"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... long formed a staple article of diet for the Insurrectos. Spanish axes had been at work here and not a single tree remained alive. The green floor of the valley farther down was dotted with the other, the royal kind, that monarch of tropic vegetation which lends to the Cuban landscape its peculiar and ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... "Albatross" entered the equatorial region below the tropic of Cancer. Six hundred miles from the northern frontier of the Sahara she crossed the route on which Major Laing met his, death in 1846, and crossed the road of the caravans from Morocco to the Sudan, and that part of the desert swept by the Tuaregs, where could be heard what is called "the song ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... after 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 ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... will—some day. But d'y' remember Kingston Harbor, where the black boys dive through the green waters for the silver sixpenny pieces, and Kingston port, where the white roads and the white walls throw back the tropic sun so that it seems twice as hot as it really is—Kingston, Guy—in Jamaica, where the sun sets like a blood-orange salad in a purple dish? D'y' remember, Guy, and the day we were lying into Kingston in the Bess and the word came that my uncle was dead? Aye, you ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... day thought it my duty to press upon him. One magnificent evening, the 30th July (that is to say, three weeks after our departure), the frigate was abreast of Cape Blanc, thirty miles to leeward of the coast of Patagonia. We had crossed the tropic of Capricorn, and the Straits of Magellan opened less than seven hundred miles to the south. Before eight days were over the Abraham Lincoln would be ploughing the waters ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... 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 rain. But ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... suck up another. Motors whirled them toward uptown, toward downtown, or east, or west, by twos and threes, or as individuals. Like ants their general effect was black, with here and there a moving spot of color, or of intermingling colors, as of flowers in the wind, or tropic birds. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... of song; Fabled fountains pouring spray; Where our anchors dropped among Corals of some tropic bay, ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... her desire to perfect herself in her duties, she had no desire. She was content. In the dismal, dirty, untidy, untidiable, uncomfortable office, arctic near the windows, and tropic near the stove, with dust on her dress and ink on her fingers and the fumes of gas in her quivering nostrils, and her mind strained and racked by an exaggerated sense of her responsibilities, she was in heaven! She who so vehemently objected to the squalid ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... the boards, but Christopher had not the key to their talk, and had little interest in them. By-and-by all but one left the stage. The light dwindled and faded. The sun-sets on the English stage are as rapid as in any tropic region. The player played his part. He was in love, and true as true could be, but the empress of his soul had her doubts about him. How could she doubt him? That was the burden of his speech as he sat at the table, and murmured the loved one's cruelty with a broken voice ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... to fight the Huns- No coward thought could bind me, I sizzled n the tropic suns, I faced the bayonets and the guns. And when in daring deeds I shone One little woman spurred me on- The girl I left ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... the elevation of the 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, when the gorges ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... and crowned with martyrdom. Here, too, the Spiderwort of our gardens, in a meeker form of beauty and with a paler radiance, luxuriated under the protection of the wood. Already I observed the predominance of luxuriant vines, indicating our nearness to the tropic, wreathed gayly over the tall and branchless trunks of the trees: some, like the Bignonia, in a full blaze of crimson; others, like the Climbing Fern, draping the trees in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... of Earth twice ten degrees and more From the Suns Axle; they with labour push'd 670 Oblique the Centric Globe: Som say the Sun Was bid turn Reines from th' Equinoctial Rode Like distant breadth to Taurus with the Seav'n Atlantick Sisters, and the Spartan Twins Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amaine By Leo and the Virgin and the Scales, As deep as Capricorne, to bring in change Of Seasons to each Clime; else had the Spring Perpetual smil'd on Earth with vernant Flours, Equal in Days and Nights, except to those 680 Beyond the Polar Circles; to them ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... in the same tracks, found a bog of oozing, icy mud. Therefore, as the town doubled daily in size, it grew endwise like a string of dominoes, till the shore from Cape Nome to Penny River was a long reach of white, glinting in the low rays of the arctic sunset like foamy breakers on a tropic island. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... leaped up the next morning, and the tropic night flashed suddenly into the tropic day, Amyas was pacing the deck, with dishevelled hair and torn clothes, his eyes red with rage and weeping, his heart full—how can I describe it? Picture it to yourselves, picture it to yourselves, you who have ever lost a brother; and you who have not, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... and blotted out. About two o'clock 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 of ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... 