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More "Equinox" Quotes from Famous Books



... mathematician, and, after fixing the length of the year at three hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter, he three times changed the beginning of the year, in his doubts as to the day on which the equinox fell; for the astronomer could then only make two observations in a year with a view to learn the time of the equinox, by seeing when the sun shone in the plane of the equator. Photinus the mathematician wrote both on arithmetic and geometry, and was usually thought the ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... place only once a decade, on High Holy Day at dawn of the spring equinox. For days prior to it joyous throngs of workers helped assemble old vehicles, machine tools and computers in the public squares, crowning each pile with used, disconnected robots. In the evening of the Day they proudly made their ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner

... was to be happy in his land had fulfilled itself, and by the time the Mesopotamian spring-tide (January, February and March), which succeeds the rainy month of December, was over, and the principal festival of the Asiatics, the New Year, had been solemnized at the equinox, and the May sun had begun to glow in the heavens, Nitetis felt quite at home in Babylon, and all the Persians knew that the young Egyptian princess had quite displaced Phaedime, the daughter of Otanes, in the king's favor, and would ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... excellent and defensible harbor, and thus acquired first-rate strategic importance, all the other anchorages on the coast being mere open roadsteads. From this circumstance the trade-winds, or monsoons, in this region also had strategic bearing. From the autumnal to the spring equinox the wind blows regularly from the northeast, at times with much violence, throwing a heavy surf upon the beach and making landing difficult; but during the summer months the prevailing wind is southwest, ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan

... and equinoctial colure intersect each other at a point close to the star [[^e]]. This is called the autumnal equinox. ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott

... threescore and twelve years the difference is found to be of one degree, that is to say, the three hundred and sixtieth part of the circumference of the whole heaven. Thus after seventy-two years the colure of the vernal equinox which passed through a fixed star, corresponds with another fixed star. Hence it is that the sun, instead of being in that part of the heavens in which the Ram was situated in the time of Hipparchus, is found to correspond with that part of the heavens in which ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire

... sank slowly and went as straight as the string of a plumb-line. The sun was bisected by the line of the horizon, and appeared to be moving about them in a circle, with only its upper half visible. As Jupiter's northern hemisphere was passing through its autumnal equinox, they concluded they had ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... days before the vernal equinox, I sailed from Liverpool for Pernambuco, in the southern hemisphere, on the coast of Brazil. There is little at this time of the year, in the European part of the Atlantic, to engage the attention of the naturalist. As you go down the Channel you see a few divers and gannets. The middle-sized gulls, ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... days had grown very long; the sun had passed the vernal equinox, and yet it looked upon unbroken snowfields. Then, about the middle of April, the snow passed quickly away in blazing sunshine, in a thousand rivulets, in a flooded river. The roads were heavy with mud, but the earth was left green, the bud ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... sunlight now," he admitted. "I'm painting gray. I'm converting it into terms of winter storm and equinox. Last year a ship was pounded to pieces in the bay while the people on Commercial street looked helplessly on. It was the same sea, but it wasn't smiling then. It wore the vindictive scowl of death. That's the mood which ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... misfortune of the astrologers is that the sky has changed since the rules of the art were established. The sun, which at the equinox was in Aries in the time of the Argonauts, is to-day in Taurus; and the astrologers, to the great ill-fortune of their art, to-day attribute to one house of the sun what belongs visibly to another. However, that is not a demonstrative ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire

... another age cultivated fields, and the solitude he produces will be succeeded by a powerful and healthy population. The results of these events in the moral and political world may be compared to those produced in the vegetable kingdom by the storms and heavy gales so usual at the vernal equinox, the time of the formation of the seed; the pollen or farina of one flower is thrown upon the pistil of another, and the crossing of varieties of plants so essential to the perfection of the vegetable world produced. ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... all. Having arrived at Cadiz, Villeneuve spent a great deal of time repairing his ships; time during which the enemy fleet also returned to Europe, and established a patrolling force off Cadiz. In the end, the coming of the equinox gales having made sailing from this port difficult, Villeneuve found himself blockaded; so the ingenious plans of the Emperor came to nothing, and he, realising that the English would not be taken in a second time, gave up the idea of invading Britain, or at ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... gusts of wind in April. A week's rain in the middle of August makes them happy. It not only refreshes the parched ground, and plumps up the grapes and other fruit, but it cools the air and assuages the beets, which then begin to grow very troublesome; but the rainy season is about the autumnal equinox, or rather something later. It continues about twelve days or a fortnight, and is extremely welcome to the natives of this country. This rainy season is often delayed 'till the latter end of November, and sometimes 'till the month of December; in which case, the rest ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... we won't describe: we would Perhaps from hearsay, or from recollection: But getting nigh grim Dante's "obscure wood,"[539] That horrid equinox, that hateful section Of human years—that half-way house—that rude Hut, whence wise travellers drive with circumspection[jz] Life's sad post-horses o'er the dreary frontier Of Age, and looking back ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... truly determines, that the year at the Flood began about the autumnal equinox. As to what day of the month the Flood began, our Hebrew and Samaritan, and perhaps Josephus's own copy, more rightly placed it on the 17th day, instead of the 27th, as here; for Josephus agrees with them, as to the distance of 150 days to the 17th day of the 7th month, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... the year and for a shorter cruise, I should be delighted to join you. But as I prefer dying a dry death, I must decline accompanying you all the way to the Scilly Islands in a little pleasure boat of thirteen tons, just at the time of the autumnal equinox. You may meet with a gale that will blow you out of the water. You are running a risk, in my opinion, of the most senseless kind—and, if I thought my advice had any weight with you, I should say most earnestly, be warned in time, and give up the trip."—Extract from ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins

... Heaven, Ned, and Things on Earth, and Things under the Earth. The old Story, whereof you have alreadie seen many Parcels; but, you know, my Vein ne'er flows so happily as from the autumnal to the vernal Equinox. Howbeit, there is Something in the Quality of this Air would arouse the ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning

... fine morning, just as the vernal equinox had blown a few ships into harbor, a stranger was announced, and immediately recognized by the master of the house as a 'Don' something—a Spanish merchant, whose kindness to a young member of the family had been often mentioned in his letters from Mexico. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... the desecration of those old heathen burying barrows on Stone Horse Head quieted off for the time being. Deadham, meanwhile, in act of repossessing its soul in peace and hibernating according to time-honoured habit until the vernal equinox. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... one evening about this time—the vernal equinox had just passed—that from some small cause Richling, who was generally detained at the desk until a late hour, was home early. The air was soft and warm, and he stood out a little beyond his small front door-step, lifting his head to inhale ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... of the religious feasts among the Indians, is a good historical proof that they counted time by and observed a weekly Sabbath, long after their arrival in America. They began the year at the appearance of the first new moon of the vernal equinox, according to the ecclesiastical year of Moses. 'Till the seventy years captivity [19] commenced, the Israelites had only numeral names for their months, except Abib and Ethanim; the former signifying a green ear of corn, the latter robust or valiant; by the first name the Indians as an ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... tongues and madness of possession. To him are also sacred priests of the oracle, and high tragedies, and the wailing of music, and streaming processions of virgins and young boys. He too agonised and arose stronger and more shining than before, dying, indeed, and rising at the very vernal equinox we have mentioned. He too is worshipped in certain Mysteries whereat the confession of iniquity and the cleansing of hearts come first: and the sacrifice is just that wheaten cake and fruit of the vine whereof, at Eleusis, you have praised to me the simplicity and ethic beauty. And he can inspire ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... It was about the equinox, if I remember rightly—the springtime, when everything is lovely and lovable: the camp flowers all in bloom, the aroma of the trees burdening the air with delicious perfume, the fresh verdure and plenty of grass, the powerful, stout-hearted ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various

... the high Arachosian plateau. In Kabul the snow lies for two or three months; the people seldom leave their houses, and sleep close to stoves. At Ghazni the snow has been known to lie long beyond the vernal equinox; the thermometer sinks to 10 deg. and 15 deg. below zero (Fahr.); and tradition relates the entire destruction of the population of Ghazni by snowstorms ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... when the ices shrink Befere the vernal equinox, at morn There was no movement in the Lady's room, Who prized the early hours like molten gold, And ever rose before ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney

... AUTUMNAL EQUINOX. The time when the sun crosses the equator, under a southerly motion, and the days and nights are then everywhere equal in length. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... beheld these signs of the vernal equinox I knew that I, too, must follow the music, forsake awhile the beautiful siren we call the city, and in the green silences meet ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... his cap. "See you later, Miss Jane. Morgan's back ag'in to work, thanks to you, doctor. That was a pretty bad sprain he had—he's all right now, though; went on practice yesterday. I'm glad of it—equinox is comin' on and we can't spare a man, or half a one, these days. May be blowin' a livin' gale 'fore the week's out. Good-by, Miss Jane; good-by, doctor." And he ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith

... peasant hastens home to his hay-harvest; the merchant must quickly regulate the produce and manufactures he has purchased, and load his ships with them, so that they may sail and reach their destination before the storms of the autumnal equinox. ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer

... Equinox, one of the two great festival days (the other being the New Year) of the Persians. See my "Book of the Thousand Nights and One ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... intervals, had imparted to the inhabitants of Crikswich, within and without, the likeness to its most perfect image, together, it must be confessed, with a degree of nervousness that invested common events with some of the terrors of the Last Trump, when one night, just upon the passing of the vernal equinox, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Mrs. October, "I think Sister August lets her children romp too much. I always like improving games for mine, although I have great trouble to make Equinox toe ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... fact seems well attested—that Milton's poetical vein flowed only from the autumnal equinox to the vernal[5], he cannot well have commenced "Paradise Lost" before the death of Cromwell, or have made very great progress with it ere his conception of his duty called him away to questions of ecclesiastical policy. The one point on which he had irreconcilably ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... when the blustering winds were again celebrating the return of the equinox, Michael, who had been sleeping heavily all day, suddenly started up and astonished his wife by an eager request that she would send at once for George Hendrick and ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare

... 'twere not fashion, and in its character the fad is essentially transient. Still we need not rail at fashion; it is a form of periodicity, and periodicity exists through all Nature. There are day and night, winter and summer, equinox and solstice, work and rest, years of plenty and years of famine. Comets return, and all fashions come back. Keep your old raiment long enough and it will be ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... of the pollen of the white summer lily, twelve ounces of the pollen of the autumn hibiscus flower, and twelve ounces of the white plum in bloom in the winter. You take the four kinds of pollen, and put them in the sun, on the very day of the vernal equinox of the succeeding year to get dry, and then you mix them with the powder and pound them well together. You again want twelve mace of water, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... be the efficient cause, the tendency to suicide should be as great at the time of the fall equinox as it is at the time of the spring equinox; but this is not the case. Two hundred and seventy-two suicides out of every thousand occur in the vernal equinoctial period and only two hundred and fifteen in the autumnal equinoctial period, and this proportion ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... the southern hemisphere of Mars in about latitude 45 degrees south. It was near the time of the vernal equinox in that hemisphere of the planet, and under the stimulating influence of the spring sun, rising higher and higher every day, some such awakening of life and activity upon its surface as occurs on the earth under similar ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss

... that the date of 25th December, which certainly began in the Roman Church, was fixed upon to avoid the multiplication of festivals about the vernal equinox, and to appropriate to a Christian use the existing festival of the winter solstice—the returning sun being made symbolical of the visit of Christ to our earth; and to withdraw Christian converts from those ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton

... [2] At the equinox, the season of Dante's journey, the sun in Aries is at the intersection of the ecliptic and the equator of the celestial sphere, and his apparent motion in his annual revolution cuts the apparent diurnal motion of the fixed stars, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri

... six hours were taken as six complete hours, and not six hours wanting some minutes. And the aggregate miscalculation continued until the minutes added yearly, amounted to ten days and changed the date of the spring equinox. Pope Gregory XIII. (1572-1585) sought to remedy the error. He re-established the spring equinox to the place fixed by the Council of Nice (787). The year had fallen ten days in arrear from the holding of the Council until the year of the Gregorian correction, ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley

... summer months the obliquity of his course diminished, and he came closer to Egypt; during the winter it increased, and he went farther away. This double movement recurred with such regularity from equinox to solstice, and from solstice to equinox, that the day of the god's departure and the day of his return could be confidently predicted. The Egyptians explained this phenomenon according to their conceptions of the nature of the world. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... songs, and for his life could not recall the first line of it;—he told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices. Milton could not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment. "Ah!" said he to a friend of mine, who was standing by, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... many in the middle Victorian period, but it is proof of the flexibility of our tastes that we have only just come to him. After shunning Anthony Trollope for fifty years, we came to him, almost as with a rush, long after our half-century was past. Now, James Payn is the solace of our autumnal equinox, and Anthony Trollope we read with a constancy and a recurrence surpassed only by our devotion to the truth as it is in the fiction of the Divine Jane; and Jane Austen herself was not an idol of our first or even our second youth, but became the cult ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... Aristillus he found no stars that had appeared or disappeared in the interval of 150 years; but he found that all the stars seemed to have changed their places with reference to that point in the heavens where the ecliptic is 90 degrees from the poles of the earth—i.e., the equinox. He found that this could be explained by a motion of the equinox in the direction of the apparent diurnal motion of the stars. This discovery of precession of the equinoxes, which takes place at the rate of 52".1 every ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes

... great clumsy, ugly, goat's-skin umbrella, but which, after all, was the most necessary thing I had about me next to my gun. As for my face, the color of it was really not so mulatto-like as one might expect from a man not at all careful of it, and living within nine or ten degrees of the equinox. My beard I had once suffered to grow till it was about a quarter of a yard long; but, as I had both scissors and razors sufficient, I had cut it pretty short, except what grew on my upper lip, which I had trimmed into ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten

... I took a greater number in consequence. The pasturage was still meagre and scarcely any water remained on the face of the earth. It was unusually low in the holes last year, but this season very few indeed contained any. The equinox however was at hand, and I could not suppose that it was never to rain again, however hopeless the aspect of the ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... not the best time for seeing some of the attractions of Belvoir; but Lady Bloomfield has written of her Majesty's proverbial good fortune in these excursions: "The Queen yachts during the equinox, and has the sea a dead calm; visits about in the dead of winter, and has summer weather." There were other respects in which Belvoir was in its glory in midwinter—it belonged to a hunting neighbourhood and ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... of in the world before, I shall take it from its beginning, and continue it in its order. It was, by my account, the 30th of September, when, in the manner as above said, I first set foot upon this horrid island, when the sun being, to us, in its autumnal equinox, was almost just over my head, for I reckoned myself, by observation, to be in the latitude of 9 degrees 22 minutes north ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... in the East, and referred to Pope St. Victor I. The Eastern Church generally celebrated Easter on the day on which the Jews kept the Passover, while in the West it was observed then, as it is now, on the first Sunday after the full moon of the vernal equinox. St. Victor directs the Eastern churches, for the sake of uniformity, to conform to the practice of the West, and his instructions are ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... Taking, indeed, a broad view of festivals throughout the world, we may say that there are four seasons when they are held: the winter solstice, when the days begin to lengthen and primitive man rejoices in the lengthening and seeks to assist it;[130] the vernal equinox, the period of germination and the return of life; the summer solstice, when the sun reaches its height; and autumn, the period of fruition, of thankfulness, and of repose. But it is rarely that we find a people seriously celebrating more than ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the course of the Sun, as the shadow of the Logos. The part of the course lived out during the human life is that which falls between the winter solstice and the reaching of the zenith in summer. The Hero is born at the winter solstice, dies at the spring equinox, and, ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... divided, not into summer and winter, as in Europe, but into the rainy seasons and the dry seasons, which were generally thus: From the middle of February to the middle of April (including March), rainy; the sun being then on or near the equinox. From the middle of April to the middle of August (including May, June, and July), dry; the sun being then north of the equator. From the middle of August till the middle of October (including September), rainy; the sun being ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... probably marks the autumnal equinox and also the time when the sowing of wheat and other spring crops begins. Many Hindus still postpone sowing the wheat until after Dasahra, even though it might be convenient to begin before, especially as the festival goes by the lunar month and its date varies in ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... symbolical of the sun's yearly course, but they were also used for astronomical purposes—being placed so that, to one standing at the high altar, the sun would rise at the winter solstice behind one of these monoliths, at the vernal equinox behind another, and so on throughout the year. Astronomical observations of a still more complex character connected with the more distant constellations were also helped by these ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... stayed with his father all the winter; and when the spring equinox drew near, all the Athenians grew sad and silent, and Theseus saw it, and asked the reason; but no one would answer him ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... we now separate our two telescopic eyes by the whole diameter of the earth (7900 miles); this is accomplished by taking from the Equator two simultaneous observations of the Sun, at its rising and setting; for when the Sun is setting, at say the Equinox, it is at that moment rising at exactly the other side of the earth; the inclination of the two telescopes, directed to a certain point on the Sun, will now give the distance approximately, though even this base ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... quitted it on Tuesday the 9th of April. Wood and water are also to be procured almost at every anchoring-place beyond Freshwater Bay. Our sufferings I impute wholly to our passing the streight just as the sun approached the equinox, when, in this high latitude, the worst weather was to be expected; and indeed the weather we had ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... against our rocks Hurl breakers in a fleecy mass, Like wolves that chase stampeding flocks Over the brink of a crevasse, While thunders down the Alpine pass The deluge of the equinox. ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer

... all a lie; something had gone wrong with the old party's eyes—amanuensis of the equinox, or something; he couldn't see well, but he was no more crazy ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... that it won't blow harder, youngster," said Nettleship, who was much graver than usual. "To my mind the weather looks as threatening as it well can be, and those in authority would have shown more wisdom had they waited till the equinox was over to send us to sea. Just look round; now did you ever ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston

... for us, master Stephen," said Roswell to his companion, fairly rubbing his hands in delight. "One month's smart work will fill the schooner, and we can be off before the equinox. Does it not seem to you that yonder are the bones of sea lions, or of seals of some sort, lying hereaway as if men had been at work ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... — better than the Teufelsdrockh of 1830, in his liveliest Scotch imagination, ever dreamed, or mortal man had ever told. At best, a week in these dim Northern seas, without means of speech, within the Arctic circle, at the equinox, lent itself to gravity if not to gloom; but only a week before, breakfasting in the restaurant at Stockholm, his eye had caught, across, the neighboring table, a headline in a Swedish newspaper, announcing an attempt on the life of President McKinley, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... multitude of advantages would accrue to the French from an adherence to the 1st of Vendemiaire, or 23d of September of the Gregorian calendar, as the first day of the year. The weather, after the autumnal equinox, is generally settled, in consequence of the air having been purified by the pre-existing gales, the ordinary forerunners of that period: and the Parisians would not be obliged to brave the rain, the wind, the cold, the frost, the snow, &c. in going to wish a ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... every Hindu bridal couple worship Gauri Ganesh together as an important rite of the wedding. Their conjunction in this manner lends colour to the idea that they are held to be mother and son. In Rajputana Gauri is worshipped as the corn goddess at the Gangore festival about the time of the vernal equinox, especially by women. The meaning of Gauri, Colonel Tod states, is yellow, emblematic of the ripened harvest, when the votaries of the goddess adore her effigies, in the shape of a matron painted the colour of ripe corn. Here she is seen as Ana-purna (the corn-goddess), the benefactress ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... the vapours of the earth. Sky lies open on the west and north to a vast extent of ocean, and is cooled in the summer by perpetual ventilation, but by the same blasts is kept warm in winter. Their weather is not pleasing. Half the year is deluged with rain. From the autumnal to the vernal equinox, a dry day is hardly known, except when the showers are suspended by a tempest. Under such skies can be expected no great exuberance of vegetation. Their winter overtakes their summer, and their harvest lies upon the ground drenched with rain. The autumn struggles hard to produce some of our ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson

... The equinox has brought with it darkness and Northern storms, and night will quickly close the short and dismal polar day. The sky of a dull and leaden blue is faintly lighted by a sun without warmth, whose white disk, scarcely seen above the horizon, pales before ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... difference is one of eleven days, for as that is the number which is added every year to the epact our epacts are almost the same. As to the celebration of Easter, that is a different question. Your equinox is on March the 21st, ours on the 10th, and the astronomers say we are both wrong; sometimes it is we who are wrong and sometimes you, as the equinox varies. You know you are not even in agreement with the Jews, whose calculation ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... Alain will never err on the side of precipitancy. But seest thou not, my sister, the equinox here, and gales are abroad. I did not expect him till the S. Michel; and then there are Captain Bowden and M. the ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene

... there some time in the attitude of suffering. He knew what a restless night he had passed, and that a violent and incessant cough cut short his breathing. The king guessed that fatigue, and the first attacks of the equinox, had shaken his weakened frame, and that in short, at that critical moment, the action of his genius was in a manner chained down by his body; which had sunk under the triple load of fatigue, of fever, and of a malady which, probably, more ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... began the year, some from the autumnal, others from the vernal equinox. The primitive patriarchs from that of autumn, that is, from the month called by the Hebrews Tisri, which coincides with part of our September and October. Hence it seems probable, that the world was created about that season; the earth, as appears from Gen. iii. 2, being then ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... unused root, meant, "was high," "made great," "exalted;" and Hîrm means an ox, the symbol of the Sun in Taurus, at the Vernal Equinox. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... rains of the autumnal equinox, come the Mvula za Chintomba, the "Chuvas grandes" of the Portuguese, lasting to the end of November. They are heavy, accompanied by violent tornadoes and storms, greatly feared by the people. The moisture ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... rendered it conspicuous and undeniable. On the 28th of October, 1828, the diameter of the nebulous matter composing this body was estimated at 312,000 miles. It was then about one and a half times further from the sun than the earth is at the time of the equinox. On the 24th of December following, its distance being reduced by nearly two-thirds, it was found to be only 14,000 miles across.[246] That is to say, it had shrunk during those two months of approach to 1/11000th part of its original volume! Yet it had still seventeen days' journey to make before ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... have little time for mourning. As the first hint of the long winter came in on the September's equinox, poor Sara had to rouse herself, and she began to look about her with despairing eyes. Friends, so far, had been most kind, and the little family had never actually suffered; but now that the few summer resources for picking up an occasional dollar were ended, what had they to look ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry

... hurt us. And we can answer back in a fashion that must soon silence them. The heights are ours; the town is safely guarded. The summer is half spent already. Let us but keep them at bay for two months, and the storms of the equinox will do the rest. When September comes, then come the gales—and indeed they may help us at any time in these treacherous waters. You mariners of England, you are full of confidence and skill—I am the last to deny it—but ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... the beginning of the Christian Era, the constellation Aries, or Ram, occupied the equinoctial place, being in the first degree of that constellation. About 2150 B.C. the first degree of Taurus, or Bull, contained the Equinox. When the constellation Taurus, or the Bull, was in the first division, or the equinoctial place, the people used a symbol representing a bull, described as giving fecundity, a deity of vegetation as at Dodona, in their religious ceremonies. ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... and fostering it in swaddling clothes, with unintermittent assiduity both night and day."[56] What hope of gain or advantage had they in those days? nay, or even now? for the hopes of parents are uncertain, and have to be long waited for. He who plants a vine in the spring equinox, gleans its vintage in the autumnal equinox; he who sows corn when the Pleiads set, reaps it when they rise; cattle and horses and birds have produce at once fit for use; whereas man's bringing up is toilsome, his growth slow; and as excellence flowers late, most ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... twinkles and flutters like a tiny flower stirred by faint air. The wind is "a cordial of incredible virtue" (Emerson)—sharp and chill, but with a milder tincture. To-day, though brisk and snell on the streets, the sunshine had a lively vigour, a generous quality, a promissory note of the equinox. I felt it from first rising this morning—the old demiurge at work! As I sat in the bathtub (when a man is fifty he may be pardoned for taking a warm bath on winter mornings) my mind fell upon the ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... East may provoke us, Making us angry and ill, Dust of the Equinox choke us, Yet we will welcome thee still, Spring, now the runnels of primrose and crocus Trickle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various

... which I was walking, still only approaches its completion; and the desiccated soil has not yet fully defined the boundaries of the river. At spring-tides, particularly when the line of the moon's apsides coincides with the syzygies, or when the ascending node is in the vernal equinox, or after heavy rains, the river still overflows its banks, and indicates its originally extended scite under ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... to the brides, were celebrated after the Persian fashion, and during the vernal equinox. For at no other period, by the ancient laws of Persia, could nuptials be legally celebrated. Such an institution is redolent of the poetry and freshness of the new world, and of an attention to the voice of nature, and the analogies of physical life. The young ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various

... which the whole firmament was mottled with cirrus. It continued cloudy, with light winds, throughout the day, but clear on the horizon. From this tinge such storms became frequent, ushering in the equinox; and the less hazy sky and rising hygrometer predicted an accession of ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... September rain the six little Bunkers had never seen before, for the very good reason that they had never before been at the seashore during what Daddy Bunker and Captain Ben called "the September equinox." ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jack's • Laura Lee Hope

... in spring, and another in autumn, on which the day and the night are each twelve hours at all places on the earth. When the night and day are equal in spring, the point which the sun occupies on the heavens is termed the vernal equinox. There is similarly another point in which the sun is situated at the time of the autumnal equinox. In any investigation of the celestial movements the positions of these two equinoxes on the heavens are of primary importance, and Hipparchus, with the instinct ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... continued to observe the Heliacal Risings and Settings of the Stars upon every day. And when by the Sun's Meridional Altitudes they had found the Solstices and Equinoxes according to the Sun's mean motion, his Equation being not yet known, they fixed the beginning of this year to the Vernal Equinox, and in memory thereof erected this monument. Now this year being carried into Chaldaea, the Chaldaeans began their year of Nabonassar on the same Thoth with the Egyptians, and made it of the same length. And the ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton

... conspirators, a general muster of the army was held; and it was observed that the ranks of the English battalions looked thin. From the first day of the campaign, there had been much sickness among the recruits: but it was not till the time of the equinox that the mortality became alarming. The autumnal rains of Ireland are usually heavy; and this year they were heavier than usual. The whole country was deluged; and the Duke's camp became a marsh. The Enniskillen ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... thou about to rush away over the mountains? At the autumnal equinox a wild boar wounded thee! Thou art dead, and the fountains weep and the trees droop, and the winter wind is whistling ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... interest even a stone with a hole in it may become, we will just mention that the Men-an-tol, or the holed stone which stands in one of the fields near Lanyon, is flanked by two other stones standing erect on each side. Let any one go there to watch a sunset about the time of the autumnal equinox, and he will see that the shadow thrown by the erect stone would fall straight through the hole of the Men-an-tol. We know that the great festivals of the ancient world were regulated by the sun, and that some of these ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... brought him into close contact with the sea had a charm for him, even that mock combat with the waves of the autumn equinox on the flat shore of Fife. Therefore at this time although classes and study were a weariness to him his days spent in the old-fashioned town of Anstruther, or on the desolate coast of Caithness, had many pleasures; had many romances also, for everywhere ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black

... the planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Venus) were points which restrained the motion of the sky in its revolution. (See Book VI., 576.) (11) Mercury. (See Book IX., 777.) (12) That is, at the autumnal equinox. The priest states that the planet Mercury causes the rise of the Nile. The passage is difficult to follow; but the idea would seem to be that this god, who controlled the rise and fall of the waves of the sea, also when he was placed directly ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... marvel is that we are ever deceived; but after all, what is it but the conflict between arbitrary and natural law? The almanac-maker says that on the first day of September autumn is due. Nature, the orbit-maker, proclaims it summer until, the month three-quarters old, the equinox is crossed. Nature is always right, and after the usual breezy argument sends Summer, her garments a bit storm-tattered, perchance, back to ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright

... vital point in this system of chronological computation, based upon the ages of the patriarchs, was the great length of life to which those worthies attained. It was generally supposed that before the Flood "there was a perpetual equinox," and no vicissitudes in Nature. After that event the standard of life diminished one-half, and in the time of the Psalmist it had sunk to seventy years, at which it still remains. Austerities of climate were affirmed to have arisen through the shifting of the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... than the thunderstorm, rising at the horizon, rushing with expanded, winnowing, black pennons across the sky, darting out its forked fiery tongue, and belching fire. In a Slovakian legend, the dragon sleeps in a mountain cave through the winter months, but, at the equinox, bursts forth—"In a moment the heaven was darkened and became black as pitch, only illumined by the fire which flashed from dragon's jaws and eyes. The earth shuddered, the stones rattled down the mountain sides ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... manner, but he had the merit of knowing how to assimilate the ideas of other men, and to pass them on in a way which was intelligible and even interesting to the lay public, with a happy knack of being funny about the most unlikely objects, so that the precession of the Equinox or the formation of a vertebrate became a highly humorous process ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... hieroglyphics, Time was. uneasily shifting and shuffling the lines of the hills, as a fever patient jerks and works the bed-clothes. And, worse than that, he was scurrying westward (frightened, no doubt, by the equinox) at such a pace that I was scared by the huddling together of shadows. Awaking from a long, long dream—through which I had been working hard, and laying the foundations of a thousand pounds hereafter—I ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore

... not keep the shadow of the vernal equinox off the simple heart of the junior Tutt. She had seen it coming for several weeks, had scented danger in the way Tutt's childish eye had lingered upon Miss Sondheim's tumultous black hair and in the rather rakish, familiar way he had guided the ladies ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train

... was approaching. The fields were empty, the leaves were beginning to fall, and many a hectic person felt the scissors on his life's thread. John, too, seemed to be suffering under the influence of the approaching equinox; those who saw him at this time said he looked particularly disturbed and talked to himself incessantly—something which he used to do at times, but not very often. At last one evening he did not come home. It was thought the Baron had sent him somewhere. The second day he was still not there. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... Epistolary letera. Epitaph epitafo. Epithet epiteto. Epitome resumo. Epitomise mallongigi. Epoch epoko. Equable egala. Equal egala. Equality egaleco. Equalise egaligi. Equally egale. Equation ekvacio. Equator ekvatoro. Equilibrium ekvilibro. Equinox tagnoktegaleco. Equipment (milit.) armilaro. Equitable justa. Equity justeco. Equivalent ekvivalenta. Equivocal dusenca. Era tempokalkulo. Eradicate elradikigi. Erase surstreki. Eraser skrapileto. Erasure surstrekajxo. Ere antaux (ol). Erect starigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... Fellow, that is gone before, He's a Souldier, fit to stand by Caesar, And giue direction. And do but see his vice, 'Tis to his vertue, a iust Equinox, The one as long as th' other. 'Tis pittie of him: I feare the trust Othello puts him in, On some odde time of his infirmitie Will ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... enthusiastic Polish Chivalry being good for nothing against regular musketry,—King Stanislaus finds that he will have to quit Warsaw, and seek covert somewhere. Quits Warsaw this day; gets covert in Dantzig. And, in fact, from this 22d of September, day of the autumnal equinox, 1733, is a fugitive, blockaded, besieged Stanislaus: an Imaginary King thenceforth. His real Kingship had lasted ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... became very severe, so that they were enveloped in all kinds of toil and danger to no purpose (forasmuch as it was now past the autumnal equinox, and the snow, which had already fallen in those regions, covered the mountains and the plains), and so, instead of proceeding, Julian undertook a ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... The Adoniac or Syrian cults were similar, Adonis being killed, but revived to point to life through death. In the Cabirie Mysteries on the island of Samothrace, Atys the Sun was killed by his brothers the Seasons, and at the vernal equinox was restored to life. So, also, the Druids, as far north as England, taught of one God the tragedy of winter and summer, and conducted the initiate through the valley ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... and transports, we had no hopes of getting out of the channel with so large a fleet, without the continuance of a fair wind for a considerable time, and this was what we had every day less and less reason to expect, as the time of the equinox drew near; wherefore our golden dreams and ideal possession of the Peruvian treasures grew every day more faint, and the difficulties and dangers of the passage round Cape Horn, in the winter season, filled our imaginations in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... indulge me too much, and I grow soft, and then every trifle rubs me the wrong way. I'm a regular spoilt child—I know it and a jolly good spanking is what I deserve. Burton, here, declares that the autumnal, like the vernal, equinox breeds hot humours and distempers in the blood. I believe we ought to be bled, spring and fall, like our forefathers. Look here, mother, don't take my grumbling to heart. I tell you I'm just a little hipped from the weather. Let's send for dear old Knott and get ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... when, in plain prose, we gravely talk of courting the Muse in shady bowers; waiting the call and inspiration of Genius ... of attending to times and seasons when the imagination shoots with the greatest vigour, whether at the summer solstice or the vernal equinox ... when we talk such language or entertain such sentiments as these, we generally rest contented with mere words, or at best entertain notions not only groundless but pernicious.' Reynolds's Works, i. 150. On the other hand, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... are not artificial. The doubling is chiefly observed at the vernal equinox, our month of May, and is perhaps due to spring floods, or vegetation in valleys of the like trend, as we find in Siberia. The massing of clouds or mists will account for the peculiar whiteness at the edge of the limb, and an ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... that I could take no other course. The vessel being ready, she sailed the day after Talcott joined her; and, sorry am I to be compelled to add, that she was never heard of, after clearing the Cattegat. The equinox of that season was tremendously severe, and it caused the loss of many vessels; that of the Hyperion doubtless among ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... mentioned by Cicero (Ad Atticum, xi. 6). As to his age, Drumann observes, "He was born B.C. 106, and was consequently 58 years old when he was killed, on the 29th of September, or on the day before his birthday, about the time of the autumnal equinox according to the ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... Italy is thus vividly described: "It was now the beginning of the month of October; already the gales which attend upon the equinox swept through the woods and trees; the delicate chestnut woods, which last dare encounter the blasts of spring, and whose tender leaves do not expand until they may become a shelter to the swallow, had already changed their hues, and shone yellow ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various

... beginning, and continue it in its order. It was by my account the 30th of September, when, in the manner as above said, I first set foot upon this horrid island; when the sun, being to us in its autumnal equinox, was almost over my head; for I reckoned myself, by observation, to be in the latitude of nine degrees twenty-two minutes north ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... under the autumnal equinox, is dressed and prepared several ways, according to the various fancies of the people and diversity of the climates wherein it groweth. The first instruction which Pantagruel gave concerning it was to divest and despoil ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... Rochester said, every gesture, these were but the ghosts of words and movements. Behind them, gloomy, imperturbable, withdrawn, slumbered a strange, smouldering power. I began to see how very hotly Jane must love him, she who loved above all things storm, the winds of the equinox, the illimitable night-sky. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare

... with added detail. "The national mind is hysterical beyond the usual and this is a time of heightened danger. It's the period when $200,000,000 are needed for crop-transportation and delivery. That means financial equinox." ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... is not calm; the equinox still struggles in its storms. The wild rains of the day are abated; the great single cloud disparts and rolls away from heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, but tossed buoyant before a continued, long-sounding, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... are those points at which the Ecliptic and Equinoctial intersect, and when the sun occupies either of these two positions, the days and nights are of equal length. The Vernal Equinox is that one which the sun passes through or intersects in going from S to N declination, and the Autumnal Equinox that which it passes through or intersects in going from N to S declination. The Vernal Equinox (V in the illustration) is ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper

... and was marked by the flames of Nico and Nicomedia, which they wantonly burnt. [117] Some obscure hints are mentioned of a doubtful combat that secured their retreat. [118] But even a complete victory would have been of little moment, as the approach of the autumnal equinox summoned them to hasten their return. To navigate the Euxine before the month of May, or after that of September, is esteemed by the modern Turks the most unquestionable instance of rashness and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... very severe, so that they were enveloped in all kinds of toil and danger to no purpose (forasmuch as it was now past the autumnal equinox, and the snow, which had already fallen in those regions, covered the mountains and the plains), and so, instead of proceeding, Julian undertook a work worthy ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... importance of the event a line is drawn across the tablet although no interruption takes place in the official order of the Eponymes. Here then we have notice of a solar eclipse which was visible at Nineveh which occurred within 90 days of the (vernal) equinox (taking that as the normal commencement of the year) and which we may presume to have been total from the prominence given to the record, and these are conditions which during a century before and after ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers

... twenty-four hours, the day sometimes has fifteen hours and the night nine; and sometimes the night has sixteen and the day eight, according as the day and night increase and diminish; and they term these hours equal at the Equinox, and those that are termed temporal are always the same, because, the day being equal to the night, ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... at the vernal equinox, there is a representative council of the whole nation, which meets in a plain about twenty miles from our house, and continues about five or six days. Here they inquire into the state and condition of the several districts; ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift

... powerful and healthy population. The results of these events in the moral and political world may be compared to those produced in the vegetable kingdom by the storms and heavy gales so usual at the vernal equinox, the time of the formation of the seed; the pollen or farina of one flower is thrown upon the pistil of another, and the crossing of varieties of plants so essential to the perfection of the vegetable world produced. In man moral causes and physical ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... field-clubs—out in pursuit of weeds, of stone-cracking, and the desecration of those old heathen burying barrows on Stone Horse Head quieted off for the time being. Deadham, meanwhile, in act of repossessing its soul in peace and hibernating according to time-honoured habit until the vernal equinox. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... to contain the immense throngs of fearful penitents: legacies and donations from conscience-stricken worshippers poured wealth into their treasuries. But once the awe-inspiring night of the vernal equinox that began the year 1000 had passed, and the bright March sun rose again on the fair earth, unconsumed by the wrath of God, the old world "seemed to thrill with new life; the earth cast off her outworn garments and clothed herself in a rich and white vesture of new churches." ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... Pliny says that after the autumnal equinox it appears every hour. This I have extracted from the Comments of Landino on the fourth book of the AEneid, and I mention it that no man may be deprived of the fruits of his labors, and that due honors may be rendered to every one. I saw this bow ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober

... made a report on June twenty-first, 1792, exonerating him from blame. The reasons given were avowedly based on the representations of the suppliant himself: first, that Duteil, the inspector, had given him permission to sail for Corsica in time to avoid the equinox, a distorted truth; and, second, that the Corsican authorities had certified to his civism, his good conduct, and his constant presence at home during his irregular absence from the army, a truthful statement, but incomplete, since no mention was made of the disgraceful ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... is not all. Having arrived at Cadiz, Villeneuve spent a great deal of time repairing his ships; time during which the enemy fleet also returned to Europe, and established a patrolling force off Cadiz. In the end, the coming of the equinox gales having made sailing from this port difficult, Villeneuve found himself blockaded; so the ingenious plans of the Emperor came to nothing, and he, realising that the English would not be taken in a second time, gave up the idea of invading Britain, ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... replied Miss Pillby, who had heard about the equinox and its carryings on all her life without having arrived at any clear idea of its nature and properties. 'We shall have it very equinoctial before the end of the month, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... unparallel'd in any land, any age. To these I must not omit adding the honesty of the essential bulk of the people everywhere—yet with all the seething fury and contradiction of their natures more arous'd than the Atlantic's waves in wildest equinox. In politics, what can be more ominous, (though generally unappreciated then)—what more significant than the Presidentiads of Fillmore and Buchanan? proving conclusively that the weakness and wickedness of elected rulers are just as likely ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... it in 1877, during the weeks that preceded and followed the summer solstice of that world. A single isolated case presented itself in 1879. On the 26th of December, this year—a little before the spring equinox, which occurred on Mars on the 21st of January, 1880—I noticed the doubling of the Nile [a canal thus named] between the Lakes of the Moon and the Ceraunic Gulf. These two regular, equal, and parallel lines caused me, I confess, a profound surprise, ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss

... is a good historical proof that they counted time by and observed a weekly Sabbath, long after their arrival in America. They began the year at the appearance of the first new moon of the vernal equinox, according to the ecclesiastical year of Moses. 'Till the seventy years captivity [19] commenced, the Israelites had only numeral names for their months, except Abib and Ethanim; the former signifying a green ear of corn, the latter robust or valiant; by the ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... same state we won't describe: we would Perhaps from hearsay, or from recollection: But getting nigh grim Dante's "obscure wood,"[539] That horrid equinox, that hateful section Of human years—that half-way house—that rude Hut, whence wise travellers drive with circumspection[jz] Life's sad post-horses o'er the dreary frontier Of Age, and looking back to Youth, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... under the olives!" But since my own garden must content me this year, let me conclude with a decent letter of thanks to the friend who sent me, from Devonshire, a box of violet roots that await the spring in a corner which even the waves of the equinox ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... three occasions in the course of five years, and usually about the time of the equinox, this remark had driven him to frenzy; he flourished his knives and shouted, ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... interests of both employer and contractor may be wisely safe-guarded. For if a contract is skilfully drawn, each may obtain a release from the other without disadvantage. From astronomy we find the east, west, south, and north, as well as the theory of the heavens, the equinox, solstice, and courses of the stars. If one has no knowledge of these matters, he will not be able to have any comprehension ...
— Ten Books on Architecture • Vitruvius

... Hannah, even while they were on their knees, that the gale blew with less fury than before. It was, indeed, one of those storms which occasionally, during the equinox, sweep along the coast, and, though brief, cause much damage to vessels caught near the shore, especially to such as are ill-found and ill-manned. So do the trials of life wreck those persons destitute of sound faith and religious principle, while those who are resting ...
— The Voyage of the "Steadfast" - The Young Missionaries in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston

... white, their pleasing springs were seen; And gliding streams amongst the tender grass, Thickets and soft winds to refresh the place. After when winter maketh sharp the air, Warm leaves, and leisure, sports, and gallant cheer Enthrall low minds. Now th' equinox hath made The day t' equal the night; and Progne had With her sweet sister, each their old task ta'en: (Ah! how the faith in fortune placed is vain!) Just in the time, and place, and in the hour When humble tears should earthly ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... eight days. The peasant hastens home to his hay-harvest; the merchant must quickly regulate the produce and manufactures he has purchased, and load his ships with them, so that they may sail and reach their destination before the storms of the autumnal equinox. ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer

... arrived yet, and the enthusiastic Polish Chivalry being good for nothing against regular musketry,—King Stanislaus finds that he will have to quit Warsaw, and seek covert somewhere. Quits Warsaw this day; gets covert in Dantzig. And, in fact, from this 22d of September, day of the autumnal equinox, 1733, is a fugitive, blockaded, besieged Stanislaus: an Imaginary King thenceforth. His real Kingship had lasted precisely ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... ships and transports, we had no hopes of getting out of the channel with so large a fleet, without the continuance of a fair wind for a considerable time, and this was what we had every day less and less reason to expect, as the time of the equinox drew near; wherefore our golden dreams and ideal possession of the Peruvian treasures grew every day more faint, and the difficulties and dangers of the passage round Cape Horn, in the winter season, filled our imaginations in their room. It was forty days from our arrival at St Helens ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... as to the beginning of the year. One is, that the year begins at the conjunction of the sun and the moon which occurs nearest to the vernal equinox. Thus this month is called the first by Moses in Exodus. If the flood set in on the seventeenth day of the second month, it must have continued almost to the end of April, the most beautiful season of the year, when the earth ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther

... oppressor. He had three daughters, like full moons of shining light or flower-gardens blooming bright; and a son as he were the moon; and it was his wont to keep two festivals in the twelve- month, those of the Nau-Roz, or New Year, and Mihrgn the Autumnal Equinox,[FN2] on which occasions he threw open his palaces and gave largesse and made proclamation of safety and security and promoted his chamberlains and viceroys; and the people of his realm came in to him and saluted him and gave him joy of the holy day, bringing ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... the heavy clouds that have passed yesterday to the south of us, I think a shower of rain may have fallen there; I ought not to allow the chance of it to escape, as it is likely to be my only one until the equinox, and I have not provisions sufficient to remain until that time, so I must push the horses as far as they will go, and then we must walk the rest, which is a very black prospect, considering the weak state we all are ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart

... year, some from the autumnal, others from the vernal equinox. The primitive patriarchs from that of autumn, that is, from the month called by the Hebrews Tisri, which coincides with part of our September and October. Hence it seems probable, that the world was created about that season; the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... written by whatever hand came next, might possibly want correction, as to the orthography and pointing; having, as the summer came on, not been shewn any for a considerable while, and desiring the reason thereof, was answered, that his vein never happily flowed but from the autumnal equinox to the vernal, and that whatever he attempted at other times, was never to his satisfaction, though he courted his fancy never so much; so that in all the years he was about his poem, he may be said to have spent but half his time therein.'[3] ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... middle Victorian period, but it is proof of the flexibility of our tastes that we have only just come to him. After shunning Anthony Trollope for fifty years, we came to him, almost as with a rush, long after our half-century was past. Now, James Payn is the solace of our autumnal equinox, and Anthony Trollope we read with a constancy and a recurrence surpassed only by our devotion to the truth as it is in the fiction of the Divine Jane; and Jane Austen herself was not an idol of our first or even our second youth, but became the cult of a time when if our tastes had ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... inexperience of the sea nearly compromised the success of the expedition. Even if they were not absolutely ignorant of the ebb and flow of the tide, they certainly did not know how dangerous the spring tide could prove at the equinox under the influence of a south wind. The rising tide then comes into conflict with the volume of water brought down by the stream, and in the encounter the banks are broken down, and sometimes large districts are inundated: this ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... walking, still only approaches its completion; and the desiccated soil has not yet fully defined the boundaries of the river. At spring-tides, particularly when the line of the moon's apsides coincides with the syzygies, or when the ascending node is in the vernal equinox, or after heavy rains, the river still overflows its banks, and indicates its originally extended scite under ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... experience. One day I have a large fire, and the next, windows and doors open in search of cool air: in the course of the afternoon a change of twenty degrees is a common occurrence. The Indian summer has not yet set in, but when the influence of the equinox is over, we shall have, I hope, a few of those divine days that made last ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power

... get beyond plovers and lovers. I am still, however, harassed by the unauthentic Muse; if I cared to encourage her - but I have not the time, and anyway we are at the vernal equinox. It is funny enough, but my pottering verses are usually made (like the God-gifted organ voice's) at the autumnal; and this seems to hold at the Antipodes. There is here some odd secret of Nature. I cannot speak of politics; we wait and wonder. It seems (this is partly a guess) Ide won't take ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... nights of September, when the autumnal equinox is past, and grey September fades into brown October, why are the Champs Elysees illuminated; why is Paris dancing, and flinging fire-works? They are gala-nights, these last of September; Paris may well dance, and the Universe: ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... a living creature to this sandy and dry country. By digging, however, in the ground, several insects, large spiders, and lizards were found in a half-torpid state. On the 15th, a few animals began to appear, and by the 18th (three days from the equinox), everything announced the commencement of spring. The plains were ornamented by the flowers of a pink wood-sorrel, wild peas, oenotherae, and geraniums; and the birds began to lay their eggs. Numerous Lamellicorn and Heteromerous insects, the latter remarkable ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... wild songs. Finally they burned a straw-man on the field.[300] In the district of Duesseldorf the straw-man burned on Shrove Tuesday was made of an unthreshed sheaf of corn.[301] On the first Monday after the spring equinox the urchins of Zurich drag a straw-man on a little cart through the streets, while at the same time the girls carry about a May-tree. When vespers ring, the straw-man is burned.[302] In the district of Aachen ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... and trouble. The festival fell in September because the rains begin about this time, and with the first rains there was generally much sickness. As a preparation for the festival the people fasted on the first day of the moon after the autumnal equinox. Having fasted during the day, and the night being come, they baked a coarse paste of maize. This paste was made of two sorts. One was kneaded with the blood of children aged from five to ten years, the blood being obtained by bleeding the children between ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... the other and putting on his cap. "See you later, Miss Jane. Morgan's back ag'in to work, thanks to you, doctor. That was a pretty bad sprain he had—he's all right now, though; went on practice yesterday. I'm glad of it—equinox is comin' on and we can't spare a man, or half a one, these days. May be blowin' a livin' gale 'fore the week's out. Good-by, Miss Jane; good-by, doctor." And he shut the ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith

... the stimulus of necessity to make them break through an initial indolence of nature. When Johnson found fault with Gray for having times of the year when he wrote more easily, from the vernal to the autumnal equinox, he added that a man could write at any time if he set himself doggedly to it. True, no doubt! But to write doggedly is not to court favourable conditions for artistic work. It may be a finer sight for a moralist to see a man performing an appointed task heavily and faithfully, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... true—and the fact seems well attested—that Milton's poetical vein flowed only from the autumnal equinox to the vernal[5], he cannot well have commenced "Paradise Lost" before the death of Cromwell, or have made very great progress with it ere his conception of his duty called him away to questions of ecclesiastical policy. The one point ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... just as the vernal equinox had blown a few ships into harbor, a stranger was announced, and immediately recognized by the master of the house as a 'Don' something—a Spanish merchant, whose kindness to a young member of the family had been often mentioned in his letters from Mexico. One of his own ships, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... the town of Devko{t}{t}a there lived a Brhman of the name of Deva{s}arman. At the feast of the great equinox he received a plate full of rice. He took it, went into a potter's shop, which was full of crockery, and, overcome by the heat, he lay down in a corner and began to doze. In order to protect his plate of rice, he kept a stick in his hand, and began to think, 'Now, if I sell this ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... fleet a few days afterward, they took up arms again. Being, however, defeated, they again sent offers of submission to Caesar, who simply demanded double the number of hostages he had originally required, as he was anxious to return to Gaul before the autumnal equinox. ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence

... after Ave Maria, from which the Romans reckon consecutively till the twenty-fourth hour. As the sun sets earlier or later, according to the season of the year, the hours vary of course, and the same period of the day that is indicated by the twelfth hour at the time of equinox, is indicated by the eleventh hour in midsummer, and the thirteenth hour in midwinter. This is very annoying to travellers from the north of Europe. "What o'clock is it?" you ask; and are told in reply, "It is the eighteenth hour and three ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... of this terrible wind, which blows in the Mexican Gulf, from the autumnal to the vernal equinox, are known not only to the sailors, but to all those who have lived some time in this city. The variation in the barometer is the surest sign. A land breeze from the north-west first blows gently, then varies to the north-east, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... decided astronomically, by a process in which sun-worship and moon-worship are both conciliated. The starting point is the vernal equinox, which was the time of a common Pagan festival. The very name of Easter is of heathen origin. All its customs are bequeathed to us from far-off Pagan ancestors. Easter eggs, symbolising the life of the universe, have been traced back to the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... and an aggressive manner, but he had the merit of knowing how to assimilate the ideas of other men, and to pass them on in a way which was intelligible and even interesting to the lay public, with a happy knack of being funny about the most unlikely objects, so that the precession of the Equinox or the formation of a vertebrate became a highly humorous ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... deployment had not been preserved, and time was necessarily lost before the troops could be put in line. Indeed, some of them were not regularly deployed at all. They had left their bivouac at sunrise which, as it was about the equinox, was not far from six o'clock. They had marched across the country without reference to roads, always a very slow mode of advancing, and doubly so with undrilled men. The untrained regiments must, in the nature ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... Jesus, suspecting some treachery, at first refused; but when the caravan of pilgrims had set out, he started on the journey, unknown to every one, and almost alone.[4] It was the last farewell which he bade to Galilee. The feast of Tabernacles fell at the autumnal equinox. Six months still had to elapse before the fatal denouement. But during this interval, Jesus saw no more his beloved provinces of the north. The pleasant days had passed away; he must now traverse, step by step, the painful ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... might ascertain from the book in what latitude, season, or circumstances, it had been written. The opponents are powerful. Reynolds ridiculed the notion of thoughts shooting forth with greater vigour at the summer solstice or the equinox; Johnson ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various

... difference between the heat at two hours afternoon in the month of the vernal equinox, and at an hour before sunrise, has been as great as ten degrees of the thermometer of Reaumur, as I have been informed by one of the medical staff attached to the army, who was in possession of that instrument. It is at present the commencement ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English

... of Robespierre and the close of the Reign of Terror.[1] These events are known in the historic calendar as the Revolution of Thermidor in the Year II. After the fall of the monarchy, the Convention decided that the year should begin with the autumnal equinox, and that the enumeration should date from the birth of the Republic. The Year I. opens on September 22, 1792; the Year II. opens on the same day of 1793. The month of Thermidor begins on July 19. The memorable Ninth Thermidor therefore corresponds to July 27, 1794. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... sailing-ground. During the first fortnight we were fortunate enough to make two recaptures of considerable value, which arrived safely in the Thames, after which we had a succession of gales front the southward, it being the time of the equinox, which drove us close to the sands of Yarmouth, and we even had difficulty in clearing them and getting into sea-room by standing to the eastward. The weather still continued very bad, and we were lying-to under storm sails for several days, and at last found ourselves ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat

... Clementine writer calls John a 'Hemerobaptist,' i.e. member of a sect which practised daily baptism [Endnote 167:1]. He talks about a rumour which became current in the reign of Tiberius about the 'vernal equinox,' that at the same season a king should arise in Judaea who should work miracles, making the blind to see, the lame to walk, healing every disease, including leprosy, and raising the dead; in the incident of the Canaanite woman (whom, with ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... Heliacal Risings and Settings of the Stars upon every day. And when by the Sun's Meridional Altitudes they had found the Solstices and Equinoxes according to the Sun's mean motion, his Equation being not yet known, they fixed the beginning of this year to the Vernal Equinox, and in memory thereof erected this monument. Now this year being carried into Chaldaea, the Chaldaeans began their year of Nabonassar on the same Thoth with the Egyptians, and made it of the same length. And the ...
— The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended • Isaac Newton

... gone by, and the equinox was upon us, with its rapid changes of sun and storm, when one of these tempests, accompanied by hail of unusual size, shattered to fragments the skylight of the bath-room. This hail-storm was succeeded by a deluge of rain, which flooded not only the adjacent closet, but the chamber ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... name of Gandun Piran, and is said to be some centuries old. In the spring equinox pilgrimages are made to this Ziarat from the neighbouring city and villages, when offerings of wheat are contributed that the donor may be at peace with the gods and expect plentiful crops. These pilgrimages take ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... overwhelming sickness induces;—and they have a picture of the Good Intent's cabin and state-room during the voyage to which I refer. Nor was this all. The weather was boisterous, being the vernal equinox; the winds cross and tempestuous; and the waves of the sea so tremendous that the little vessel sunk, and rose, and rolled, as if each succeeding shock were the last ere she sank for ever into the roaring abyss; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... hieroglyphics of the ancients, found upon a mummy-case in the British Museum a delineation of the signs of the zodiac, and the position of the planets; the date to which they pointed was the autumnal equinox of the year 1722 B.C. Professor Mitchell, to whom the fact was communicated, employed his assistants to ascertain the exact position of the heavenly bodies belonging to our solar system on the equinox of that year. This was done, and a diagram ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... "The poet no doubt intended to indicate the vernal equinox as the birthday of Rama. For the month Chaitra is the first of the two months assigned to the spring; it corresponds with the latter half of March and the former half of April in our division of the year. Aditi, the mother of the Gods, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... a distinction to grey hairs. But their superiority is founded more deeply than by outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the march of man; they have more or less solved the irking problem; they have battled through the equinox of life; in good and evil they have held their course; and now, without open shame, they near the crown and harbour. It may be we have been struck with one of fortune's darts; we can scarce be civil, so cruelly ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... suffered through the sallies of the besieged: and in some of these his soldiers behaved so ill that he was forced to punish their cowardice by decimation. His supplies failed, and he had to feed his troops on barley instead of wheat. Meantime the autumnal equinox was approaching, and the weather was becoming cold. The Medes and Parthians, under their respective monarchs, hung about him, impeded his movements, and cut off his stragglers, but carefully avoided engaging him ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson

... watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac[262] he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice[263] he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... a month later and September was drawing to an end. The weather was beautiful, but the foliage in the park began to show a great deal of read and yellow and since the equinox, which had brought three stormy days, the leaves lay scattered in every direction. In the circular plot a slight change had been made. The sundial was gone and in the place where it had stood there lay since yesterday ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... At the autumnal equinox of 1794 Pitt was confronted by a far more serious crisis than at the beginning of the war in February 1793. The Republicans, after throwing back Clerfait beyond the River Roer, towards Aix-la-Chapelle, compelled the Duke of York to abandon the natural ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... other ports—Foochow, Amoy, and Ningpo. I have a line from Oliphant, who took up my letter to Shanghae, and made a quick though rough passage. We shall be a good deal longer on the way, and my captain advises me to be off, to anticipate the equinox. I have just written a despatch to Lord Clarendon, to tell him that perhaps I may go direct from Shanghae to Japan, and so home. It is almost too good ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... thanks have I not to pay, when my cough is the most painful sensation that I feel? and from that I expect hardly to be released, while winter continues to gripe us with so much pertinacity. The year has now advanced eighteen days beyond the equinox, and still there is very little remission of the cold. When warm weather comes, which surely must come at last, I hope it will help both me and your ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... soothingly. "I'm no fool, Lou. Trust me to do the fine work in a case like this. Sow the right kind of seeds and you'll get results every time. I merely dropped a few hints, that's all,—and in the right direction, believe me. Count Equinox will do the rest. I'll bet my head we'll have this prince ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... point in each day at the sixth hour, so also it reaches its highest point in every year at the summer solstice. Therefore Christ ought to have suffered about the time of the summer solstice rather than about the vernal equinox. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... there are when sun and man, by stress of work, or clouds, or light, or it may be some Process of the Equinox, make draughts upon the untilted day, and solace themselves in the morning. For lack of dew the sun draws lengthy sucks of cloud quite early, and men who have labored far and dry, and scattered the rime of the night with dust, find themselves ready about 8 A.M. for the golden encouragement ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... "I never eat between the equinoxes. At the vernal and at the autumnal equinox I take a good meal, and that lasts me for half a year. I am extremely regular in my habits, and do not think it healthful to eat at odd times. But if you need food, go and get it, and I will return to the soft grass where I slept last ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton

... gathering their Indian corn about the latter end of this month. The weather during the former and latter part of it was wet. About the time of the equinox, the tides in the cove were ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... ship that, a hundred years before, Freighted deep with its goodly store, In the gales of the equinox ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... arm of the sea between Sark and Jersey called the Passage of the Deroute. There was then no lighthouse at any point on either coast. It had been a clear sunset; the night was darker than summer nights usually are; it was moonlight, but large clouds, rather of the equinox than of the solstice overspread the sky, and, judging by appearances, the moon would not be visible until she reached the horizon at the moment of setting. A few clouds hung low near the surface of the sea and covered ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... have forgotten the terrible storm from the northeast, in the middle of the equinox of that year. The tempest raged without intermission from the 18th to the 26th of March. Its ravages were terrible in America, Europe, and Asia, covering a distance of eighteen hundred miles, and extending obliquely to the equator from the thirty-fifth north parallel to the ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne

... the example of Encke's comet rendered it conspicuous and undeniable. On the 28th of October, 1828, the diameter of the nebulous matter composing this body was estimated at 312,000 miles. It was then about one and a half times further from the sun than the earth is at the time of the equinox. On the 24th of December following, its distance being reduced by nearly two-thirds, it was found to be only 14,000 miles across.[246] That is to say, it had shrunk during those two months of approach to 1/11000th part of its original volume! Yet it had still seventeen days' ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... ascent from east to south, thence to descend obliquely towards the west. During the summer months the obliquity of his course diminished, and he came closer to Egypt; during the winter it increased, and he went farther away. This double movement recurred with such regularity from equinox to solstice, and from solstice to equinox, that the day of the god's departure and the day of his return could be confidently predicted. The Egyptians explained this phenomenon according to their conceptions ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... might generally be divided, not into summer and winter, as in Europe, but into the rainy seasons and the dry seasons, which were generally thus: From the middle of February to the middle of April (including March), rainy; the sun being then on or near the equinox. From the middle of April to the middle of August (including May, June, and July), dry; the sun being then north of the equator. From the middle of August till the middle of October (including September), rainy; the sun being then come back to the equator. From the middle of October till ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... Gandamak, winter is rigorous, but especially so on the high Arachosian plateau. In Kabul the snow lies for two or three months; the people seldom leave their houses, and sleep close to stoves. At Ghazni the snow has been known to lie long beyond the vernal equinox; the thermometer sinks to 10 deg. and 15 deg. below zero (Fahr.); and tradition relates the entire destruction of the population of Ghazni by ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... their chronology. At the beginning of the Christian Era, the constellation Aries, or Ram, occupied the equinoctial place, being in the first degree of that constellation. About 2150 B.C. the first degree of Taurus, or Bull, contained the Equinox. When the constellation Taurus, or the Bull, was in the first division, or the equinoctial place, the people used a symbol representing a bull, described as giving fecundity, a deity of vegetation ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... And yet this was only the day of the vernal equinox; it was most extraordinary. Everywhere the gutters ran streaming with water, the snow melting under the unexampled heat of the solar rays like wax in a candle flame. The trees growing in the square were leafless, and the tropic ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... yours. Neither should the husband, without imperative reason, consent to such a life unless he is sure his wife can withstand the temptation of social dissipation which sweeps across such places with the force of the Atlantic Ocean when driven by a September equinox. Many wives give up their homes for these public residences so that they may give their entire time to operas, theatres, balls, receptions and levees, and they are in a perpetual whirl, like a whip-top, spinning round and round and round very prettily until it loses its equipoise ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... at the horizon, rushing with expanded, winnowing, black pennons across the sky, darting out its forked fiery tongue, and belching fire. In a Slovakian legend, the dragon sleeps in a mountain cave through the winter months, but, at the equinox, bursts forth—"In a moment the heaven was darkened and became black as pitch, only illumined by the fire which flashed from dragon's jaws and eyes. The earth shuddered, the stones rattled down the mountain sides into the glens. Right and left, left ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... in human affairs that they determined to have a new chronology. Accordingly a commission of scientists was appointed to formulate a system, which was adopted in October 1793. The "Era of the Republic" was to be counted from the autumnal equinox, 1792. The year was divided into twelve months, as before, but they were renamed (Thermidor hot month, Fructidor fruit month, Nivose snow month, &c.), and ran in periods of thirty days each from the 22d of September. This left five days undistributed, ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... and mists and battering rains that follow in quick succession after the equinox, the chill winds that creep about the fields, have ceased a little while, and there is a pleasant sound in the fir trees. Everything is not gone yet. In the lanes that lead down to the 'shaws' in the dells, the 'gills,' as ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... thunder-storm last night. The last few days have begun the vernal equinox. It rained torrents all night and stopped at dawn. The wind was northeast and cool. Cloudy overhead, with purple horizon all around—a forbidding day. But we decided to go fishing, anyhow. We had new, delicate three-six tackles to try. About seven ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey

... part must be content to be as though they had not been: to be found in the register of God, not in the records of men. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The Night of Time far surpasseth the Day, and who knoweth the Equinox?—Sir ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... sort of ingenious device is resorted to, to attract customers and render them attractive. This custom is probably derived from the East, where the egg is the symbol of the primitive state of the world and of the creation of things. The new year formerly began at the spring equinox, at about Easter; and at that period of the renewal of Nature, a festival was celebrated in the new moon of the month Phamenoth, in honor of Osiris, when painted and gilded eggs were exchanged as presents, in reference to the beginning of all things. The transference of the commencement of the year ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... appeared or disappeared in the interval of 150 years; but he found that all the stars seemed to have changed their places with reference to that point in the heavens where the ecliptic is 90 degrees from the poles of the earth—i.e., the equinox. He found that this could be explained by a motion of the equinox in the direction of the apparent diurnal motion of the stars. This discovery of precession of the equinoxes, which takes place at the rate of 52".1 ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes

... the mode of culture for rice in Carolina:—It is sowed as soon as it conveniently can be after the vernal equinox, from which period until the middle, and even the last of May, is the usual time of putting it in the ground. It grows best in low marshy land, and should be sowed in furrows twelve inches asunder; it requires to be flooded, and thrives best ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... and you must accept it or you would deserve to be unfortunate, for you must remember that I used to go to your house, with the sacred unscrupulousness of friendship, when you were in prosperity, and when I was struggling against all the winds of heaven, and overtaken by the high tides of the equinox, drowned in debts. I have it now in my power to make the sweet and tender reprisals of gratitude . . . You will have some days' happiness every three months: come more frequently if you will; but you are to come, that is settled. I did this in the old times. At St. Cyr, at Angouleme, at Frapesle, ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd

... came to me with the equinox, The wild wind blew him to my swinging door, With flakes of tawny foam from off the shore, And shivering spindrift whirled across the rocks. Flung down the sky, the wheeling swallow-flocks Cried him a greeting, and the lordly woods, Waving lean arms of welcome one by ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various

... are added. Thus the Clementine writer calls John a 'Hemerobaptist,' i.e., member of a sect which practised daily baptism. He talks about a rumour which became current in the reign of Tiberius, about the 'vernal equinox,' that at the same time a King should arise in Judaea who should work miracles, making the blind to see, the lame to walk, healing every disease, including leprosy, and raising the dead; in the incident of the Canaanite woman ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... Autumnal Equinox, one of the two great festival days (the other being the New Year) of the Persians. See my "Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night," Vol. IV. ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... plumb-line. The sun was bisected by the line of the horizon, and appeared to be moving about them in a circle, with only its upper half visible. As Jupiter's northern hemisphere was passing through its autumnal equinox, they concluded they had landed exactly ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... me and indulge me too much, and I grow soft, and then every trifle rubs me the wrong way. I'm a regular spoilt child—I know it and a jolly good spanking is what I deserve. Burton, here, declares that the autumnal, like the vernal, equinox breeds hot humours and distempers in the blood. I believe we ought to be bled, spring and fall, like our forefathers. Look here, mother, don't take my grumbling to heart. I tell you I'm just a little hipped from the weather. Let's ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the first line of it;—he told his mishap to the audience, and they screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices. Milton could not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal equinox. One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without fitting him with a new garment. "Ah!" ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then. No ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... of the white summer lily, twelve ounces of the pollen of the autumn hibiscus flower, and twelve ounces of the white plum in bloom in the winter. You take the four kinds of pollen, and put them in the sun, on the very day of the vernal equinox of the succeeding year to get dry, and then you mix them with the powder and pound them well together. You again want twelve mace of water, fallen on 'rain ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... flutters like a tiny flower stirred by faint air. The wind is "a cordial of incredible virtue" (Emerson)—sharp and chill, but with a milder tincture. To-day, though brisk and snell on the streets, the sunshine had a lively vigour, a generous quality, a promissory note of the equinox. I felt it from first rising this morning—the old demiurge at work! As I sat in the bathtub (when a man is fifty he may be pardoned for taking a warm bath on winter mornings) my mind fell upon the desire of wandering: it occurred to me that a spread of legs in the vital ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... difficulty would have been by observing the length of shadows thrown by upright posts at noon in spring and autumn. In latitude 30 deg. north, the sun at noon in spring (or, to speak precisely, on the day of the vernal equinox) is just twice as far from the horizon as he is from the point vertically overhead; and if a pointed post were set exactly upright at true noon (supposed to occur at the moment of the vernal or autumnal ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... After the equinox, the sun had remained constantly above the horizon. The eight months of perpetual daylight had begun. This continual sunlight, with the increasing though still quite feeble heat, soon began ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... twelve years the difference is found to be of one degree, that is to say, the three hundred and sixtieth part of the circumference of the whole heaven. Thus after seventy-two years the colure of the vernal equinox which passed through a fixed star, corresponds with another fixed star. Hence it is that the sun, instead of being in that part of the heavens in which the Ram was situated in the time of Hipparchus, is found to correspond ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire

... fortunate that the difference is one of eleven days, for as that is the number which is added every year to the epact our epacts are almost the same. As to the celebration of Easter, that is a different question. Your equinox is on March the 21st, ours on the 10th, and the astronomers say we are both wrong; sometimes it is we who are wrong and sometimes you, as the equinox varies. You know you are not even in agreement with the Jews, whose calculation is ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... unnoticed part of an enormous bank, assumes its shape of ethereal beauty as faithfully as though preparing for some grand exhibition. Planets rush with dizzy sweep through almost limitless courses, yet return to equinox or solstice at the appointed second, their very movement being "the uniform manifestation of the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... in this posture for four months, that is to say, from the middle of June to the middle of October; for though the rains went off, at least the greatest violence of them, about the equinox, yet, as the sun was then just over our heads, we resolved to stay awhile till it passed ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe

... may say that there are four seasons when they are held: the winter solstice, when the days begin to lengthen and primitive man rejoices in the lengthening and seeks to assist it;[130] the vernal equinox, the period of germination and the return of life; the summer solstice, when the sun reaches its height; and autumn, the period of fruition, of thankfulness, and of repose. But it is rarely that we find a people seriously celebrating more than ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... Admiral in sight; rather in advance of us, owing to the circumstance I have related. I now fear our voyage will prove very tedious, and that the want of provisions and other circumstances will compel us to put into some port; this may occasion great delay, which the approach of the equinox makes me very desirous to avoid. I really believe no ships in so bad a condition as those with me ever ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross

... month, the pontiffs were enabled to prolong the term of a magistracy or hasten the annual elections; and so little care had been taken to regulate the year, that, at the time of Julius Caesar, the civil equinox differed from the astronomical by three months, so that the winter months were carried back into autumn and the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... unintermittent assiduity both night and day."[56] What hope of gain or advantage had they in those days? nay, or even now? for the hopes of parents are uncertain, and have to be long waited for. He who plants a vine in the spring equinox, gleans its vintage in the autumnal equinox; he who sows corn when the Pleiads set, reaps it when they rise; cattle and horses and birds have produce at once fit for use; whereas man's bringing up is toilsome, his growth slow; and as excellence flowers ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... a certain impetus and oestro." What was his season of inspiration is somewhat uncertain. In the elegy "To Spring," Milton says it was the spring which restored his poetic faculty. Phillips, however, says, "that his vein never flowed happily but from the autumnal equinox to the vernal," and that the poet told him this. Phillips' reminiscence is perhaps true at the date of Paradise Lost, when Milton's habits had changed from what they had been at twenty. Or we may agree with Toland, that Phillips has transposed the seasons, though preserving the fact ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... not go to drive with him that morning, though he apologized and humbled himself in every way. He pleaded that it was such a beautiful day, it must be the last they were going to have; it was getting near the equinox, and this must be a weather-breeder. She let him go off alone, for he would not lose the drive, and she watched him out of sight from her upper window with a heavy heart. As soon as he was fairly gone, she wanted ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells

... but all the fruit, that I have seen, is small. They attempt to sow nothing but oats and barley. Oats constitute the bread-corn of the place. Their harvest is about the beginning of October; and, being so late, is very much subject to disappointments from the rains that follow the equinox. This year has been particularly disastrous. Their rainy season lasts from autumn to spring. They have seldom very hard frosts; nor was it ever known that a lake was covered with ice strong enough to bear a skater. The sea round them is always open. The snow falls, but soon melts; only in ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... our experience went, it appears, that the sea to the north of Beering's Strait is clearer of ice in August than in July, and perhaps in a part of September it may be still more free. But after the equinox the days shorten so fast, that no farther thaw can be expected; and we cannot rationally allow so great an effect to the warm weather in the first half of September, as to imagine it capable of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr

... Beginning with the Vernal Equinox, it must be remembered; and (howsoever the old Solar Year is practically superseded by the clumsy Lunar Year that dates from the Mohammedan Hijra) still commemorated by a Festival that is said to have been appointed by the very Jamshyd whom ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam

... to the north-western part of the notable feature, to which Schiaparelli has given the name of Syrtis major.[18] This has at various times been recorded as grey, green, blue, brown, and even violet. When this region (about the time of the autumnal equinox of the northern hemisphere) is situated in the middle of the visible disc, the eastern part is distinctly greener than the western. As the season progresses this characteristic colour gets feebler, until the green tint is ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... the affair even more at heart than myself. He told me, with a rueful and prognosticating countenance, that we were fast drawing near to the autumnal equinox, when we should reach the commencement of a natural night of six months' duration; and although the benevolent substitute of steam might certainly in some degree lessen the evil, that it was a furious evil, after all, to exist for a period so weary without enjoying the light of ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... the De Pascha computus, written in Africa in 243, sets it by private revelation, ab ipso deo inspirati, on the 28th of March. He argues that the world was created perfect, flowers in bloom, and trees in leaf, therefore in spring; also at the equinox, and when the moon just created was full. Now the moon and sun were created on a Wednesday. The 28th of March suits all these considerations. Christ, therefore, being the Sun of Righteousness, was born on the 28th of March. The same symbolical ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... This year, however, the equinox brought no storm with it, and the lighted fires have continued to burn with such fierceness that not only the swamp, but the surrounding country, is in danger of ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 51, October 28, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... in this system of chronological computation, based upon the ages of the patriarchs, was the great length of life to which those worthies attained. It was generally supposed that before the Flood "there was a perpetual equinox," and no vicissitudes in Nature. After that event the standard of life diminished one-half, and in the time of the Psalmist it had sunk to seventy years, at which it still remains. Austerities of climate were affirmed to have arisen through the shifting of the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... calculations the six hours were taken as six complete hours, and not six hours wanting some minutes. And the aggregate miscalculation continued until the minutes added yearly, amounted to ten days and changed the date of the spring equinox. Pope Gregory XIII. (1572-1585) sought to remedy the error. He re-established the spring equinox to the place fixed by the Council of Nice (787). The year had fallen ten days in arrear from the holding of the Council until ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley

... parts. If we now regard it again as a whole, we may observe that the cathedral, built over a crypt symbolical of the contemplative life, and also of the tomb in which Christ was laid, was naturally obliged to have its apse towards that point of the heavens where the sun rises at the equinox, so as to convey, says the Bishop of Mende, that it is the Church's mission to show moderation in its triumphs as in its reverses. All the liturgical commentators are agreed that the high altar must be placed at the eastern ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... especially of Thebes; the other of a hawk, the symbol of Horus, holding in its claws a symbol of the universe.[75] It may symbolize by this form, the rising sun and the coming of the Spring sun of the vernal equinox in the zodiacal sign of the ram, but more likely has a much deeper religious meaning.[76] Represented with the head and legs of a man the scarab was an emblem ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer

... on, the mornings and evenings get cooler in relation to the mid-day heat; and about the equinox, the difference in the temperature of mid-day and midnight is at its maximum. We have therefore a powerful sedative effect in the morning, which braces and invigorates the body; a powerful reactive effect at mid-day, which rouses ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various

... grown very long; the sun had passed the vernal equinox, and yet it looked upon unbroken snowfields. Then, about the middle of April, the snow passed quickly away in blazing sunshine, in a thousand rivulets, in a flooded river. The roads were heavy with mud, but the earth was left green, the bud ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... injustice. entusiasmo enthusiasm. envenenar to poison. enviado envoy, messenger. enviar to send. envidioso envious. envoltorio bundle. envolver to involve, wrap. epilogo epilogue. episodio episode. epistola epistle. epoca epoch, time. equidad f. equity. equinoccio equinox. equipaje m. baggage. equitacion f. horsemanship. equivocar vr. to mistake. erguir to erect, raise up straight. erial m. unfilled ground. ermita hermitage. esbirro bailiff, guard. escalera staircase. escalon ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

... after all, was the most necessary thing I had about me next to my gun. As for my face, the color of it was really not so mulatto-like as one might expect from a man not at all careful of it, and living within nine or ten degrees of the equinox. My beard I had once suffered to grow till it was about a quarter of a yard long; but, as I had both scissors and razors sufficient, I had cut it pretty short, except what grew on my upper lip, which I had trimmed into a large pair of Mahometan whiskers, such as I had ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten

... to Lucian, which says that the Golden Lamb is the constellation Aries, "The Ram." Hugo Winckler (Weltanschauung des alten Orients, pp. 30, 31) suggests that the story is a piece of Babylonian astronomy misunderstood. It seems that the vernal equinox, which is now moving from the Ram into the Fish, was in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. moving from the Bull into the Ram. Now the Bull, Marduk, was the special god of Babylon, and the time when he ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides

... equinox—caught and held me on the island, huddled over the fire, and it was then that I conceived the famous idea of the furnace. I had planned many a pleasant autumn there, for it was now the best of America to me, and if such weeks as this were possible (and probable) there would be little comfort ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell

... (ii., 19.) (10) It was supposed that the Sun and Moon and the planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Venus) were points which restrained the motion of the sky in its revolution. (See Book VI., 576.) (11) Mercury. (See Book IX., 777.) (12) That is, at the autumnal equinox. The priest states that the planet Mercury causes the rise of the Nile. The passage is difficult to follow; but the idea would seem to be that this god, who controlled the rise and fall of the waves of the sea, also when he was placed directly over the Nile caused ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... far as Terracina, &c. In this wide expanse we could see the thunderclouds forming and rising gradually over the sky before the storm, and I used to watch the vapour condensing into a cloud as it rose into the cool air. I never witnessed anything so violent as the storms we had about the equinox, when the weather broke up. Our house being high above the plain became enveloped in vapour till, at 3 p.m. we could scarcely see the olives which grew below our windows, and crash followed crash with no interval between the ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... friend had told me how he had read in a book that the damnable Brute CAPITAL was about to swallow us all up and make slaves of us and that there was no way out of it, seeing that it was fixed, settled and grounded in economics, not to speak of the procession of the Equinox, the Horoscope of Trimegistus, and Old Moore's Almanack. Oh! Run, Run! The Rich are upon us! Help! Their hot breath is on our ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc









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