"Upas" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the forests—past the river's brink, O'er wood and plain and mountain, till it fouls Fair Paris in her pleasures; then it prowls, A deadly stench, to Crete, to Mexico, To Poland—wheresoe'er kings' armies go: And Earth one Upas-tree of bitter sadness, Opening vast blossoms of a bloody madness. Throats cut by thousands—slain men by the ton! Earth quite corpse-cumbered, though the half not done! They lie, stretched out, where the blood-puddles soak, Their black lips gaping with the last ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... on the prostrate trunks may be seen numberless insects of various species. Impalpably, however, the poison of the dead and decaying vegetation is inhaled into the system with a result sometimes as fatal as that which is said to arise from the vicinity of the Upas-tree. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... an eloquence which would have disarmed the savage tiger, could have won wretches so much more pitiless than the most ferocious beasts of the wilderness, or saved him from their slow but sure poison, whose breath was worse than the upas tree to all who ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... flush of consumption, which carries with it the seeds of a certain death. Will that orange where Indian yellow figures ever see old age, or that green with indigo, or purple with cochineal lake? Will they not rather spread over the picture the Upas-tree of fugacity, and kill it as ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... North! the South! no geographic line Can fix the boundary or the point define, Since each with each so closely interblends, Where Slavery rises, and where Freedom ends. Beneath your rocks the roots, far-reaching, hide Of the fell Upas on the Southern side; The tree whose branches in your northwinds wave Dropped its young blossoms on Mount Vernon's grave; The nursling growth of Monticello's crest Is now the glory of the free Northwest; To the wise maxims of her olden school ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... reason to know that they can be easily civilised. Their arms were brought on board as trophies. They consisted of the blow-pipe, (the sumpitan); it is about eight feet long, and from it they eject small arrows, poisoned with the juice of the upas, chiefly for killing birds. They had also long sharp knives called parangs, spears, and shields, in addition to the fire-arms, which they procure ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... Balm from the pines, and healing from the grass, And carry down my current as I go Not common stones but precious gems to show; And tears (the holy water from sad eyes) Back to God's sea, from which all rivers rise Let me convey, not blood from wounded hearts, Nor poison which the upas tree imparts. When over flowery vales I leap with joy, Let me not devastate them, nor destroy, But rather leave them fairer to the sight; Mine be the lot to comfort and delight. And if down awful chasms I needs must leap Let me not murmur at my ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... science. They were the real Titans who bared their grand foreheads to all the thunderbolts of all the gods. The church has been, and still is, the great robber. She has rifled not only the pockets but the brains of the world. She is the stone at the sepulcher of liberty; the upas tree in whose shade the intellect of man has withered; the gorgon beneath whose gaze the human heart has ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... own life, root and branch, that had grown into the upas-tree which was poisoning existence for Rachel Steel. She was being punished for her second marriage as she had been punished for her first, only more deservedly, and with more subtle stripes. Each day brought a dozen tokens of the anomalous position which she had accepted in the madness of ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... slavery in our own worn—out colonies, utterly disregardless of our rights and lives? Mind, Tom, I don't defend slavery, I sincerely wish we could do without it, but am I to be the only one to pay the piper in compassing its extinction? If, however, it really be that Upas—tree, under whose baleful shade every kindly feeling in the human bosom, whether of master or servant, withers and dies, I ask, who planted it? If it possess the magical, and incredible, and most pestilential quality, that the English gentleman, who shall be virtuous ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... good-by, and unclasped your hands from my neck, chided you, laughed at you, fondled you, promised all manner of pretty things and engaged you never to forget me—and sailed away upon the Golden Rose to meet my crowded years with their wine and roses, upas shadows and apples of Sodom. How long before I forgot you, Audrey? A year and a day, perhaps. I protest ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... train approaching her castle and she went out into the yard and sat on a rickety bench under a upas tree to receive the king and his court. She was attended by twelve snapdragons, a score of hobgoblins, and innumerable gnomes, elves, ghouls, and hoodoos. On her left stood the catamaran, and on her right the boogaboo, each more revoltingly hideous ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... forgot to P ... A ... Y ...