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 ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... is more abundantly supplied with rivers, and of a larger magnitude, than any out of the tropics, the Murray alone excepted; and doubtless a journey across the island within the tropic would present fewer difficulties than one direct from Perth to Sydney, or Adelaide; but, excepting for the advancement of geographical knowledge, there is no object to be gained by such a journey. The best way is along the valley of the ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... sentimental attachment for articles of clothing, but I must confess an affection for my veteran uniform overcoat, inspired by its persistent utility. I find that it is twenty-three years of age and can testify to its strenuous existence. It has been spared neither rain, wind, nor salt sea spray, tropic heat nor Arctic cold; it has outlived many sets of buttons, from their glittering gilded youth to green old age, and it supports its four-stripe shoulder straps as gaily as the single lace ring of the early ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... land so rich in bloom, Its branches wrought at noon a gloom; Her form was bright with beauty's hues, Which each propitious year renews; And, as within its bosom lay, Treasures which mocked the sun's bright ray; In her rich soul shone wealth to shame, That tropic sun's meridian flame. She stood a lovely being fraught, With that most dear to human thought, The power to love, to force the bliss Of heaven, to such a world as this. Iola, dearest maiden, threw A wondrous charm o'er all who knew Her loveliness; her menial train Adored her ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... in the New World, unclouded by the climacteric 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 ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... limit of perpetual snow 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 ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... 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 Well accept ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... Vast herds of llamas were domesticated, from the hair of which the exquisitely woven cloth was made. Agriculture flourished. The country, upraised from the sea by the great range of mountains, afforded every variety of {70} climate from temperate to tropic, and the diversified products of the soil corresponded with the opportunities presented. And every foot of space was utilized for a population of millions of industrious workers, with an economy and resourcefulness only emulated ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... has effected great reforms. Oft one man's act has deflected the stream of the centuries. Full oft a single word has been like a switch that turns a train from the route running toward the frozen North, to a track leading into the tropic South. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... what calm of tropic seas, 'Neath alien clusters of the nights, Looked, in the past, such eyes as these? Long-quenched, relumed, ...
— A Father of Women - and other poems • Alice Meynell
... below, and there seemed to be no safe spot whereon to land. The foul, deep swamp that reached for miles on every side, the towering trees that sprouted their spiny trunks and limbs from it, the interlaced razor-edged vines and creeper-growths—all was a stirring welter of tropic life, life varied and voracious and untamed. From the tiny poisonous bansi insects layers deep on the nearest tree to the monster gantor that crouched in a clump of weeds, gently sawing his fangs back and forth, all the creatures of ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... talents and acquirements, and of the spirit of enterprise and decision, united with prudence and discretion, exhibited in your recently published travels through the territories of the Maselakatze to the Tropic of Capricorn, has been pleased to select you to conduct the mission which the British Government has resolved to send to Sahela Selasse, the king of Shoa, in Southern Abyssinia, whose capital, Ankober, is supposed to be about four hundred miles inland from the port of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... only as strong and as cruel as you are. That is Nature's law: and is it not at first sight a fearful law? Internecine competition, ruthless selfishness, so internecine and so ruthless that, as I have wandered in tropic forests, where this temper is shown more quickly and fiercely, though not in the least more evilly, than in our slow and cold temperate one, I have said: Really these trees and plants are as wicked as so ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... too 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... condition in which there is an abnormal quantity of fluid in the tunica vaginalis. It is generally caused by traumatism, violent muscular efforts, or straining, and is much more frequent in tropic countries than elsewhere. It sometimes attains an enormous size. Leigh mentions a hydrocele weighing 120 pounds, and there are records of hydroceles weighing 40 and 60 pounds. Larrey speaks of a sarcocele in the coverings of the testicle which weighed 100 pounds. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... 