly, is an ens rationis, made up by fanciful composition from various sources, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Bareheaded under the semi-tropic sun, he glowered at the lily-drift. Then he snarled at Crump to reverse the motor. Tedge would ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... another, Captain Harry Love, a swarthy long-haired Texan ranger, of the third. Love's magnificent horsemanship, his dark features, drooping mustache and general appearance, might class him as a Spaniard. Blackened with the burning sun of the plains, the deserts, and tropic Mexico, his cavalier locks sweep to his shoulders. The heavy Kentucky rifle, always carried across his saddle, proves him the typical frontiersman and ranger. He is a dead shot. Many a Comanche and guerilla have fallen under the unerring aim of Harry Love. His agile frame, quickness with ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... had a clear 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
... comes from good San Antonio, my Lady Bird—when the sea-breeze makes—then the old brig will reel off the knots! But see! just now not a breath to keep a tropic bird's wings out. There, look ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... notes of busy life, telling us that it was time to weigh anchor and be sailing. To this cheerful tune we lent ear and, hastening to be underweigh, were soon clear of the port. Then, skimming along near the beach in the early morning, our sails spread to a land breeze, laden with fragrance from the tropic forest and the music of many songsters, we sailed in great felicity, dreading no dangers from the sea, for there were none now to dread ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... wanderer 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 ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... looking on the ground as meditative men are apt to do; his eyes WOULD fix themselves on the distant bend in the road round which a little figure must surely appear before long. Ah! There she comes. First a bright patch of colour, like a tropic bird among the boughs; then a tripping figure, with a round hat on, and a small basket under her arm; then a deep-blushing, almost frightened, but bright-smiling girl, making her curtsy with a fluttered yet happy glance, as Arthur came up to her. ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... from tropic lands, needing heat upon it, You could grow without a thought, if you'd doff your bonnet; Thousands of you, growing food on your daily trips, Helping to economise the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... spice and tar, Old painted empires that are ever fair, From Cochin-China down to Zanzibar! O Beauty simple, soul-less, and bizarre! I would take Danger for my bosom-wife, And light our bed with some wild tropic star— O how I long to run ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... fertile Western plains Were hid behind your sullen walls, Your cliffs and crags and waterfalls All weatherworn with tropic rains. ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... country, within that ancient watery park, within the 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 how noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting towards us amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous corymbi from vintages, amidst ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... champion of the Truth, whate'er it be! World-wand'rer over this terrestrial frame; Twin-named with Darwin on the roll of fame; This day we render homage unto thee; For in thy steps o'er alien land and sea, Where life burns fast and tropic splendours flame. Oft have we follow'd with sincere acclaim To mark thee unfold Nature's mystery. For this we thank thee, yet one thing remains Shall shrine thee deeper in the heart of man, In ages yet to be when we are dust; Thou ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... brown, yielding beauties dance in time To the pulsing music of a saraband! And yet there is a flavor of the sea, [Sipping wine. The long-drawn heaving of the ocean wave, The gentle cradling of a tropic tide; Its native golden sun—I fear you sleep? Or do the travels of the wine so rock Your soul that self is lost in revery? Why, man, dream not too much of placid bliss; Nor wine, nor man, can reach this clear perfection Until they ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... through seventeen centuries: this city I will bury, but not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my mysterious anger; set in azure light through generations to come: for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas." This city, therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating along the noiseless depths of ocean: and oftentimes in glassy calms, through the translucid atmosphere of water that now stretches like an air-woven ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... miles of the richly grassed slopes of a beautiful open forest, intersected by frequent watercourses where the land trended gradually upward to the distant mountain-range. Sometimes they had to go out of their course in order to avoid the tangle of tropic jungle; but onward north by east they went, beneath the shade of heavy-fruited palms, their road again made difficult by the large and numerous anthills that give these northern latitudes so strange a solemnity ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... 