—I use cryptography Lest I his vengeful pen should dree— His P ...O ...S ...T ...A ...G ...E ...) Things to the same effect I cut, About the tantrums of a ghost, Not more than three weeks since, at most, Near Stratford, in Connecticut. 420 Knott's Upas daily spread its roots, Sent up on all sides livelier shoots, And bore more pestilential fruits; The ghosts behaved like downright brutes, They snipped holes in his Sunday suits, Practised all night on octave flutes, Put peas (not peace) into his boots, Whereof grew ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... 1870 was rendered memorable by the passing of a scarcely less popular and important measure—the Irish Land Bill. Mr. Gladstone, in speaking of Ireland, had referred to three branches of an Upas tree, to the growth of which her present sad condition was largely owing—the Irish Church, the Irish Land Laws, and the Irish Universities. The first branch had fallen with the disestablishment of the Irish Church, and Mr. Gladstone, pressing on in his ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... reptile haunts the sweetest bower, The rose blooms on the thorn; There 's poison in the fairest flower That greets the opening morn. The hemlock and the night-shade spring In garden and in grove; But oh! the upas of the soul ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of the Romans; God will show whether it is in the case of our Indian empire: but this I say, that the Turkish empire has not even that excuse to plead; as is proved by the patent fact that the whole East, the very garden of the old world, has become a desert and a ruin under the upas-blight of their government. ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... a large body of men in this country, as in France and Italy, who condemn the demand for these precautions as un-Christian and impolitic. Such laxness is the soil in which thrives the upas tree whose shade has so long darkened the organs of our empire and now threatens ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... on a grander scale, are presented by the extinct crater in the Island of Java called "Guevo Upas," the Poison-Valley. It is a level about half a mile in circumference, surrounded by precipitous rocks. From various parts of its soil carbonic acid gas is discharged in such quantities as to prove fatal ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... members of families, as citizens, as practical men of the world; and so to conquer at last that Manichaean hatred of marriage and parentage, which from the first to the sixteenth century shed its Upas shade over ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and base desires Like noxious weeds unchecked luxurious grow, Making a tangled jungle of the soul, Where no good seed can find a place to root, Where noble purposes and pure desires And gentle thoughts wither and fade and die Like flowers beneath the deadly upas-tree. He saw that selfishness bred grasping greed, And made the miser, made the prowling thief, And bred hypocrisy, pretense, deceit, And made the bigot, made the faithless priest, Bred anger, cruelty, and thirst for blood, And made the tyrant, stained ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... INNOXIA.—The upas tree. Most exaggerated statements respecting this plant have passed into history. Its poisonous influence was said to be so great as not only to destroy all animal life but even plants could not live within ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... you first about these barnacles that clog the wheels of society by poisoning the springs of rectitude with their upas-like eye," said Jeff, with the pure gleam of the muck-raker in ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... the Sly Old Fox. "The Spanish Main! With all the little parrots and monkeys flitting about in the branches of the upas ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... of viewing in one morning of two hours' length, a score of trees we had hitherto known only in the tales of the tropics: the traveler's tree with its fernlike leaves, the cannon-ball tree, the deadly upas, the nourishing breadfruit, the clove, the cinnamon, the mace or nutmeg, the vanilla, the guava, the cork, the almond, the mulberry, the mango, the sandalwood! There were great screw-pines, lignum-vitae, mahogany, mimosa, magnolia trees; and the tree-fern, the giant creeper, the panama-hat ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... of that case Never-Fail Blake wrung a thin and ghostly consolation. The more he brooded over it the more morosely disquieted he became. The thing grew like a upas tree; it spread until it obsessed all his waking hours and invaded even his dreams. Then a time came when he could endure it no more. He faced the necessity of purging his soul of all uncertainty. The whimpering of one of his unkenneled ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... one natural history topic per chapter, be it a plant, a tree or an animal. There are various perils that have to be overcome—the upas tree, an ourang-outang, a tree that drops its fruit like a heavy bomb, a python, and quite a few more. Luckily they don't meet any unfriendly Dyaks during the journey they undertake to get from their landing-place to the town of Bruni, many hundreds ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... long at them; then suddenly exclaimed: "U, P, A, S! Why, it is the Upas tree; the deadly, mysterious, poisonous Upas tree! I found it in the jungle. I felt ill the night I camped beneath it. I have never felt quite well since. The nightmares began on that night; and the nightmares have followed me home. This is the worst of all. Helen calls me the Upas tree—the ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... sadly spoken words fell upon his hearer's ears like so many snowflakes. Instinctively they shrank back from the beautiful bush as though it had been the fabled Upas. They had begun to fear now for the first time. But there was one among them, a young fellow of twenty-two, named Martin Caine, who was already known as one of the most daring and far-sighted of the rising generation of chemical investigators, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... endeavours, whether or no they take the line which most approves itself to me. A faineant in the English Ministry to-day is something worse than even a cumberer of the ground; he is, I dare to say, like a upas upon it, blighting where he throws his shadow, so conspicuous and so deadly must be the example of such a life in the Minister of such a Gospel. But what I mean, again and again, is this, that the ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... Harvey had not heard her spoken of before, as connected with the report of his intemperance, he knew very well that Mr. Query's "friendly investigations" had been the sole cause of his loss of practice. However, to go to the roots of this Upas tree of scandal, he resolved to pay an ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... pseudo-commentator, and sometimes of Amner, who was discovered to be an obscure puritanic minister who never read text or notes of a play-wright, whenever he explored into a "thousand notable secrets" with which he has polluted the pages of Shakspeare! The marvellous narrative of the upas-tree of Java, which Darwin adopted in his plan of "enlisting imagination under the banner of science," appears to have been another forgery which amused our "Puck." It was first given in the London Magazine, as an extract from ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... male and female, haven't you, reader? Such people are great nuisances—half the discomforts of life are bred by them; they contaminate and poison the air they breathe, with their noisome breath, like the odor of the Upas tree. ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... for myself or for others. Our life is a false nature; it is not in the harmony of things; it is an all-blasting upas, whose root is earth, and whose leaves are the skies which rain their poison-dews upon mankind. We wither from our youth; we gasp with unslaked thirst for unattainable good; lured from the first to the last by phantoms—love, fame, ambition, avarice—all idle, and all ill—one meteor ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... according as matadors of the Exchange pull the wires behind the scenes. Not the State has the Exchange, but the Exchange has the State in its power. Will he, nill he, a Minister is often forced to water the upas tree, which he might prefer to tear up by the roots, but that he ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... still Jehovah's aid implore, From isle to isle, from sea to sea, From peopled earth's remotest shore, To root that deadly Upas Tree. ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... naturally adopt. The man who coolly held the porcupine might not have been killed if wounded, because the quantity of poison used is less in the case of small game than large. The poison is prepared from the sap of the upas tree, antiaris toxicaria, which is heated until it becomes a dark paste. It is a fortunate fact that these extremely efficient weapons, which noiselessly bring down birds and monkeys from great heights, ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... nothing loves a snake. It is not because the snake is feared, but because it is incomprehensible. The talk of its upas-like influence, its deadly fascination, is chiefly picturesque humbug. Ducks will approach a snake curiously, inwardly debating the possibility of digesting so big a worm at one meal; the moving tail-tip they will peck at cheerfully. This was the sort of thing that one might have observed for ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... themselves; saved to society; saved to their friends—who, but for this Refuge, would have poisoned the moral atmosphere of our land, and breathed around them more deadly effluvia than that of the fabled Upas." ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... where the Copper head sleeps, Where the waters are stagnant, the white vapor creeps, Where the musk of Magnolia hangs thick in the air, And the lilies' phylacteries broaden in prayer; There is peace in the swamp, though the quiet is Death, Though the mist is miasm, the Upas tree's breath, Though no echo awakes to the cooing of doves,— There is peace: yes, the peace ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... which has repressed this as it has all other healthy growths in the South. Slavery seems to benumb all the faculties except the passions. The fact that the mountaineers had but few or no slaves, does not seem to be of importance in the case. They lived under the deadly shadow of the upas tree, and suffered the consequences of its stunting their development in all directions, as the ague-smitten inhabitant of the Roman Campana finds every sense and every muscle clogged by the filtering in of the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... are poisoned arrows shot through a blowpipe. I have never before seen one, but I have often read about them. The bamboos the Dyaks carried were sumpitans. These fish-bones have been steeped in the juice of the upas tree. Iris, my dear girl, if one of them had so much as scratched your finger nothing ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... even as one of her own giant waterfalls. From the jungles of Africa, and the creeper-tangled groves of the Islands of the South, arise, from the glowing hearts of a thousand flowers, heavy and intoxicating odours—the Upas-poison which dwells in barbaric sensuality. In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... obliged to say that all are not meta- physicians, or Christian Scientists, who call themselves so. Charlatanism, fraud, and malice are getting into the ranks of the good and pure, sending forth a poison [15] more deadly than the upas-tree in the eastern archi- pelago. This evil obtains in the present false teaching and false practice of the Science of treating disease through Mind. The silent address of a mental malpractitioner can only be portrayed in these words of the apostle, ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... themselves particular vows, and the monks are required to deliver sermons and explain the sacred texts in the upas'rayas (separate buildings for monks like the Buddhist viharas). The principle of extreme carefulness not to destroy any living being has been in monastic life carried out to its very last consequences, and has shaped the conduct of the laity in a great measure. No layman will intentionally kill any ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... but he had heard of it just as he had heard of the poisonous Upas-tree, growing on some distant ocean island, or of an evil star, under whose baleful influence he ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... help me Heaven!" exclaimed the indignant man, as he strode noiselessly down the hall, and out into the open air, where he breathed more freely, as if just escaping from the poisonous atmosphere of the deadly upas. ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... the least care of this splendid ornament bestowed upon them by Nature; when they do not let their hair hang dirty and dishevelled upon their shoulders they just tie it up badly with a strip of many-coloured upas bark (a remedy against migraine) stick in some roughly carved combs and hair-pins (amulets against the malignant spirit of the wind) and adorn it ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... he left me there, under the deadly shade of the steeple—deadlier to him than the upas-tree; ordered his little household band out, and away they filed, one by one, the head of the family manfully ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... security; but soon the epidemic of sudden as well as lingering deaths from poison broke out again on all sides. The fatal tree of the knowledge of evil, seemingly cut down with Exili and St. Croix, had sprouted afresh, like a upas that ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... rocky cleft. Sandhills in sight. Enter the desert. The solitary caravan. Severe ridges of sand. Camels poisoned in the night. In doubt, and resolved. Water by digging. More camels attacked. A horrible and poisonous region. Variable weather. Thick ice. A deadly Upas-tree. ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... the Star The Mistress of Shenstone The Broken Halo Through the Postern Gate The Wall of Partition The Upas ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... squalor, and hardly habitable in a sanitary point of view. Interesting, of course, to the traveller from its wealth of splendid relics of the past and vast treasures of art, but as undesirable for residence as the Upas Valley. Now what does the traveller see? A prosperous and happy population; a new city rapidly rising on the site of the ancient "Queen of the world," with all the conveniences, appliances, and luxuries of a modern European city. Magnificent new streets ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... is well for us that we are no seers. Were we cursed with second sight, we should see the white shroud breast-high above the living man, the phosphor light of death gleaming on the youthful radiant face, the feathery seed, lightly sown, bearing in it the germ of the upas-tree; the idle careless word, daily uttered, carrying in its womb the future bane of a lifetime; we should see these things till we sickened, and reeled, and grew blind with pain before the ghastly face of the Future, as men in ancient days before ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... begun the debate on the 7th of May by a savage onslaught on "Squatter Sovereignty"—a fallacy, he said, fraught with mischief more deadly than the fatal upas, because it spread its poison over the whole Union. Douglas took up the gauntlet, and, replying on May 15 and 16, said he could not recognize the right of a caucus of the Senate or the House to prescribe new ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... lost; Athirst beside glad rivers that elude, With mocking lapse, thy tantalized pursuit, And hungering where gilded husks delude With bitter ashes as of Dead Sea fruit, Ashes of Hope, but seed of Discontent, That rears its upas growth from blighted root? Around, thou hear'st Creation eloquent, Hymning creative attributes, and seest The starry marvels of the firmament, And marvels of the nearer earth, released By impulse from within, not dimly shown, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... unsteady, and subverting God's law of order. Woman reigned by divine right only at home. If married, in the hearts of husband and children, and not in the gilded, bedizened palace of fashion, where thinly veiled vice and frivolity hold carnival, and social upas and social asps wave and trail. If single, in the affections of brothers and sisters and friends, as the golden sceptre in the hands of parents. If orphaned, she should find sympathy and gratitude and usefulness among the poor and ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... not fear thee, Death! I have a bantering thought!—though I am told Thou art inflexible, and stern, and bold; And that thy upas breath Rides on the vital air; Monarch and Prince of universal clime, Executor of the decrees of Time— Sin's ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... did officeholders contribute toil and money while that disappointed majority were so slow and spiritless in rallying to the party's summons, and so many of them even hostile. The zeal of honest Democrats was stricken by what Gail Hamilton wittily called "the upas bloom" of civil service reform, which the President still displayed upon his lapel. To a large number of ardent civil service reformers who had originally voted for Cleveland this decoration now seemed so wilted that, more in indignation than in hope, they went over to Harrison. The public at ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... kings—Chandragupta and Dharmasoka—what has "'Ptolemaios' of the Greeks" to do with "Turamaya" or the latter with "Asuramaya," except, indeed, to use it as a fresh pretext to drag the Indian astronomer under the stupefying "Greek influence" of the Upas Tree of Western Philology? Then we learn that, because "Panini once mentions the Yavanas, i.e., .... Greeks, and explains the formation of the word 'Yavanani,' to which, according to the Varttika, the word lipi, 'writing,' must be supplied," therefore ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... class, known in more modern parlance as a "Border Ruffian." Such as are at this time endeavoring, by their swaggering and bullying, to cast on the fair fields of Kansas the deep curse of Slavery—a curse which, like the poison of the deadly Upas, blights all within its influence: the colored and the white man, the slave and the master. We were thankful, however, that no more lives were lost during the vendue, which was commenced with the stock; this occupied ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... life. Such a thought had never entered his head. He was one of those delightful, irresponsible, erratic persons whose heads thoughts of this kind do not enter, and who are about as deadly to those whose lives are bound up with theirs as a Upas tree. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... yet my enthusiasm for "Tristan" is not second to yours.—I am delighted that the performance has come off so well, but I should not wish this marvellous chef- d'oeuvre to become for you a sort of upas tree under the shadow of which you would go to sleep.—Great manifestations of genius ought to do the part of the sun,—to ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... according to the pace of the cattle that is before' him. We must be content to bring the world gradually to the Christian ideal. To abolish or to impose institutions or customs by force is useless. Revolutions made by violence never last. To fell the upas-tree maybe very heroic, but what is the use of doing it, if the soil is full of seeds of others, and the climate and conditions favourable to their growth? Change the elevation of the land, and the 'flora' will change itself. Institutions are the outcome of the whole mental and moral state of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... rigidity and cynicism of her guardian. She shrank from the calm, steadfast gaze of his eyes, which looked into hers with a deep yet gentle scrutiny, and resolved ere the close of the evening to sound him concerning some of the philosophic phases of the age. Had he escaped the upas taint of skepticism? An opportunity soon occurred to favor her wishes, for, chancing to allude to his visit to Rydal Mount, while in the lake region of England, the transition to a discussion of the metaphysical tone of the ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the reminiscence of his lost "pony" was rankling in Forrester's mind, or if he was only affected by the presence of Sir Henry Fallowfield—an immoral Upas, under whose shadow the most flourishing of good resolutions were apt to wither and die; but certainly, after dinner, he broke through the cautious reserve which he had always in public maintained toward Miss Raymond since Bruce's arrival. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... her claim to North America, and crush the upas of heresy in its germ. Within her bounds the tidings were hailed with acclamation, while in France a cry of horror and execration rose from the Huguenots, and found an echo even among the Catholics. But the weak and ferocious son of Catherine de Medicis gave no response. The victims ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... Caddy. Cassowary. Cockatoo. Dugong. Gamboge. Gong. Gutta-percha. Mandarin. Mango. Orang-outang. Rattan. Sago. Upas. ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... must stop, for you feel these things as deeply as I; more deeply, if it were only for this, that you have lived longer. What then shall we say of many great mansions with their unqualified expulsion of human creatures from their neighbourhood, happy or not; houses, which do what is fabled of the upas tree, that they breathe out death and desolation! I know you will feel with me here, both as a man and a lover and professor of the arts. I was glad to hear from Lady Beaumont that you did not think of removing your village. Of course much here will depend upon circumstances, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... who infer that because human slavery is abolished in the Occident and the thrones of the Orient are beginning to totter before the might of democracy; because science is marching on to triumph after triumph, and no Spanish Inquisition or English Court of High Commission longer casts its upas-shadow athwart the hearts of men, the great world is "growing nobler and better," I hereby tender my services to pilot them through that Perdition which does not hover indeterminate in the inane limboes of dogmatic theology, but hath a well-defined latitude and longitude; ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... forehead) "—-is. I am nearly sure —but I have a book of Indian Botany here—" He took a volume from the book-shelves, and turned the leaves with trembling fingers. "Yes! Compare it with this picture! It is the exact duplicate! This is the flower of the Upas-tree, which usually grows only in the depths of forests; and the flower fades so quickly after being plucked, that it is scarcely possible to keep its form or colour even so far as the outskirts of the forest! ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... have insisted,[909] an affinity for special organic substances, whether natural or foreign to the body. We see this in the cells of the kidneys attracting urea from the blood; in the worrara poison affecting the nerves; upas and digitalis the muscles; the Lytta vesicatoria the kidneys; and in the poisonous matter of many diseases, as small-pox, scarlet-fever, hooping-cough, glanders, cancer, and hydrophobia, affecting certain definite parts of the body or certain ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... than one of the daily newspapers, between the years 1836 and 1840, appeared glowing puffs of "the beautiful young female physician," as she was termed, accompanied by elaborate advertisements setting forth her specialty. No wonder this Upas tree flourished by the river of crime on whose banks it was fed. No wonder that her brother Joseph, who had been imported from madame's native English town, was kept busy in putting up medicines and compounds for the ladies of New York. No wonder that the Lohmans, alias the Restells, waxed ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... delicate species called kalapa-gading, into which a drug had been secretly introduced. The king observing these directed that one should be cut open for him, and having drunk of the juice, became affected with a giddiness in his head. (This symptom shows the poison to have been the upas, but too much diluted in the liquor of the nut to produce death). Being inclined to repose, the strangers were ordered to return on shore, and, finding his indisposition augment, he gave directions for being ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... contained in the plant from which they are derived. Oil of bitter almonds and cherry laurel water are poisonous in consequence of containing prussic acid. Opium owes its activity to the alkaloid morphia. The Upas-tiente derives its energetic powers from the alkaloid strychnia; conia is the active principle of hemlock; veratria of hellebore; aconita of monk's hood; and although there are several poisonous plants in which the active ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... that disease and death invaded their ranks? One after another, many died and were launched into the deep sea. The ship entered Fayal to refit, and there that clime of endless summer proved to the emigrants more fatal than the blast of the upas-poisoned valley of Java. The delicious oranges, and the mild Pico wine, used liberally by the passengers, sowed the seeds of death yet more freely among their ranks. On the passage from Fayal, the mortality was dreadful, but at length, decimated and diseased, the band ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... this doctrine of supersedure is new. I have now proved that it is a plant of but ten days' growth. It was never seen or heard of until the 23d day of January, 1854. It was upon that day that this tree of Upas was planted; we already see its ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... harshly reproved by the older woman on account of the artist's daughter, who had been the source of so many incidents which had caused her pain, and Iras regretted that she had ever confided to her aunt her love for Dion. But, no matter what might happen, the upas-tree whence emanated all these tortures, anxieties, and vexations, must be rooted out—stricken from the ranks ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... like mad creatures, waving their napkins, and shouting with energy. Some of the elder ones, I noticed, looked mournfully on, and were evidently not in a gay humour, seeming a prey to bitter reflections. Notwithstanding the curse of slavery, which, like a poisonous upas, taints the very air they breathe with the murdered remains of its victims, the white citizens of the south are extremely sensitive of their civil and political rights, and seem to regard the palladium of independence secured by their progenitors as an especial ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... knitting-needle. One end of the dart is imbedded in a cork-shaped piece of pith which fits the hole in the sumpitan as a cartridge fits the bore of a rifle; the other end, which is of needle-sharpness, is smeared with a paste made from the milky sap of the upas tree dissolved in a juice extracted from the root of the tuba. With the possible exception of curare, this is the deadliest poison known, the slightest scratch from a dart thus poisoned paralyzing the respiratory center and causing almost instant death. The dart is expelled from the ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... loathing at the exaggerated proportions and venomous nature of all creeping things; who find the succulence of the fruit unpleasant to the taste, and the flowers, though fair to the eye, deadly as the upas tree to all other sense;—for whom it is no compensation to feel, with the first breath of morning air, the dull, leaden weight of life lifted, or no happiness to watch the sea heaving and palpitating with delight under the rays of the noon-day sun, and to know ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... this time, however, there had been no questioning of the divine rights claimed by the hierarchy. Luther was still a Papist, and thought to grow his plants of evangelic faith under the shadow of the Upas of ecclesiasticism. He had not yet been brought to see how his Augustinian theology concerning sin and grace ran afoul of the entire round of the mediaeval system and methods of holiness. It was only the famous Leipsic Disputation between him and Dr. John Eck that showed ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... than the ellipses arched by the boughs from its taper stem. Few contrivances more umbrageous than the combination of its long, feathery foliations into its perfection of a parasol. But there are times in the dank, hot nights of midsummer, when the ailantus is but a diluted upas-antiar of Macassar, tainting, albeit with no deadly essence, the muggy air that rocks its slumbering branches and rolls away thence along the parapets and in at the windows of the sleepers. Dead-horse chestnut it might reasonably be called, because of its heavy, carrion smell, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Protestant countries the natural sciences could grow and thrive. They sprung up, indeed, in Italy after the restoration of Greek literature in the fifteenth century; but they withered there again only too soon under the blighting upas shade of superstition. Transplanted to the free air of Switzerland, of Germany, of Britain, and of Montpellier, then half Protestant, they developed rapidly and surely, simply because the air was free; to be checked again in France by the return of superstition ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley |