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 the causes which produced those statues, human and divine, which ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... between the United States and China a mountain chain more than three thousand miles long crosses the tropic of Cancer. Only the highest peaks, however, reach above sea level; most of the range is fathoms deep in the waters of the Pacific. The eastern end of this great chain constitutes the Hawaiian group of islands, or the Territory ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... glooms, and out of their black arches shall come tripping children, like white fairies, to laugh and talk with the girl who lies dreaming and reading in the hammock there, beneath the black velvet canopy of the great cedar tree, like some fair tropic flower hanging from its boughs; and we will sit down, and eat and drink among the burdock leaves, and then watch the quiet house, and lawn, and flowers, and fair human creatures, and shining water, all sleeping breathless in the glorious light beneath the glorious blue, till we doze off, ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... England, and my coughing continues, I will tell you how I might do, and be most happy and comfortable. I might remain in my chamber all winter, and keep it at an even temperature, and exercise by means of the portable gymnasium. I am sure the joy of your presence would be better than any tropic or equator without you. And I hate to be the means of your ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... think that his perplexing friend had really gone off his head at last; there seemed so reckless a flight of irrelevancy from the tropic-pictured walls he was asked to imagine to the gray, wind-swept, and somewhat chilly suburban garden in which he was actually kicking his heels. How he could be more happy in one by imagining the other he could not conceive. Both (in ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... faithful, loving characters of Isabella, Juliet, Desdemona, Perdita, Helena, Miranda, Imogen, Ophelia and Cordelia, whose love-lit words and phrases shine out in the firmament of purity and devotion like morning stars in tropic skies. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Many of the ladies wore quaint costumes and rich attire of the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, while a few were attired in grotesque costumes. Felicita was dressed as a princess of the court of the ancient Incas, with a head dress of the rich plumage of tropic birds. I was dressed in ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... false shame of that eager demand for one, which she saw ready to leap to words in his eyes. He read it, sitting in the Richford library alone, while the great rhododendron bloomed outside, above the shaven sunny sward, looking like a monstrous tropic bird alighted to brood an ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nice clear space just ahead, with ample room in which to show ourselves and to make a downward plunge again beneath that large ship, the barnacle-covered bottom of which seems to tell of a long voyage through tropic seas. Now take up your stations of observation, gentlemen, and note the consternation which ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... from under the swift-moving keel, and feeling the soft, balmy Notos, the kind wind of the south, now and then puff against her face, when the west wind veered away, and so brought up a whiff of the spices and tropic bloom of the great southern continent, over the parching deserts and the treacherous quicksands of the Syrtes ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... there 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
... 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 ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... 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 was ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... 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. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... peas, beans, and onions; sugar-canes, ginger, pepper, and turmeric. In fact, situated as the island is, in a temperate climate just without the tropic, and enjoying abundance of rain, there is scarcely any vegetable, with the exception of a few of the equinoxial plants, that may not be cultivated here. The zea maize, or Indian corn, would be infinitely useful both for themselves, ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... shores of a tropic island, fighting together for the flag of the nation, both Blue and Gray gained a new and happier viewpoint; and looking back across the warm and shining waters of the Gulf Stream, each knew that all was good, ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... and after him Torres, both endeavoured to keep in the latitude of the tropic of Capricorn. In the charts of the period a port or bay was marked on the coast of Java-Major in that latitude. See "Baye Perdue," in the ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... pieces. Above all men, he longs for sympathy, recognition, applause. He respects his fellow-creatures, because he beholds in him a possible reader. To write a book, to send it forth to the world and the critics, is to a sensitive person like plunging mother-naked into tropic waters where sharks abound. It is true that, like death, the terror of criticism lives most in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criticised, and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man's life. Most men endure criticism with commendable ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... 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 hast put forth thy hand to rend our chains, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... 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 ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... sea shells, and of the mermaids who brought them to the shore, that some one who loved her might take them to her, and that the soft sound of the sea might always come to her ears, with visions of blue skies and tropic islands, where ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... A kind of stereographic projection on the plane of the equinoctial; the eye is supposed in one of the poles, so that the tropic, ecliptic, and horizon form the arches of the circles, but the hour-circles are all curves, drawn by means of several altitudes of the sun, for some particular latitude, for every day in the year. The use of ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... their evening meal, while those who worked the terrible engines ceased from their destroying toil. Peace, an ominous peace, brooded on the place, and everywhere, save for the flames that crackled among the cedar-wood beams in the roofs of the cloisters, was deep silence, such as in tropic lands precedes the bursting of a cyclone. To Miriam who watched, it seemed as though in the midst of this unnatural quiet Jehovah was withdrawing Himself from the house where His Spirit dwelt and from the people who worshipped ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... 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