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 nun-like close of day ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... marshy banks for an hour or two, then the river began to widen into an irregularly shaped bay. Sundry low lying islands, covered with strange semi-tropic vegetation, rose up seaward, and by and by a sound as of muffled thunder ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... 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 ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... The young Arrillian led Tyndall the length of the corridor, back to the patio he had stepped onto by mistake earlier in the day. Bheel stepped respectfully aside. Tyndall looked out into the garden: the sun was beginning to set, the long shadows stretched across the dim recesses of tropic greenery. The huge insect-like thing was still there, stretched out in a narrow strip of sunlight, catching the last failing waves of warmth ...
— Grove of the Unborn • Lyn Venable
... onward faster and more furiously. I see the faint outlines of purple hills breaking the vacant curve of the horizon. A delicious fragrance from tropic flowers fills the air—the perfumes of the jessamine, the magnolia, the cereus. A sweet, delicious languor creeps over me. I feel a vague sense of rest and happiness, which, to my onlooking self, seems almost unaccountable; for, ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... same degree of latitude in the Western Hemisphere that Egypt occupies in the Eastern, the Tropic of Cancer dividing both countries in the centre. There is a striking resemblance between them, also, in many other respects, such as architecture, vegetation, domestic utensils, mode of cultivating the land, ancient pyramids, and idols, while both afford ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... Take the list of regiments and batteries and troops in the Eighth Army Corps, under the command of Major-General E.S. Otis, and there is but one record—each officer and enlisted man was in his place, and all are worthy to be glorified, for their dashing rushes through the swamps and the hideous tropic tangles, they penetrated to find the foe, equally with those heroes who mounted with unquailing ardor that only death could quench and that victory crowned the bloody hills ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... single raindrops began to splash so loudly on the veranda roof just outside my window that the noise waked me; after that I only slept fitfully, and my ears were never free from the loud roaring of the tropic rain that began presently to fall upon Aiken. I dreamed that somebody had stolen the Great Lakes and while being hotly pursued had dropped them. All day it rained like that, and all the following night, and only let up a little the afternoon ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... slipped softly from its moorings and drifted off on seas that soon grew tropic: should it be Bermuda, after all? Oleanders and a turquoise bay—what ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... away seem almost like delusive spots of the imagination. Smiling skies and smiling waters; groves of palms and oranges; the bloom of the heliotrope, the jasmine and the rose; flights of strange and gaudy birds; tropic nights at once luxurious and calm; clouds of fireflies floating like unsphered stars on the night breeze; graceful figures of dark-eyed senoritas in diaphanous drapery; picturesque groups of Monteros, relieved by the dusky faces and ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... stood again for Falmouth, where we anchored that evening and remained three days to complete our stores. We once more made sail for our destination, which I now found was the West Indies, without meeting further obstacle. As we neared the tropic those who had crossed it were anticipating the fun; others were kept in ignorance until Neptune came on board, which he did with one of his wives. It was my morning watch, when the frigate was hailed and ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... blooms of hill and wildwood, That shame the toil of art, Mingled the gorgeous blossoms Of the garden's tropic heart. ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... scenes, you think, are all too sombre. So, indeed, they are; but the blame must rest on the sombre spirit of our forefathers, who wove their web of life with hardly a single thread of rose-color or gold, and not on me, who have a tropic-love of sunshine, and would gladly gild all the world with it, if I knew where to find so much. That you may believe me, I will exhibit one of the only class of scenes, so far as my investigation has taught me, ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... East, Rang, shone, spake, shuddered around us: 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 breath, And she sprang as the life in a god made man ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... knowledge—directly of the apparent motions, 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 of the same class is the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... Blanc, on his eternal throne,— The city-gemmed Peruvian peak,— The sunset portals landsmen seek, Whose train, to reach the Golden Land, Crawls slow and pathless through the sand,— Or that, whose ice-lit beacon guides The mariner on tropic tides, And flames across the Gulf afar, A torch by day, by night a star,— Not thus, to cleave the outer skies, Does my serener mountain rise, Nor aye forget its gentle birth Upon the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... tributaries of the Burdekin so lately discovered by Leichhardt. Following it down through the thick brigalow scrub, which is a marked feature of this river and its companion the Suttor, of Leichhardt, the party crossed the southern tropic on the 25th July, being, as Mitchell says, the first to enter the interior beyond that line. In this he rather overlooked the fact, which he must have known, that Leichhardt's track was only a few miles to the eastward, and also what he did not ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... lonely prison-block, Grim fragment 'neath a tropic sky, Where, like Prometheus on his rock, The captive Caesar came ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... course more westerly than any navigator had done before him in so high a latitude; but met with no land till he got within the tropic, where he discovered the islands of Whitsunday, Queen Charlotte, Egmont, Duke of Gloucester, Duke of Cumberland, Maitea, Otaheite, Eimeo, Tapamanou, How, Scilly, Boscawen, Keppel, and Wallis; and returned ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... ships, the Penelope, Merchant-Royal, and Edward Bonadventure, sailed from Plymouth the 10th April, 1591, and arrived at the Canary Islands on 25th of that month, whence we again took our departure on the 29th. The 2d May we were in the latitude of Cape Blanco, and passed the tropic of Cancer on the 5th. All this time we had a fair wind at north-east, sailing always before the wind, till the 13th May, when we came within eight degrees of the line, where we met a contrary wind. We lay off and on from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... vessels on the altar, and the brazen-winged eagle of the lectern. Strange-shaped patterns of wine-colour and violet were cast from the stained glass windows upon the walls and pillars, enriching the grey fabric of the church, like tropic flowers. The window nearest me was a favourite of ours. It was dedicated, so saith the bronze tablet beneath, to the memory of Cosmo John, fifth son of an Earl of Aberfalden. He had died at the age of fifteen, not a tender age to me, but the age toward which I was eagerly straining, ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... emerged into a beautiful butterfly, clothed first in mauve and next in magenta. After its long winter of neglect, there sprung from coal-tar the most vivid and varied hues, like flowers from the earth at spring. At a touch of the fairy wand of science, the waste land became a garden of tropic tints, and colour succeeded colour, until the whole gamut had been gone through. Never was transformation more dazzling or more complete. The once despised refuse was now a valued commercial product—indeed a trade in itself. Perfectly fascinated by the study, ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... may be bare and barren, uninhabitable and desolate; the cold winds of the snow-borne North may blow across it, and freeze it into ice-bound sterility; or the blazing fury of the tropic sun may pour down upon it, and scorch it into a dreary waste of glaring, burning sand; but if there is gold in it, and if man comes to know that the gold is in it, desolation, frozen sterility, or scorching waste, are alike doomed for conquest. The gold may lie in the sand; ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... repeated Sam sliding a trifle closer. "We would sail about, visiting desert islands which lay like jewels in the heart of tropic seas." ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... land. The bottoms of some of the gorges, which descend to the coast, are filled up to the depth of about a hundred feet, by rudely divided layers of sand, muddy clay, and fragmentary masses; in these beds, Mr. Seale has found the bones of the tropic-bird and of the albatross; the former now rarely, and the latter never visiting the island. From the difference between these layers, and the sloping piles of detritus which rest on them, I suspect that they were deposited, ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... chaotic. Great rushes of vapour driven by mighty winds; great seas, for the most part calm. Then upheavals and volcanoes spouting fire. Then tropic scenes of infinite luxuriance. Terrific reptiles feeding on the brinks of marshes, and huge elephant- like animals moving between palms beyond. Then, in a glade, rough huts and about them a jabbering crowd of creatures ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... from Honolulu, And it bears the tropic brand, Sandwiched in this friendly missive ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... approaches a stone as a jeweler approaches a casket to unlock the hidden gems. Geikie causes the bit of hard coal to unroll the juicy bud, the thick odorous leaves, the pungent boughs, until the bit of carbon enlarges into the beauty of a tropic forest. That little book of Grant Allen's called "How Plants Grow" exhibits trees and shrubs as eating, drinking and marrying. We see certain date groves in Palestine, and other date groves in the desert a hundred ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... midnight when they heard footsteps on the board walk in front of the house. In a moment Harry Needles entered in cavalry uniform with fine top boots and silver spurs, erect as a young Indian brave and bronzed by tropic suns. ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... still fainter murmur from the streets. The 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 ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... has 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... Before it had disappeared Jack saw swarms of the dreaded mosquitoes begin to thicken in the air, like flights of gnats on a summer evening in England. The swift tropic dark swept over swamp and hill-side, and almost at once the framework which covered each of the captives was literally hidden with the vast masses of the venomous insects, which knew that a fresh prey awaited ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... considered as injurious to trade in some lights, yet necessary to its welfare in others. The West India Company of that country, originally erected in 1621, held, by an exclusive charter, the commerce of the coast of Africa, from the tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope, and that of America, from the southern point of Newfoundland in the N.E. all along the eastern coast to the Straits of Magellan or Le Maire, and thence northwards again along the western coast, to the supposed Straits of Anian, thus including ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... tropic's glowing verge, what star-bright memories we have of thee! How deeply treasured in our heart of hearts are all thy joys and pleasures,—ay, and griefs and sorrows too! But as the spot where this long-crushed and drooping spirit heard ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... the Sound the birds of passage sailed, Speaking some unknown language strange and sweet Of tropic isle remote, and passing hailed The village with the cheers of all their fleet; Or quarrelling together, laughed and railed Like foreign sailors, landed in the street Of seaport town, and with outlandish noise ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... voice that came to me in the blazing heat of tropic day, in the cool of eve, in the calm serenity of night, a voice calling, calling infinite pitiful and sweet, yet ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... South that now through orient mist At nightfall off Tampico or Belize Greetest the sailor, rising from those seas Where first in me, a fond romanticist, The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... 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, "if it be hotter ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... of Elephantine, opposite Aswan, an interesting discovery has lately been made by Mr. Howard Carter. This is a remarkable well, which was supposed by the ancients to lie immediately on the tropic. It formed the basis of Eratosthenes' calculations of the measurement of the earth. Important finds of documents written in Aramaic have also been made here; they show that there was on the island in Ptolemaic times a regular colony of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... episode of the publishing of his journal and his subsequent arrogant bearing before the Holy Father, which had provoked his fate. Under the beneficent influences of the soft climate and the new interests of this tropic land he began to feel a budding of something like confidence, and the suggestions of an unfamiliar ambition to retrieve past failure and yet gratify, even if in small measure, the parental hope which had first directed him as a child into the fold of the Church. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... there were early attempts to accomplish this object, the results of which have been lost. But Eratosthenes executed one between Syene and Alexandria, in Egypt, Syene being supposed to be exactly under the tropic of Cancer. The two places are, however, not on the same meridian, and the distance between them was estimated, not measured. Two centuries later, Posidonius made another attempt between Alexandria ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... skies The Shuttle flies Seven sunsets long, tropic-deep, Thousand-sailed, Half in waking, ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... this realization dawned, he was ordered below, and as the tropic sun was sinking over that eery floating tombstone, which according to Professor Stevens marked a ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... the second time the clouds had all cleared away, except a few that sailed there, white as cotton. The moon was up—a tropic moon. The moon at home turns a wood black, but even this old butt-end of a one showed up that forest, as green as by day. The night birds—or, rather, they’re a kind of early morning bird—sang out with their long, falling notes like nightingales. And I could see the dead man, that I was still half ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... skies, in fair forests, in great tracts of meadow verdure. See how Kingsley grows contented,—how he becomes wise. "Have you eyes to see? Then lie down on the grass, and look near enough to see something more of what is to be seen; and you will find tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; mountain cliffs and debacles at the mouth of every rabbit burrow; dark strids, tremendous cataracts, 'deep glooms and sudden glories' in every foot-broad rill which wanders through the turf.... Nature, as every one will ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... nature; I have a cold blood, sir. There's neither fur, nor flannel—no, sir, nor hot rum, will warm up what they call the temperature. Sir, it's the same with most men that have been carbonadoed, as they call it, in the tropic seas." ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... below and far behind him. The incredible greenness of tropic verdure, of the jungle which rings Rio all about. The many glitterings of sunlight upon glass, and upon the polished domes of sundry public buildings, and the multitudinous shimmerings of the tropic sun upon the bay. The deep dark ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same equinoxes call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman to the harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic as he did when his course began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star and constellation and galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom, and the love, which placed them in the heavens and uphold ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... orbit, and that it is this inclination that produces the seasons. Now it is not the same for Jupiter. His axis of rotation remains almost vertical throughout the course of his year, and results in the complete absence of climates and seasons. There is neither glacial zone, nor tropic zone; the position of Jupiter is eternally that of the Earth at the season of the equinox, and the vast world enjoys, as it were, perpetual spring. It knows neither the hoar-frost nor the snows of winter. The heat received from ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... 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 ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... girdle of creaming surf had never seemed so beautiful as in the early morning of the day Shane and Kayak and Harlan sailed away in search of help. The electricity of adventure, of hope was in the air, and the wind was as soft and balmy as a breath from tropic seas. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... places he has never been to, Yet more minute and vivid than remembrance, Of boyhood homes, sail between sleep and waking Like some mirage, refuting all experience With topsy-turvy ships, That steals by in dead calms through tropic haze: And many a man in his climacteric years, Thoughts and remembered words have roused from sleep With knowledge that he lacked on lying down: And I, lapped in a trance of reverie, doubt Some spore of episodes Anterior far beyond this body's birth, Dispersed like puffs of dust impalpable, Wind-carried ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... too wild for song, Then rolled like tropic storms along, Where, though 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 fling Light on ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... said the captain quietly, "with the simple beauty of home; but you will have to see the grand sunrises and sunsets of tropic lands to fully understand the full beauty of God's ever-changing ocean. But even now, Mr Meadows, I think you can hardly say you don't ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... shore line, but the people had vanished. There was only the thick, steamy mist, the tropic jungle crowding down to the shore, and the waves rolling in monotonously from the waste of gray ocean beyond ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... the second time the clouds had all cleared away, except a few that sailed there, white as cotton. The moon was up—a tropic moon. The moon at home turns a wood black, but even this old butt end of a one showed up that forest as green as by day. The night birds—or, rather, they're a kind of early morning bird—sang out with their long, falling notes like nightingales. And I could see the dead man, that I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mixture of English and Dutch, but they saw many sailors who were of neither race. Some were brown men with rings in their ears, and they spoke languages that Robert did not understand. But he knew that they came from far southern seas and that they sailed among the tropic isles, looming large then in the world's fancy, bringing with them a ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of beauty in the familiar northern scenes; but we miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic outbursts, the tropic glow, and all the surprising manifold and tender and sweet-scented outpourings of soil and sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating underneath all ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... beautiful. Then they bow like willows, their leaves streaming forward all in one direction, and, when the sun shines upon them at the required angle, entire groves glow as if every leaf were burnished silver. The fall of tropic light on the crown of a palm is a truly glorious spectacle, the fervid sun-flood breaking upon the glossy leaves in long lance-rays, like mountain water among boulders at the foot of an enthusiastic cataract. ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... the line of the Laccadive Archipelago. If you suppose the cold to travel from the southern pole northwards, it will not help us, unless we suppose that the countries immediately north of the northern tropic were at the same time warmer, so as to allow free passage from India to Africa, which seems to me too complex and unsupported an hypothesis to admit. Therefore I cannot see that the supposition of different longitudinal belts of the world ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... through the Central Zion. The eye easily discerns in these a great M inscribed in the circle, with its middle angular point at Jerusalem. Gervasius of Tilbury (with some confusion in his mind between tropic and equinoxial, like that which Pliny makes in speaking of the Indian Mons Malleus) says that "some are of opinion that the Centre is in the place where the Lord spoke to the woman of Samaria at the well, for ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Since the morn of the Miracle-Birth, Have widened the fame of the marvellous tale Till the tidings have filled the earth! And so in the climes of the icy North, And the lands of the cane and the palm, By the Alpine cotter's blazing hearth, And in tropic belts of calm, Men list to-night the welcome swells, Sweet and clear, ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... knows us From Fundy to the Keys; Every bend and every creek Of abundant Chesapeake; Ardise hills and Newport coves And the far-off orange groves, Where Floridian oceans break, Tropic tiger seas. ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... every table, and the drawing-room floor, were spread with the presents we were expected to take away with us. There were bunches of scarlet feathers, two or three hundred in number, from the tail of the tropic bird, which are only allowed to be possessed and worn by chiefs, and which are of great value, as each bird produces only two feathers; pearl shells, with corals growing on them, red coral from the islands on the Equator, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... interesting business on hand. Whether a man shall shake hands with welcome in the distinguished elevation of respect, or shrink from contempt in the abject corner of insignificance; whether he shall wanton under the tropic of plenty, at least enjoy himself in the comfortable latitudes of easy convenience, or starve in the arctic circle of dreary poverty; whether he shall rise in the manly consciousness of a self-approving mind, or sink beneath a galling ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of the South Seas has laid its gentle spell rather overwhelmingly upon American readers. To be unread in Polynesiana is to be intellectually declasse.... In the face of this avid appetite for tropic-scented literature, one may well imagine the satisfaction of a publisher when offered opportunity of association with such an expedition as that of the Kawa, an association involving the exclusive privilege of publishing the manuscript of Walter ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... roadway over it is thirty feet wide, affording room for a double set of rails, and the panting trains have already begun to cross its web-like span, gliding into sight from the cliff-top on one side, only to disappear the next moment on the other in a green wilderness of ferns and tropic flowers. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... loose clothes of a strange bluish drab colour, and a conservative, round Panama hat without the cock-a-loop indentations and cants with which Northern fanciers disfigure the tropic head-gear. Moreover, he was the homeliest man I have ever seen. His ugliness was less repellent than startling—arising from a sort of Lincolnian ruggedness and irregularity of feature that spellbound you ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... the world, I am bold to affirm—nobody, at least, in our bleak little world of New England,—had dreamed of Paradise that day except as the pole suggests the tropic. Nor, with such materials as were at hand, could the most skilful architect have constructed any better imitation of Eve's bower than might be seen in the snow hut of an Esquimaux. But we made a summer of it, in ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... we see the whole great procession in a glance. We have come across no African, nor South American, nor Australian plants, so we have not seen anything like the whole of plant life. But the range from the tropic to the arctic has been complete and continuous. In no other region could we in so short a space as a hundred miles—the distance from Bath to London—see the entire range ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... course in which, according to the Ptolemaic system, the sun passes from the equator to the tropic of Cancer, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... Aragon, Naples and Milan, Mexico and Peru. Lewis might wear the imperial crown, might place a prince of his family on the throne of Poland, might be sole master of Europe from the Scythian deserts to the Atlantic Ocean, and of America from regions north of the Tropic of Cancer to regions south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Such was the prospect which lay before William when first he entered on public life, and which never ceased to haunt him till his latest day. The French monarchy was to him what the Roman republic ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... shutters; the rare officials, undisguisedly somnambulant; and the customary loiterers, even to the middle-aged woman with the ulster and the handbag, fled to more congenial scenes. As in the inmost dells of some small tropic island the throbbing of the ocean lingers, so here a faint pervading hum and trepidation told in every corner of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... southern 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, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... 