... does a vast island continent in the Southern world, lies to some extent within the tropical range, for the Tropic of Capricorn traverses its northern part. At present, however, its most densely populated portion lies just outside the tropics, and it is this semi-tropical part of Australia with which we have mostly to do. And apart, too, from the mere fact of Australia being between certain parallels ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... in which a good story grows under the hand is so remarkable, that no tropic vegetation can show the like of it. For, consider, when you have got your germ—the mere idea, not half a dozen lines perhaps—which is to form your plot, how small a thing it is compared with, say, ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... just perceptible on the skirt of the horizon. Easterly breezes soon brought us to the island of Fogo, which, having passed on the 35th day of our voyage, we received the usual marine baptism, and participated in all the ceremonies observed on crossing the equator. We soon reached the tropic of Capricorn, and endeavored to gain the channel between the Falkland Islands and Patagonia; but unfavorable winds obliged us to direct our course eastwards, from the Island of Soledad to the Staten Islands. On the 3d of March we made the longitude of Cape Horn, but were not able ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... lovely youth! I guess The panther in the wilderness Was not so fair as he; And when he chose to sport and play, No dolphin ever was so gay Upon the tropic sea. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... The Mantchoo, and indeed all the other Tartar tribes bordering upon China, are scarcely distinguishable from the Chinese. The same colour, except in a few instances as I have elsewhere observed, the same eyes, and general turn of the countenance prevail, on the continent of Asia, from the tropic of Cancer to the Frozen Ocean[36]. The peninsula of Malacca, and the vast multitude of islands spread over the eastern seas, and inhabited by the Malays, as well as those of Japan and Lieou-kieou, have clearly been peopled from the same common stock. The first race of people to ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... 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 appreciation ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... 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 parallels called the polar circles, either because ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... down from its branches "bush-ropes," as they are called. These take root and become stout trunks. There is literally a "rubber belt" around the world, for nearly all rubber comes from the countries lying between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. More than half of all that is brought to market is produced in the valley of the Amazon River; and some of this "Para rubber," as it is called, from the seaport whence it is shipped, is the ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... of vampire-bats before the glare Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening, 485 Strange night upon ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... upon a weekday the bookstall shines emblazoned, discreetly hidden behind dingy 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... same 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 the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... will you dream a dream Of tropic shades in the lands of shine, Where the lily leans o'er an amber stream That flows like a rill of wasted wine,— Where the palm-trees, lifting their shields of green, Parry the shafts of the Indian sun Whose splintering vengeance falls ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley
... madness, I might have been at that moment comfortably at home, reading the evening paper! Nay, were it not better to be tossing on stormy seas, driving on a lee-shore, toiling as a slave under a tropic sun, than here, with a gaping audience waiting to devour me with their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... accompanying drawing, almost touch the back. Swans, when angered, likewise raise their wings and tail, and erect their feathers. They open their beaks, and make by paddling little rapid starts forwards, against any one who approaches the water's edge too closely. Tropic birds[13] when disturbed on their nests are said not to fly away, but "merely to stick out their feathers and scream." The Barn-owl, when approached "instantly swells out its plumage, extends its wings and tail, hisses and clacks ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... the directions he had received, he chartered a cab, and after a half-hour's tumultuous journey found himself alighting before a pretty villa in Prahran, with a well-ordered garden in front of it full of English shrubs and flowers, amidst which were interspersed a number of sub-tropic plants and trees. He was shown with no delay into a shaded room, where he had some difficulty in making out the figure of a gray-haired lady who sat in an arm-chair to receive him, and who did not rise at his entrance. Madge was standing near her, and as the dazzling ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... precious pair of idiots! They will have a glorious life. Such harmony, such congeniality! Such incomparable sweetness on her part, such equable spirits on his! Not the surpassing repose of a windless tropic night can approach to the divine serenity of their future. Ha! by the Furies! he will have an enviable companion; a matchless Griselda!" Laughing scornfully, he started up and strode across the floor. As Beulah caught the withering expression which sat on every ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... was time to boil the kettle once more, and make a cup of tea before setting out homewards. The lengthening shadows added fresh tenderness and beauty to the peaceful scene, and the sky began to paint itself in its exquisite sunset hues. It has been usual to praise the tints of tropic skies when the day is declining; but never, in any of my wanderings to East and West Indies, have I seen such gorgeous evening colours as those ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... and a roebuck during the first two days, for a violent gale made hunting well-nigh impossible. On the third morning the sun rose in a sky as blue as the waters of a tropic sea, and not a breath of air stirred the silver poplar leaves as we crossed the rocky stream bed to the base of the mountains north of camp. Fifteen hundred feet above us towered a ragged granite ridge which must be ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... were then 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... August, September, and October are rainy, from the equator to about the 20th degree of north latitude. Towards the equinoxial they begin earlier, and make their progress to windward, but the difference throughout the whole of the north tropic fluctuates little more or less than 15 or 20 days. When the rains commence, the earth, before parched up and consolidated into an impenetrable crust, by the powerful influence of the sun and a long period ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... to myself 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they got off late in the afternoon, and made ten or twelve miles to Gatun. The journey up the lazy tropical river was exciting and interesting. The boatmen sang, the tropic forests came down to the banks with their lilies, shrubs, mangoes, cocos, sycamores, palms; their crimson, purple, and yellow blossoms; their bananas with torn leaves; their butterflies and paroquets; their streamers and vines and scarlet ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the mariner really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... parallel of 38 and 39 south, till in longitude 57 east, where the weather being very stormy, we hauled to the north-east till in 35 south latitude, and then ran east till in 90 east, when we steered to the east-north-east, and crossed the tropic in 102 east, which was probably too far west. The south-east trade hung far to the eastward, and made it difficult to fetch Java Head, which had we not succeeded in doing at first, might have caused considerable delay, as the wind still blew out of ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... below we could hear them smashing the treasure-chests. While they were busy in the storeroom I hacked away at the scuttle-board, which was thick and of hard wood, well seasoned by continual wetting and drying in the tropic sun. ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... languages they spoke 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 ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... along carelessly, with a book under his arm, but not 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, ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... dark complexion was rendered extremely swarthy by the long exposure to weather, and tropic weather at that, which he had undergone. The expression of his face was of that abstract and thoughtful, nay, even melancholy, cast which we commonly associate with the student rather than the man of affairs. He was dressed in the prescribed uniform ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Vincent soon shared its fate. The Earl of Albemarle and Admiral Sir George Pococke sailed in early spring on a more important errand, landed in June near Havana with eleven thousand soldiers, and attacked Moro Castle, the key of the city. The pitiless sun of the tropic midsummer poured its fierce light and heat on the parched rocks where the men toiled at the trenches. Earth was so scarce that hardly enough could be had to keep the fascines in place. The siege works were little else than a mass of dry faggots; and when, after exhausting toil, the ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... inhibition. The rail-splitter can be so easily encouraged to believe that rail-splitting is his vocation. The tragedy in the life of Mr. J.M. Barrie's "Admirable Crichton" was not due to any legal prohibition of his conversion in England, as on the tropic island, into a veritable chief, but that on English soil he did not in his own soul want any such elevation and distinction. His very loyalty to the forms and fabric of English life kept him fatuously content with the mean truckling and meaner domineering of his position of butler. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... 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
... Patmos of the Southern Seas Our northern dreamer sleeps, Strange stars above him, and above his grave Strange leaves and wings their tropic splendours wave, While, far beneath, mile after shimmering mile, The great Pacific, with its faery deeps, Smiles all day long its ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... you made over Ward Cheney—that fortunate, youth! Like Susy, he got out of life all that was worth the living, and got his great reward before he had crossed the tropic frontier of dreams and entered the Sahara of fact. The deep consciousness of Susy's good fortune is a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the tropic routes Need poleward warp and veer, But on through the Gates of Goethals The steady keels shall steer, Where the tribes of man are led toward peace ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... want to 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, for that is their true ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... tropic suggestion of the Ayah's personality had warmed the imagination of the servants' hall, and there had been much talk of many things, of the Osborns as well as of their servants, and thrilling stories of East Indian life had been related by Walderhurst's man, who was a travelled ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... divine decisions That often rule him: and at times he views Portraits of 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
... sun, what spiritual loveliness in the tender day! A tropic sky always seemed to me to hang so low that one could almost bathe one's fingers in its lukewarm liquid blue by reaching upward from any dwelling-roof. But this sky, softer, fainter, arches so vastly as to suggest the heaven of a larger planet. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... means Bride in the German sense of "affianced"; and although the joy of this relation passed over Schumann like the breath of a Tropic, bringing forth, amongst other gorgeous fruits, his glorious First Symphony, which some one has well called the Symphony of Bliss, yet, ere this bliss was more than an elusive vision, the two passed through fierce ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Bayswater omnibus, passing across some huge desert on its ordinary way to Bayswater. The blue elephant was no longer blue with paint; he was blue with distance. The black doll was really a negro relieved against passionate tropic foliage in the land where every weed is flaming and only man is black. The red Noah's ark was really the enormous ship of earthly salvation riding on the rain-swollen sea, red in the ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... was broken just before nightfall. Dark had come with the suddenness of the tropic seas. There was a puff of wind, followed by a steady breeze, and the schooner once more sped southward. Robert, anxious to breathe the invigorating air, came upon deck, and standing near the mainmast watched the sea rushing ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... 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 ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair
... great idea of Death appareled itself to my young suffering heart—the corresponding pomp in which the antagonistic idea, not less mysterious, of life, rose, as if on wings, to the heavens, amidst tropic glories and floral pageantries, that seemed even more solemn and more pathetic than, the vapory plumes and trophies of mortality—all this chorus of restless images, or of suggestive thoughts, gave to my ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... 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 in a small, congested area the coarser labors of humanity were performed ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... now rapidly drawing out of the cold northern winter and into a tropic warmth. Already the raw chill of higher latitudes was giving way to a balmy, spring-like temperature, while the glittering sunshine transformed the sea into a lively, gleaming expanse of sapphire. The nights were ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... never visited that land, And Summer's lap spilled o'er with fruits and flowers, And tropic trees cast shade on every hand, And twined ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of Portuguese India, each of them circumscribing the world by voyaging in opposite directions, until they meet at these islands, which are numerous and of varying size; they are properly called Filipinas, and are subject to the crown of Castilla. They lie within the tropic of Cancer, and extend from twenty-four degrees north latitude to the equinoctial line, which cuts the islands of Maluco. There are many others on the other side of the line, in the tropic of Capricorn, which extend for twelve degrees in south latitude. [211] The ancients ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... 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
... by the side of the hanging wood, and over my field. Did these small weak birds, some of which were nestling twelve days ago, shift their quarters at this late season of the year to the other side of the northern tropic? Or rather, is it not more probable that the next church, ruin, chalk-cliff, steep covert, or perhaps sandbank, lake, or pool (as a more northern naturalist would say), may become their hybernaculum, and afford them a ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... sank swiftly. 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 ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... people. This praying and singing continued for an hour. Then, after a short prayer, the principal priest uncovered the maro; and Otoo rose up, and wrapped it about him, holding, at the same time, in his hand, a cap or bonnet, composed of the red feathers of the tail of the tropic bird, mixed with other feathers of a dark colour. He stood in the middle space, facing the three priests, who continued their prayers for about ten minutes; when a man, starting from the crowd, said something which ended ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... partial, as if we would give flight to the arrow without bending the bow. No living movement either begins or is completed save through death. If the shuttle return not there is no web; and the texture of life is woven through this tropic movement. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... snow gave way a little on the swells, and streams of water began to trickle down under the huge banks of snow, filling the ravines; and then at last came a day when a strange, warm wind blew from the northwest. Soft and sweet and sensuous it was, as if it swept some tropic bay filled with a thousand isles—a wind like a vast warm breath blown upon the land. Under its touch the snow did not melt; it vanished. It fled in a single day from the plain to the gullies. Another day, ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... flowery wilderness! Some in thy "slip-boxes" and "honey-moons" Complain of—want of order, I confess, But not of system in its highest sense. Who asks a guiding clue through this wide mind, In love of Nature such will surely find. In tropic climes, live like the tropic bird, Whene'er a spice-fraught grove may tempt thy stay; Nor be by cares of colder climes disturbed— No frost the summer's bloom shall drive away; Nature's wide temple and the azure dome Have plan enough, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... when he forged, out of one golden thought, A key to open his prison; when the King Released him for a tale of faerie gold Under the tropic palms; when those grey walls Melted before his passion; do you think The gold that lured the King was quite the same As that which Raleigh saw? You know ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry fingerpoints the Almighty ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... two sailors were out in the sun, and by the time that Crothers and Joe Byng had realized that there was an audience of something like a thousand, including children, he was standing posed like a gladiator, with the straight-down tropic sun streaming off his ebony hide. As Crothers, not quite sure even yet that the whole affair was not a joke, began to doff his blouse it dawned on him that if the thing were true it would ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... were of the hedgerows that bounded his lands—boundaries that vanished day by day, as the lands widened, with now a whole farm added, and now a single field. Could he leave Arden, and the kingdom that he had created for himself, to roam in sandy deserts, and hob-and-nob with Kaffir chiefs under the tropic stars? ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... new rice is the occasion of a family festival called Pongol. The new rice is boiled in a new pot on a fire which is kindled at noon on the day when, according to Hindoo astrologers, the sun enters the tropic of Capricorn. The boiling of the pot is watched with great anxiety by the whole family, for as the milk boils, so will the coming year be. If the milk boils rapidly, the year will be prosperous; but it will be the reverse if the milk boils slowly. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... wide A sun-pursuing highway did prepare For those true-hearted exiles few The house of Liberty that reared anew. Nor fails he here of honor due. These goodly structures ye behold, These towering piles in order brave, From whose tall crests the pennons wave Like tropic plumage, gules and gold; These ample halls, wherein ye view Whate'er is fairest wrought and best— South with North vying, East with West, And arts of yore with science new— Bear witness for us how religiously ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... rose from Honolulu, And it bears the tropic brand, Sandwiched in this friendly missive ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... through every zone and clime are they: countless thousands of them far, far from the land that gave them birth. Nearby the place where those of the Shwe Dagon sleep I stood on the temple walls and looked out on the fading beauty of the tropic sunset, the silvery outline of the Irrawaddy River breaking into the darkening green of the jungle growth. And then came up the cool night breeze of the Torrid Zone—more refreshing and delightful than our Temperate climate ever knows. As gentle and caressing as a mother's lullaby, ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... and went errant upon quests, and met Ulysses and the heroes and the fairies. Or late in the evening, just before the lamps in the nursery were put out, he would suddenly mount me, and we would gallop through Africa. There we would pass by night through tropic forests, and come upon dark rivers sweeping by, all gleaming with the eyes of crocodiles, where the hippopotamus floated down with the stream, and mysterious craft loomed suddenly out of the dark and furtively passed away. And when we had passed ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... in the street, past others in the doorways, past children and dogs and goats, the pair marched briskly to the faded blue house whence the federal superintendent ruled the town with tropic indolence. There they found a thin, fever-worn, gravely courteous gentleman ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... expecting sire, The mother's kiss, and, still if aught remain, Our whispering hearts shall aid the silent strain. Ah, let the dreamer o'er the taffrail lean To muse unheeded, and to weep unseen; Fear not the tropic's dews, the evening's chills, His heart lies warm among ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in the Eastern seas, where a lad shares the perils of his father, the captain of the merchant ship The Petrel. After touching at Singapore, they are becalmed off one of the tropic isles, where the ship is attacked and, after a desperate fight, set on fire by Malay pirates. They escape in a boat and drift ashore upon a beautiful volcanic island, where, after sundry adventures, they come upon the half-burned remains of the ship, out of whose timbers they construct ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... been a 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 ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... it, lulled by the swaying motion of the elephant's stride. The soothing silence of the woodland was broken only by the crowing of a jungle cock. The thick, leafy screen overhead excluded the glare of the tropic sunlight; and the heat was tempered to a welcome coolness by ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... virtue: to be free From foolishness is wisdom's first degree. Think of some ill you feel a real disgrace, The loss of money or the loss of place; To keep yourself from these, how keen the strain! How dire the sweat of body and of brain! Through tropic heat, o'er rocks and seas you run To furthest India, poverty to shun, Yet scorn the sage who offers you release From vagrant wishes that disturb your peace. Take some provincial pugilist, who gains A paltry cross-way prize for all his pains; Place on ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... Una)—her narrowly veiled eyes lost no detail of any happening in Una's group, and her ears, I am sure, no detail of its conversation. Subtle glances, stolen or portentous, shot between them, and Jerry, poor lad, wandered from one to the other like some great ship becalmed in a tropic sea aware of an impending tempest, yet powerless ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... 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
... 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, and much ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... song, O, Wind, Of countries beyond the sea, Which in thy wand'rings oft Thou pass with a footstep free; Lands that are ever green 'Neath blaze of the tropic spells, Bright with their blessed ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... a long lean sallow face; He sat with half-shut eyes, Like an old sailor in a ship Becalmed 'neath tropic skies. Beside him in the dust he had set His staff and shady hat; These, peeping small, Louisa saw Quite clearly where ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... handkerchiefs round their throats, In from sea with the cotton boats. Portuguese and Brazilianos, Men from the mountains, men from the Llanos, Men from the Pampas, men from the Sierras, Men from the mines of the Cordilleras, Men from the flats of the tropic mud Where the butterfly glints his mail with blood; Men from the pass where day by day The sun's heat scales the rocks away; Men from the hills where night by night The sheep-bells give the heart delight; Indians, Lascars ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... help my friend. But I felt I must do something. The cabin skylights were open, for it was tropic weather, and a murmur of voices ascended through the opening. I could not distinguish words, but I felt I must know what they were saying to Newman, or about him. So I took a chance. I slipped the wheel into the becket, and crept to the ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... the followers of Pythagoras do distribute the universal globe of heaven into five circles, which they denominate zones; one of which is called the arctic circle, which is always conspicuous to us, another is the summer tropic, another is the solstice, another is the winter tropic, another is the antarctic circle, which is always out of sight. The circle called the zodiac is placed under the three that are in the midst, and is oblique, gently touching them all. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the 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 whether color ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... respected her uncle's preference; besides—the pony! Of these trios Mr. Fountain was the true soul. He had to blow the coals of conversation right and left. It is very good of me not to compare him to the Tropic between two frigid zones. At first he took his nap as usual; for he said to himself: "Now I have started them they can go on." Besides, he had seen pictures in the shop windows of an old fellow dozing and then the young ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... twentieth of September they passed the Tropic of Capricorn, and by the middle of October they were almost opposite the Straits of Magellan. On this voyage they had kept most of the time far away from the coast, and had landed only when necessary to re-stock their ship with water ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... not best That one turn humorist. The mind that seeks Holiness, finds it seldom; who pursues Beauty perhaps shall in a lengthened life Find it perfected only once or twice. But if one's quest were humor—what rich stores, What tropic jungles of it, lie to hand At every moment, everywhere one turns— What luscious meadows ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... upon the tropic seas, Where fathom long the blood-red dulses grow, Droop from the rock and waver in the breeze, Lashing the tide to foam; while calm below The muddy mandrakes throng those waters warm, And purple, gold, and green, the living ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... with labour pushed Oblique the centric globe: some say the Sun Was bid turn reins from the equinoctial road Like distant breadth—to Taurus with the seven Atlantic Sisters, and the Spartan Twins, Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amain By Leo, and the Virgin, and the Scales, As deep as Capricorn; to bring in change Of seasons to each clime. Else had the spring Perpetual smiled on Earth with ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Virginia learned to sew. She had always detested it. Her fingers were pricked and sore weeks after she began. Sad to relate, her bandages, shirts, and havelocks never reached the front, —those havelocks, to withstand the heat of the tropic sun, which were made in thousands by devoted Union women that first summer of the war, to be ridiculed as nightcaps by ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