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 my suspicions. After an ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... by the inhabitants, whose eyes were not upon the stars; seen again in the Cantonment, over the massed trees of the park, and seen remarkably well from the wide veranda of Mrs. Wilder's bungalow, where the guests sat after a long dinner, remarking upon the heat and oppressiveness of the tropic night. The fire-flies danced over the trees like iridescent sparks hung on invisible gauze, and even came into the lighted drawing-room, to sparkle with less radiance against the plain white walls. Fans whirred ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... 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
... to be lugging a bundle of heavy clothing. By midnight I began to credit myself with foresight. The windows were closed, yet the land of yesterday seemed far behind indeed. I wrapped my heavy coat about me. Toward four we crossed the Tropic of Cancer into the Torrid Zone, without a jolt, and I dug out my gray sweater and regretted I had abandoned the old blue one in an empty box-car. Twice I think I drowsed four minutes with head and elbow on my bundle, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... every climate from the tropic to the pole, and armed against every malady from Ague to Zoster. He carried also the paternal watch, a solid silver bull's-eye, and a large pocketbook, tied round with a long tape, and, by way of precaution, pinned into his breast-pocket. He talked about having a pistol, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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 deeper. Out on the harbor the pale saffron light lingered, long after the red had faded. How many tides ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... his friends and be written down an incorrigible bore; and who doubts that the Wandering Jew, with the weight of twenty centuries of experience and observation upon his head, finds a deeper pang than the tropic heat or the Arctic snow could give, in the want of an occasional quiet and patient listener to the ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... times in which the force of the old had spent itself and nothing new had come to take its place. We are beginning to see now that we too have been passing through a twilight zone whose contrasts are all the more dramatic through the more than tropic swiftness with which the high lights of the Victorian period darkened into the distractions and disillusionments of our own time. The best one can say is that there was on the part of the more sensitive a widespread anticipation of all this, as if the chill of a coming shadow had fallen first ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... fair Earth spake: the glad Sun speeded forth, Hearing her matron words, and backward drave To frozen caves the icy Wind of the North,— And bade the South Wind from the tropic wave Bring watery vapors over river and plain,— And bade the East Wind cross her path, and lave The lowlands, emptying there her laden mist,— And bade the Wind of the West, the best wind, blow After the early and the latter rain,— And beamed himself, and oft the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... about to reply when the war cries of Muda Saffir's Dyaks as they rushed out upon Bududreen and his companions came to them distinctly through the tropic night. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was therefore likely to be 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 through ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... laughed Mr. Treadwell. "The leaves aren't anything like those of an orange tree. I remember once when we gave an act with this tree it was supposed to be on a tropic island, and one of the actors fastened a cocoanut on it, to make the audience think ...
— Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Giving a Show • Laura Lee Hope
... sounds which you hear within yourselves in sleep, and by the light of an electric sun whose rays often overcome you. You know no more how light makes itself seen within you, than you know the simple and natural process which changes it on the throats of tropic birds to rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and opals, or keeps it gray and brown on the breasts of the same birds under the cloudy skies of Europe, or whitens it here in the bosom of our polar Nature. You know not how to decide ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... thick, lush, and green. The lianas looped across from bough to bough, huge birds' nest ferns lay tucked in the branches, on all sides big-leaved plants, fronds of ferns, and tangled creepers crowded each other for space, and through all the mass of wild tropic growth the hot sunlight filtered in splashes of ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... pines and floored with harsh palmetto-scrub. Strewn here and there through this sandy expanse lovely oases, locally known as "hammocks", usually in hollows, and consisting of several acres of rich soil where tropic and sub-tropic trees grow as luxuriantly as in a jungle, where undergrowth and vine run riot, where orchid and airplant and wondrous-hued flowers blaze through the green gloom of ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... a front of resolute gayety. A new stove graced the parlor, a stove with the proud nickeled title of "Frost King"; a title seen to be deserved when Clem had it properly gorged with dry wood. Within its tropic radiations Miss Caroline bloomed and was hale of being, like ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... noon! and not a single sound Breathes on the eternal stillness all around; 'Tis tropic noon! and yet the sultry time Seems like the twilight of some fairy clime. Spreading in lone luxuriance round is seen The mangrove's tangled maze of sombre green; Thro' mists that dwell those baneful fens upon Large orbed and pale peers out the shrouded Sun, And ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... convey to the mind a just idea of its magnitude. Stretching from the 115th to the 153rd degree of east longitude, and from the 10th to the 37th of south latitude, it averages 2700 miles in length by 1800 in breadth; and balanced, as it were, upon the tropic of that hemisphere in which it is situated, it receives the fiery heat of the equator at one extremity, while it enjoys the refreshing coolness of the temperate zone at the other. On a first view we should be led to expect that this extensive tract ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... above them fell a voice of Stentor. "Sail ho! sail ho!" Upon which they gave for the remainder of the tropic night small attention to aught but warlike matters. With the morning the three ships counted to the general gain the downright sinking of a small fleet from Hispaniola, and the taking therefrom porcelain, many ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... of this expedition. Professor, this young red-head is Martin Grey, a sort of nephew by adoption who knows more about night life than most cabaret proprietors—and not much of anything else. He has shaken the dangers of the gold-diggers to face with us the dangers of the tropic seas." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... its diplomatists, England, as the chief party interested, would have long since intimated gently to such dog in the manger: 'Dog, will you be so obliging as rise! I am grieved to say, we shall have to do unpleasant things otherwise. Dogs have doors for their hutches: but to pretend barring the Tropic of Cancer,—that is too big a door for any dog. Can nobody but you have business here, then, which is not displeasing to the gods? We bid you rise!' And in this mode there is no doubt the dog, bark and bite as he might, would have ended by rising; not only England, but ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... dark ohia for precarious roothold on rocky ledges, and dense masses of Eugenia, aflame with crimson flowers, and bananas, and all the leafy wealth born of heat and damp fill up the clefts which fissure the pali. Every now and then some scarlet tropic bird flashed across the shadow, but it was a very lifeless and a very silent scene. The arches, buttresses, and columns suggest a temple, and the deep tone of the fall is as organ music. It is all ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... nor day brings to my tree, She thought, the free air's choice extremes, But yet it grows as joyfully And floods my chamber with its beams, So that some tropic land it seems Where oranges with ruddy gleams, And aloes, whose weird flowers the creams Of long rich centuries one deems, Wave through the softness of the gloom,— And these may blush a deeper bloom Because they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... geniuses, do the most unusual things. So with all other intoxications. Noble Dill was indeed no genius, and some friend should have kept an eye upon him to-day; he was not himself. All afternoon in a mood of tropic sunrise he collected rents, or with glad vagueness consented instantly to their postponement. "I've come about the rent again," he said beamingly to one delinquent tenant of his father's best client; and turned and walked away, humming ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... or so, and recognized the published Fiji characteristics: a broad belt of clean white coral sand around the island; back of it a graceful fringe of leaning palms, with native huts nestling cosily among the shrubbery at their bases; back of these a stretch of level land clothed in tropic vegetation; back of that, rugged and picturesque mountains. A detail of the immediate foreground: a mouldering ship perched high up on a reef-bench. This completes the composition, and makes the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 sea. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... 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 the really ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... lights held firm and steady. They were seven—like seven little moons. One was of a pearly pink, one of a delicate nacreous blue, one of lambent saffron, one of the emerald you see in the shallow waters of tropic isles; a deathly white; a ghostly amethyst; and one of the silver that is seen only when the flying ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt |
