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More "Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eye. He was elegantly and somewhat extravagantly dressed as a civilian; he carried himself with a rustic, barbaric jauntiness, strangely dashed with a superinduced touch of the Parisian salon. His tawny cheek, like a date, spoke of the tropic, A wonderful atmosphere of proud friendlessness and scornful isolation invested him. Yet there was a bit of the poet as well as the outlaw in him, too. A cool solemnity of intrepidity sat on his lip. He looked like one who of purpose sought out harm's way. He looked like one ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... parents sit together upon the sofa; and as the song proceeds the hand of the mother steals into that of the father, which holds it closely, while his arm creeps noiselessly around her waist. Their hearts float far away upon that music. His eyes droop as when he was speaking of the tropic islands—as if he were hearing the soft language of those shores. As his wife looks at him she sees on his face, beneath the weariness of its expression, the light which shone there in the days when they sang "Bonnie Doon" together. He draws her closer to him, and his head bows as if by long ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... over a distant unknown land along the Rio Grande. In that country, no iron trails as yet had come. The magic of the wire, so recently applied to the service of man, was as yet there unknown. Word traveled slowly by horses and mules and carts. There came small news from that far-off country, half tropic, covered with palms and crooked dwarfed growth of mesquite and chaparral. The long-horned cattle lived in these dense thickets, the spotted jaguar, the wolf, the ocelot, the javelina, many smaller creatures not known in our northern lands. In the loam along the stream the deer ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... shines emblazoned, discreetly hidden behind dingy shutters; the rare officials, undisguisedly somnambulant; and the customary loiterers, even to the middle-aged woman with the ulster and the handbag, fled to more congenial scenes. As in the inmost dells of some small tropic island the throbbing of the ocean lingers, so here a faint pervading hum and trepidation told in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a bliss more fair than this Which we taste in our colder clime; For they were rife in a tropic life— A brighter and ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... voyages were still confined to the limit of Rhapta. We have just stated that Prasum, according to the most moderate hypothesis, must be fixed seven degrees to the south of Rhapta. Marinus, however, fixes it either in thirty-five degrees south, or under the tropic of Capricorn. He was led into this and similar errors by assigning too great a number of stadia to the degree. Ptolemy endeavours to correct him, and places Prasum in latitude 15, 30 south; it is remarkable that the Prasum of Ptolemy is precisely ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... he sailed among these beautiful tropic islands, and of them and of the people who lived upon them he wrote to the king and queen of Spain: "This country excels all others as far as the day surpasses the night in splendor. The natives love their neighbors as themselves; ...
— The True Story of Christopher Columbus • Elbridge S. Brooks
... near, the bright, tropic sun shone out for a while, and the furious wind died away, seeming to gather fresh strength for another sweeping onslaught from the ...
— Susani - 1901 • Louis Becke
... while there before Mine eyes brown, yielding beauties dance in time To the pulsing music of a saraband! And yet there is a flavor of the sea, [Sipping wine. The long-drawn heaving of the ocean wave, The gentle cradling of a tropic tide; Its native golden sun—I fear you sleep? Or do the travels of the wine so rock Your soul that self is lost in revery? Why, man, dream not too much of placid bliss; Nor wine, nor man, can reach this clear perfection Until ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... Ceylon, is undeniable; since, amongst other imaginary characteristics of Taprobane, they make it extend considerably to the south of the line. Now, with respect to Ceylon, this is notoriously false; that island lies entirely in the northern tropic, and does not come within five (hardly more than six) degrees of the equator. Plain it is, therefore, that Taprobane, it construed very strictly, is an ens rationis, made up by fanciful composition from various sources, and much like our own ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... in chill degree, As map informs, of fifty-three, And do not much for cold atone, By bringing thither fifty-one, Methinks all climes should be alike, From tropic e'en to pole arctique; Since you have such a constitution As nowhere suffers diminution. You can be old in grave debate, And young in love-affairs of state; 10 And both to wives and husbands show The vigour ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... to Colaba, the point south of Bombay. This took us through the cantonments and past officers' houses on the low ground, amongst barracks, and soldiers in khaki and rolled up shirt sleeves, smoking their pipes under palms and tropic trees; with the lap of Indian Ocean on the shore to the west, and Bombay on the left and east. This is not the healthiest or most fashionable quarter. Our officers cannot afford to take the best bungalows and situations which are towards ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... broken by this warning from the primitive powers that counterbalance each other behind the peace of the tropic night. By and by, one grows accustomed to the uncanny neighbourhood of the volcano, and only the more formidable eruptions attract notice. Sometimes, while at work, I hear one of the boys exclaim, "Huh, huh!" to call my attention to the fact that a particularly violent outbreak has ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... the child of tropic seas and volcanic lava, and many of the features were new and strange to us. The mountains looked familiar in outline, but the colors of the landscape, the soft lilacs, greens, and browns, and the whole atmosphere of the scene, were unlike anything we had ever before seen. And Diamond Head, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... respectability which promised payment for their accommodation, were put to bed; the common sort were bundled unceremoniously out on the strand before the door and left to sober up as best they might in the soft tropic night. Teach, Raveneau, and the Brazilian were detained for conference with the boatswain. To these worthies, therefore, Hornigold unfolded Morgan's plan, which they embraced with alacrity, promising each to do his share. Velsers was too ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... summer. It was one of those days when there was not the filmiest cloud to veil the sun; you could see the ether shimmering over the land, and the fields of yellow grain looked like lakes of molten metal. Shaded by our wide straw hats, Penelope and I had no thought of the tropic heat. We were engrossed in the reaper as it cut its way through the wheat; we followed it, counting the sheaves as they dropped with mechanical precision; we stepped along untiringly in its wake, as though the rough stubble were the smoothest of ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... the vengeance that awaits any nation that lays unholy hands on an American citizen or violates any sacred American right. It has drawn from an admiring world unstinted applause for the invincible army, that under tropic suns, despite privations and disease, untrained but undismayed, has swept out of their own trenches and routed from their own battlements, like chaff before the wind, the trained forces of a formidable power. It has bodily stripped the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... as a place of residence even in Adelle's childhood, but now it was almost completely converted to industrial uses. The stove factory had grown like a tropic plant, and had spawned about itself a number of parasitic industries, such as tack-mills, paper-box factories, and other occupations that use the labor of women and children. It was one long, smoky, grimy thoroughfare, where in a small, congested area ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... was ready to go to bed, and long in the torpor of the tropic night there came to him, above the hum of the mosquitoes fighting at the net, the soft, wailing croon of Isidro, back at his "Goo-oo-oo ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... get vastly less news nowadays from our next-door neighbor, Mexico, than from Europe and Asia, therefore a 'Call' reporter, meeting a Comrade who has recently returned from the tropic peninsula, fell upon him and demanded news of the Socialist, ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... the Honourable the Governor in Council, having formed a very high estimate of your talents and acquirements, and of the spirit of enterprise and decision, united with prudence and discretion, exhibited in your recently published travels through the territories of the Maselakatze to the Tropic of Capricorn, has been pleased to select you to conduct the mission which the British Government has resolved to send to Sahela Selasse, the king of Shoa, in Southern Abyssinia, whose capital, Ankober, is supposed to be about four ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... leaped up the next morning, and the tropic night flashed suddenly into the tropic day, Amyas was pacing the deck, with dishevelled hair and torn clothes, his eyes red with rage and weeping, his heart full—how can I describe it? Picture it to yourselves, picture it to yourselves, you who have ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... to Will—a handsome, stalwart man, with a heavy amber moustache, hard blue eyes, and a skin tanned red by hotter suns than English Augusts know. His disposition, also, as it seemed, reflected years of a tropic or subtropic existence, for this trivial meeting and momentary intrusion upon his solitude resulted in an explosion as ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... miles of the richly grassed slopes of a beautiful open forest, intersected by frequent watercourses where the land trended gradually upward to the distant mountain-range. Sometimes they had to go out of their course in order to avoid the tangle of tropic jungle; but onward north by east they went, beneath the shade of heavy-fruited palms, their road again made difficult by the large and numerous anthills that give these northern latitudes so strange a solemnity and appearance ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... sail upon the tropic seas, Where fathom long the blood-red dulses grow, Droop from the rock and waver in the breeze, Lashing the tide to foam; while calm below The muddy mandrakes throng those waters warm, And purple, gold, and ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... trembling in every muscle as a deep rage at these blasphemies spread throughout his frame. As tropic storms strike languid forests, swaying, threshing, rending trees this way and that, so a mighty rush of fury swept him. Slowly at first, then faster, the almost forgotten taper flame of manliness that flickered on the altar of his inmost being ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... they go, and they reject as mistaken and unworthy the doctrine that we lose our own liberties by securing the enduring foundations of liberty to others. Our institutions will not deteriorate by extension, and our sense of justice will not abate under tropic suns in distant seas. As heretofore, so hereafter will the nation demonstrate its fitness to administer any new estate which events devolve upon it, and in the fear of God will "take occasion by the hand and make the bounds of freedom ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... in the house the German merchant built, the Chinese millionaire bought, and the Admiral, without a fleet since the 1st of May, rented. The furnishing was rich; there were frescoes that were aglow with the tropic birds and window curtains that were dreams. The vast mansions of the ex-officials were not, however, such as would have been sought as accommodations for the management of the military and other affairs, and there was much lacking to comfort; but as the hotels after ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... toward warmer seas. It was winter in their home land and, though they knew it not, Christmas day. There the tropic sun blazed overhead from an absolutely cloudless sky. There was no vestige of breeze to stir the canvas of the solitary sail or ripple the glassy surface of the smoothed out ocean. The boat lay still. Not even the iron man at the helm could have ...
— And Thus He Came • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Spain—and she is one of its loveliest children. The oranges and pomegranates scent the burning air, the vineyards glow in the tropic sun, and golden summer forever reigns. But the glowing southern sun is not more brilliant than the Spanish gypsy's flashing black eyes, nor the pomegranate blossoms half so ripe and red as her cheeks. She is Zenith, the Zingara, ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... creates the dampness complained of. It is not that our soil is more humid, that marshes exist, or that the country is not well drained; but it is that the westerly and north-westerly breezes which prevail, come loaded with the warm vapours ascending from the tropic heated waters of ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... English speech Sounded, there English hearts, of mould humane. Justice would strengthen, cruelty restrain. And is it all a figment of false pride? Such horrors do our vaunting annals hide Beneath a world of words, like flowers that wave In tropic swamps o'er a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... to be the most gorgeous cinema in the Five Towns; and it simply was. Its advertisements read: "There is always room at the top." There was. Over the ceiling of its foyer enormous crimson peonies expanded like tropic blooms, and the heart of each peony was a sixteen-candle-power electric lamp. No other two cinemas in the Five Towns, it was reported, consumed together as much current as the Imperial de Luxe; and nobody could deny that the degree of excellence of a cinema is finally ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... things in common, and now suddenly he was satiate of her. But Katherine, he had thought, was so young and bright and beautiful; a child that had lived within the cloister and had grown to maidenhood in sweet innocence. 'Twas like finding in some tropic clime, embowered and shaded by thick, waxy leaves, a glorious, ripe pomegranate, which he would grasp and drink from its rich, red pulp, a portion that would cool and 'suage a burning thirst; while Constance, by the side of Katherine, was like a russet apple, into whose heart ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... heaven of heavens are the Lord's; the whole earth hath he given to the children of men;" deducing therefrom craftily, to the exceeding pleasure of his hearers, the iniquity of the Spaniards in dispossessing the Indians, and in arrogating to themselves the sovereignty of the tropic seas; the vanity of the Pope of Rome in pretending to bestow on them the new countries of America; and the justice, valor, and glory of Mr. Drake and his expedition, as testified by God's miraculous protection ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the light Lies with a pathos sorrowfuler than night. Fancy forbids this doom of Life with Death Wedded; and with a wand restores the Life. The jostling throngs swarm, animate, beneath The open shops, and all the tropic strife Of voices, Roman, Greek, Barbarian, mix. The wreath Indolent hangs on far Vesuvius's crest; And beyond the glowing town, and guiltless ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... the land. Vast herds of llamas were domesticated, from the hair of which the exquisitely woven cloth was made. Agriculture flourished. The country, upraised from the sea by the great range of mountains, afforded every variety of {70} climate from temperate to tropic, and the diversified products of the soil corresponded with the opportunities presented. And every foot of space was utilized for a population of millions of industrious workers, with an economy and resourcefulness only emulated by the Chinese in the working of their country. ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... whole town was a mixture of English and Dutch, but they saw many sailors who were of neither race. Some were brown men with rings in their ears, and they spoke languages that Robert did not understand. But he knew that they came from far southern seas and that they sailed among the tropic isles, looming large then in the world's fancy, bringing with them a whiff of ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... warmth and colour were a very part of her nature, was an exotic, a lost tropic bird, in these icy mountains. In a letter to her mother-in-law her heart cried out: "I cannot deny that living here is like living in a well of desolation. Sometimes I feel quite frantic to look out somewhere, and almost ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... did not belong to them, and took their places beside Ami: the pathways were pointed out which they had made for themselves across the celestial vault, in order to inspect their kingdoms from the exalted heights to which they had been raised; that of Bel was in the Tropic of Cancer, that of Ea in the Tropic of Capricorn. They gathered around them all the divinities who could easily be abstracted from the function or object to which they were united, and they thus constituted ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... influence of the land. During the south-east monsoon the wind is found to blow there, between that point and south. Whilst the sun continues near the equator the winds are variable, nor is their direction fixed till he has advanced several degrees towards the tropic: and this is the cause of the monsoons usually setting in, as I have observed, about May and November, instead ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Queensland, on remote stations in the Never Never land, where men live on damper and beef, and occasionally eat a whole bottle of hot pickles at a sitting, simply to satisfy their craving for vegetable food. Here, under the blazing tropic sun, among flies and dust and loneliness, they struggle with the bullock from year's end to year's end. It is not to be supposed that they take up this kind of thing for fun. The man who worked cattle for sport would ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... sank swiftly. Before it had disappeared Jack saw swarms of the dreaded mosquitoes begin to thicken in the air, like flights of gnats on a summer evening in England. The swift tropic dark swept over swamp and hill-side, and almost at once the framework which covered each of the captives was literally hidden with the vast masses of the venomous insects, which knew that a fresh prey awaited ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... will not be such; that it may save many lives—they may revive: but were it not so, I would still say Give. Let them go, even if every soul in that ship were doomed. Let them go. Let them drink the fresh sea breeze before they die; let them see the green tropic world; let them forget their sorrow for a while; let them feel springing up afresh in them the celestial fount of hope. We let the guilty criminal eat and drink well the morn ere he is led forth to die—shall we not do as much by ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... but in the wisest consonance with his creative dreams. Wherever he went, he found something essential for his use, breathed upon it, and returned it fourfold in beauty and worth. The longing of the Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for the palm, took him to the South Seas. There, too, strange secrets were at once revealed to him, and every island became an 'Isle of Voices.' Yes, an additional proof of Stevenson's artistic mission lay in his careless, careful, liberty ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... earth; and yet those old rents have been clothed and mollified by some power that finds it worth while to do it—and it isn't done for you or me, either—there must be treasures of loveliness going on hidden for centuries in tropic forests. It's done for the sake of doing it; and we are granted a glimpse of it, just to show us perhaps that we are right to adore it, and to try in our clumsy way to make beautiful things too. That is ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... artificially heated and moistened to reproduce the steaming jungle, is massed a splendid exhibit of those island trees and flowers that most of us know only through pictures and stories of southern seas. Around the central source of light, which is hidden under tropic vines, stands a circle of royal palms; and planted thickly over the remaining space are jungle trees, vivid enough to our imagination, but many of which have never before been seen in ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... time we were beyond Ras-al-nef about three leagues, whence the latitude of that cape is 24 deg. N. From this it appears that the ancient city of Berenice was built upon this cape Ras-al-nef as Ptolomy places it on this coast under the tropic of Cancer, making the greatest declination of the sun at this place almost 23 deg. 50'. Likewise Pliny says that at Berenice the sun at noon in the summer solstice gives no shadow to the gnomon, by which that city appears to have ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... lessons some other day; and let us look now at the world of light and life and beauty, which begins here at the open door, and stretches away over the hay-fields, over the woods, over the southern moors, over sunny France, and sunnier Spain, and over the tropic seas, down to the equator, and the palm-groves of the eternal summer. If we cannot find something, even at starting from the open door, to teach us about Why and How, we must be very ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... shores of a tropic island, fighting together for the flag of the nation, both Blue and Gray gained a new and happier viewpoint; and looking back across the warm and shining waters of the Gulf Stream, each knew that all was ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... breastworks, or lying still under artillery fire, and they were glad to get a chance to shoot at the Spaniards in the open. We lay on our arms that night and as we were drenched with sweat, and had no blankets save a few we took from the dead Spaniards, we found even the tropic ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of Venus present the greatest anomaly, if its assigned inclination of axis (75 deg.) can be relied on as correct, which is doubtful. Its tropic zone extends nearly to the pole, and at the same time the winter at the other pole reaches the equator. The short period of this planet causes it to present the south pole to the sun only one hundred and twelve days after it has been scorching the one ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... As some vast Tropic tree, itself a wood, That crests its head with clouds, beneath the flood Feeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flank Of its wide base controls the fronting bank— (By the slant current's pressure scoop'd away The fronting bank becomes a foam-piled ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of that would be to grumble because a hollyhock is neither a violet nor a rose. He had his enemies during his life and his detractors ever since, and we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. He was a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed, even to excess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He lived in a perpetual alternation of thunderstorm and blazing sunshine. He admitted himself that his "reason," by which he meant his judgment, "was exceeding weak," and his tactlessness constantly precluded a due appreciation ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... aware that there has been a good deal said in poetry about the fringed gentian and the harebell of rocky districts and waysides, and I know that it is possible for maidens to bloom in very slight soil into a wild-wood grace and beauty; yet, the world through, they lack that wealth of charms, that tropic affluence of both person and mind, which higher and more stimulating culture brings,—the passion as well as the soul glowing in the Cloth-of-Gold rose. Neither persons nor plants are ever fully themselves until ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... seen them. But something of the boyish thrill that filled me when I pored over the pages of Melville long ago returned while I stood on the deck of the Morning Star, plunging through the surging Pacific in the driving tropic rain. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... that seven of their number had died on the passage from Bombay; two or three after crossing the Tropic of Cancer, and the rest met their fate in the Channel, where the ship had been tost about in violent seas, attended with cold rains, peculiar to that vicinity. Two more had been lost overboard from ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... where every man has at one time or another been his monk, is quite a different thing to reading of him in far countries, under other skies and swayed by other thoughts. To sit in the monastery garden in the dusk, in just such a tropic dusk as he taught in so many years ago, and hear the yellow-robed monk tell of that life, and repeat his teaching of love, and charity, and compassion—eternal love, perfect charity, endless compassion—until the stars come out in the purple sky, and the silver-voiced gongs ring ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... through the amazing collection of tropic and near tropic growths that is the Botanical Garden until he came at once to Paula and the Lagoa ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... bright, sunshiny morning a week later. The Southern Cross was now in sub-tropic waters, steaming steadily along under blue skies and through smooth azure water flecked here and there with ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... into a hospital for the wounded Tagalogs left by their comrades on the field. Beneath a broad thatched shed behind the church lay the bodies of the dead, stiff and still under the coverings of cocoanut-fibre cloth thrown hastily over them. The light of a full tropic moon threw the shadow of the roof over them like a soft, brown velvet pall. They were to be buried between day-break and sunrise, that the men who buried them might escape the ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... Holland rises a power which wages eighty years' warfare with the most potent empire upon earth, and which, during the progress of the struggle, becoming itself a mighty state, and binding about its own slender form a zone of the richest possessions of earth, from pole to tropic, finally dictates its decrees to the empire ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... view of the Magellan Clouds and of the Southern Cross. The Magellan Clouds consist of three small nebulae in the southern part of the heavens,— two bright, like the milky-way, and one dark. They are first seen, just above the horizon, soon after crossing the southern tropic. The Southern Cross begins to be seen at 18 N., and, when off Cape Horn, is nearly overhead. It is composed of four stars in that form, and is one of the ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... immediate orders for the yacht to continue her route, steering to the west of the Canary group, and leaving Teneriffe on her larboard. She made rapid progress, and passed the Tropic of Cancer on the second of ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... there spellbound by the weird savagery of the spectacle-the great licking fire, the dancing, barbaric figures, the rise and fall of the rhythm, the dust and shuffle, the ebb and flow of the dance, the dim, half-guessed groups swaying in the darkness-and overhead the calm tropic night. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... we passed over the hot and stifling Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean, toward the sunny plains of India. Away from the snowy ridge of the Himalayas, down across the bare plains of the north and the rice fields and cocoa-nut palms of the tropic south, India lies like a vast continent, embracing one-fifth of the human race. It was held before the war by some 75,000 British and twice as many Indian troops. The numbers are completely altered now. Almost the whole regular force, both Indian and British, ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... on either side of the equator, which mark the limits N. and S. of the sun's verticality to the earth's surface, the distance being in each case 231/2 deg.; the northern tropic is called the Tropic of Cancer, and the southern the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... than the south wind, when it brings The scent of aromatic shrub and tree, And tropic flower on ifs glowing wings, Thine odorous breath is wafted over me; How to thy dewy lips mine own lip clings, And my whole being is absorbed in thee; And in my breast thine eyes have lit a fire That ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... that this man was almost thirty-five, her eager scrutiny of his features would have discovered little concerning his age, and still less concerning his character. Exposure to the winds and heat of tropic regions had darkened and sallowed the complexion, which his clear deep blue eyes and light brown hair declared was originally of Saxon fairness; in proof whereof, when he drew off one glove and lifted his hand it seemed ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... wonderful operations, transmuting the inorganic into the organic, dead matter into living and life sustaining matter? Is it without a purpose that water instead of contracting, expands at the freezing point?—a fact to which is due that the earth north of the tropic is habitable for man or beast. It is no answer to this question to say that a few other substances have the same peculiarity, when no good end, that we can see, is thereby accomplished. No man is so foolish as to deny that his eye was intended to enable him to see, because he cannot ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... scintillant flickerings had met In the vague meshes of some airy net! And now mysteriously I seemed to guess, While watching their tumultuous loveliness, What fervor of deep passion strangely thrives In the warm richness of these tropic lives, Whose wings can never tremble but they show These hearts of living ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... To a vision free to follow his whole orbit his story would be more intelligible: it would be easier to convince a chance idler in the street than the trained intelligence hampered by a sense of his antecedents. This idea shot up in him with the tropic luxuriance of each new seed of thought, and he began to walk the streets, and to frequent out-of-the-way chop-houses and bars in his search for the impartial stranger to whom ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... whereabouts? He was going to follow up that clue, and something seemed to tell him that he was on the right track. The jungle was dripping and steaming after a three days' downpour; monkeys and birds were huddled in the trees, melancholy, but patient, knowing that their friend, the burning tropic sun, would come to them again, some day. Piang trudged on through the sticky, slippery jungle. An occasional fresh track or recent camping site made him push forward eagerly. What he should do when he did overtake the kidnappers, he had no idea, but something always happened ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... of the Mambookei chain of mountains, and in the central portion of Africa, below the tropic, are the Bechuanas, who inhabit an extent of country as yet imperfectly known to us. These may be termed the ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... along the finest coast-line in the world. Every shade of blue was on sky or sea or mountain, while the deep morning shadows were transparent and almost luminous. From the pinewoods a scent of resin swept seaward, mingled with the subtle odour of the tropic foliage near the shore. The sky was cloudless. This was indeed the ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... sail, with a fair wind, 1000 stadia, or 125 miles, in the revolution of a day and night, Diodorus Siculus computes ten days from the Palus Moeotis to Rhodes, and four days from Rhodes to Alexandria. The navigation of the Nile from Alexandria to Syene, under the tropic of Cancer, required, as it was against the stream, ten days more. Diodor. Sicul. tom. i. l. iii. p. 200, edit. Wesseling. He might, without much impropriety, measure the extreme heat from the verge of the torrid zone; but ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the tropic routes Need poleward warp and veer, But on through the Gates of Goethals The steady keels shall steer, Where the tribes of man are led toward peace By ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... I contrived to catch a glimmering, if not something more, of the author's meaning. It was hard work, but I struggled on, down page after page, fascinated, my imagination vividly depicting the various scenes of which I read. I saw the deep blue tropic sea heaving and sparkling in the joyous sunshine, and the stout ship, with her gleaming wide-spread canvas, sweeping bravely over its bosom. I stood upon the deck of that ship, among the seamen, peering eagerly ahead, and saw a faint grey cloud gradually ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... where it rises, to the fervid waters in which it pours, for three thousand miles it would be visible, fed by rivers that flow from every mile of the Allegheny slope, and edged by the green embroideries of the temperate and tropic zones; beyond this line another basin, too, the Missouri, catching the morning, leads your eye along its western slope till the Rocky Mountains burst upon the vision, and yet do not bar it; across its passes we must follow, as the stubborn courage of American pioneers ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... were gathered a few white houses, giving signs of life thrice a day in tiny threads of smoke rising from their prim chimneys; and over all, the pallid skies of New England, where the sun wheeled his shorn beams from east to west as coldly as if no tropic seas mirrored his more fervid glow thousands of miles away, and the chilly moon beamed with irreproachable whiteness across the round gray hills and the straggling pond, beloved of frogs and mud-turtles, that Greenfield held in honor under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... equatorial woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. We almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box, artificially carved and artificially coloured. So ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... other big stores were as hot or hotter than Peter Rolls's that July; but it seemed to Winifred Child that the Tropic of Cancer might have breezes which the Hands missed. Those of the salespeople who did not look as if at any moment their eyes might come out and all their veins burst, were living advertisements for Somebody's Anti-Anemia Mixture before the mixture was taken. ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... and shaped like a full moon; this lamp, being provided with a peculiar kind of glass, shed a mild, subdued lustre around, producing the beautiful effect of a moonlit eve! On every side rare exotics and choice plants exhaled a delicious perfume; tropic fruits grew from the carefully nurtured soil;—orange, pomegranate, citron, &c. Gravelled walks led through rich shrubbery, darkened by overhanging foliage. Mossy paths, of charming intricacy, invited the wanderer to explore ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... with us to-day." She made no remark; she respected her uncle's preference; besides—the pony! Of these trios Mr. Fountain was the true soul. He had to blow the coals of conversation right and left. It is very good of me not to compare him to the Tropic between two frigid zones. At first he took his nap as usual; for he said to himself: "Now I have started them they can go on." Besides, he had seen pictures in the shop windows of an old fellow dozing and then the young ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... you by night and day, But never a whiff can you take away: And never a song of a tropic bird Outside of its palm-decked land ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... some sixty aboriginal stocks or families found in North America above the Tropic of Cancer, about five-sixths were confined to the tenth of the territory bordering Pacific ocean; the remaining nine-tenths of the land was occupied by a few strong stocks, comprising the Algonquian, Athapascan, Iroquoian, Shoshonean, Siouan, and ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... assez fait connoitre qu'il etoit mecontent de ce que son autorite etoit partagee, prit la parole, disant au dit Sr. de la Salle que le chirurgien etoit officier du roi comme lui."—Memoire autographe de l'Abbe Jean Cavelier, MS.] When they crossed the tropic, the sailors made ready a tub on deck to baptize the passengers, after the villanous practice of the time; but La Salle refused to permit it, to the disappointment and wrath of all the crew, who had expected to extort a bountiful ransom, in money and liquor, from their victims. There was an ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... the African departed from the Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from that tropic mud. ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... the distant Tropic strand Where the billows, bright and bland, Go creeping, curling round the palms with sweet, faint undertune; From its fields of purpling flowers Still wet with fragrant showers, The happy South Wind lingering sweeps the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... air, O lands whose names are made of spice and tar, Old painted empires that are ever fair, From Cochin-China down to Zanzibar! O Beauty simple, soul-less, and bizarre! I would take Danger for my bosom-wife, And light our bed with some wild tropic star— O how I long to ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... pleasing, and inspiring. On a bark we will convey us Through the peering rocks and islands, Where the Summer brings its sunshine, And the Winter frost and snow-storms, For a season to the lone isles. Then unto the tropic regions, Where the proud sun pours its glory On the burning sandy deserts; Streams of brightness everlasting, Like ten thousand mountains blazing; And the khamsheens wild and fiercely Sweep in burning flakes along them, And torment the weary traveller Who is slowly ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... a sand storm the day before, followed by rain, and all the land was refreshed and sparkling. The pepper trees swung tassels of bloom and the flaming coral of the occotilla glowed like tropic birds poised on wide-reaching wands of green. Meadow larks echoed each other in the tender calls of nesting time, and from the jagged peaks on the east, to far low hills rising out of a golden haze in the west, there was a great ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... lovers if they are not, insensible of the rocks that may lurk below.—But our's was not the beau ideal of crossing the line: we had fresh breezes in the day, and thunder and lightning at night; saw few tropic birds, and those very vigorous, and fish more nimble than sharks, or even sun-fish, of which, however, we met a due proportion. I had once been in a tropical calm, and I really, after trying them both, prefer the breezes and thunder-storms. ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... by very ripe and sweet grapes, which the fruitfulness of the earth at that season of winter, it may seems strange that those fruits were then there growing. But the reason thereof is this, because they being between the tropic and the equinoctial, the sun passeth twice in the year through their zenith over their heads, by means whereof they have two summers; and being so near the heat of the line they never lose the heat of the sun so much, but the fruits have their increase and continuance in ...
— Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World • Francis Pretty
... they required. I know others whose occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture of beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet without poetry they would be less alive, their minds would be less young. As children, most of us would have flushed before the beauty of a sunrise on a tropic ocean, felt dimly if profoundly—and forgotten. The poet—like the painter—has caught, has interpreted, has preserved the experience, so that, like music, it may be renewed. And he can perform that miracle for greater things than sunrises. This, perhaps, is the best ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... in its plane. On each side are the two tropics, at the distance of 23 deg. 30 min., and described by the sun when in his greatest declination north and south, or at the summer and winter solstices. That on the north side of the equinoctial is called the tropic of Cancer, because the sun describes it when in that sign of the ecliptic; and that on the south side is, for a similar reason, called the tropic of Capricorn. Again, at the distance of 231/2 degrees from the poles are two other parallels called the polar circles, either because they are near ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... into China, and northward across the Himalayan snows. He had dwelt among strange peoples and looked on strange gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and learnt their polity and their ways. He had seen the bewildering fecundity of nature in the tropic jungle, and her barren and terrible beauty in the out-stretch of the naked desert. And the thought of all this set Dickie's imagination on fire. The return of Roger Ormiston was, to him, as the return of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the South Seas has laid its gentle spell rather overwhelmingly upon American readers. To be unread in Polynesiana is to be intellectually declasse.... In the face of this avid appetite for tropic-scented literature, one may well imagine the satisfaction of a publisher when offered opportunity of association with such an expedition as that of the Kawa, an association involving the exclusive privilege of publishing the manuscript of ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... rising from its repast, it floats up among the highest summits of the Andes and is lost to sight beyond them, miles above the line of perpetual snow, where the temperature must be lower than that of the Arctics. But even the Condor, sweeping at one flight from tropic heat to arctic cold, although it passes through greater changes of temperature, does not undergo such changes of pressure as a fish that rises from a depth of sixty-four feet to the surface of the sea; for the former remains within the air that surrounds our globe, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... was a loneliness in the desert. That was part of the big feeling of it, the still, stealing sense of immensity reaching out its shadowy hands for you.... Loneliness and restlessness.... These tropic nights, when the stars burned low and bright, and the hot sands seemed breathing.... Loneliness and restlessness—but they gave a man dreams.... And were those ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... of freedom on the dark blue sea. Now I wandered in fairy caverns among the bones of primaeval monsters. I fought at the side of Leonidas, and the Maccabee who stabbed the Sultan's elephant, and saw him crushed beneath its falling bulk. Now I was a hunter in tropic forests—I heard the parrots scream, and saw the humming birds flit on from gorgeous flower to flower. Gradually I took a voluntary pleasure in calling up these images, and working out their details into words with all the accuracy and care for ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost line back with tropic heat; And ever when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... back. There lay the hearthrug-coated beast, in flat abandonment among the tropic beauties of the garden, the pampas-grass shrubbery, the india-rubber plant bushes, the geranium-trees and the urn fountain. Beauty was ready to make her great entry in all the thrilling splendour of despair. And then suddenly it ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... eyes, when snatch'd from sight. What can sad laments avail Unless sharp justice kill the taint of sin? What can laws, that needs must fail Shorn of the aid of manners form'd within, If the merchant turns not back From the fierce heats that round the tropic glow, Turns not from the regions black With northern winds, and hard with frozen snow; Sailors override the wave, While guilty poverty, more fear'd than vice, Bids us crime and suffering brave, And shuns the ascent of virtue's precipice? Let the Capitolian fane, The favour'd goal of ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... neighbourhood of Torres Straits to about the Tropic of Capricorn, extends, at a distance of fifty to a hundred miles from the shore, an enormous bed of coral, named the Barrier Reef. There, untold millions of minute insects are still noiselessly pursuing their toil, and raising fresh structures from the depths of ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... affording room for a double set of rails, and the panting trains have already begun to cross its web-like span, gliding into sight from the cliff-top on one side, only to disappear the next moment on the other in a green wilderness of ferns and tropic flowers. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... confess,' he says, 'an affection for my veteran uniform overcoat, inspired by its persistent utility. I find that it is twenty-three years of age and can testify to its strenuous existence. It has been spared neither rain, wind, nor salt sea spray, tropic heat nor Arctic cold; it has outlived many sets of buttons, from their glittering gilded youth to green old age, and it supports its four-stripe shoulder straps as gaily as the single lace ring of the early days which proclaimed ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... tropic gorgeousness, the Lord of Day To the bright chambers of the west retired, And with the glory of his parting ray The hundred domes of Mexico he fired, When I, with vague and solemn awe inspired, Entered the Incarnation's sacred fane. The vaulted roof, the dim ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... seated in their shelter close under the highest wall of the ancient ruins, well screened from the ardent rays of the tropic sun, which had not yet risen sufficiently high to interfere with their comfort, and for about the third time the boys were giving their account of the previous evening's adventure, with nothing more visible to show ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... streets. The very goldfish in the fountain do not stir, and the long line of slaves against the marble wall, save for their branded foreheads, might be gaunt caryatides hewn in Egyptian wood or carved in ebony and amber. That gaudy tropic bird scarce ruffles a feather. What is the difference between life and death? A voice, a call, some sudden strange or familiar message on old paths, to the consciousness that lies under that apparent unconsciousness, will waken all these semblances ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... bare and barren, uninhabitable and desolate; the cold winds of the snow-borne North may blow across it, and freeze it into ice-bound sterility; or the blazing fury of the tropic sun may pour down upon it, and scorch it into a dreary waste of glaring, burning sand; but if there is gold in it, and if man comes to know that the gold is in it, desolation, frozen sterility, or scorching waste, are alike ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... and Bascomb's talk, especially, of cloudless skies of richest blue, out of which the sun darted his flaming rays by day, and in which the stars blazed like jewels at night; of tranquil seas of sapphire in which creatures of strange forms and brilliant hues disported themselves; of tropic shores, coral fringed and clothed with graceful feathery palms backed by noble forest trees of precious woods, made glorious by flowers of every conceivable hue and shape, amid which hovered birds of such gorgeous plumage that they gleamed and shone in the sun like ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... sympathy, recognition, applause. He respects his fellow-creatures, because he beholds in him a possible reader. To write a book, to send it forth to the world and the critics, is to a sensitive person like plunging mother-naked into tropic waters where sharks abound. It is true that, like death, the terror of criticism lives most in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criticised, and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man's life. Most men ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... to Alexandria, and placed at the head of the library. His great achievement was the determination of the circumference of the earth. This was done by measuring on the ground the distance between Syene, a city exactly under the tropic, and Alexandria, situated on the same meridian. The distance was found to be five thousand stadia. The meridional distance of the sun from the zenith of Alexandria he estimated to be 7 deg. 12', or a fiftieth part of the circumference of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... phantom as herself, To Nowhere seemed to go In purposeless circumference, As 't were a tropic show. ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... fertile Western plains Were hid behind your sullen walls, Your cliffs and crags and waterfalls All weatherworn with tropic rains. ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... estimate fairly the connexion which exists between the internal need of food—i.e., of combustible matter—and the external temperature, we must compare the Hindoo, who lives on a pinch of rice a day, between the tropic and the equator, with the Esquimaux, who, to keep up his 37 degrees of heat, beyond the polar circle, in a country where European travellers have seen mercury freeze, sometimes swallows from ten to fifteen pints of whale-oil at a sitting! Just fancy whale-oil! which is much nastier ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... Sylviadae erect their feathers when frightened or enraged? (469/1. See "Expression of the Emotions," page 99.) I want to show that this expression is common to all or most of the families of birds. I know of this only in the fowl, swan, tropic-bird, owl, ruff and reeve, and cuckoo. I fancy that I remember having seen nestling birds erect their feathers greatly when looking into nests, as is said to be the case with young cuckoos. I should much like to know whether nestlings do really thus erect their feathers. I am now at ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... lily, the turquoise eyes of water-plants,—all these gave her a pleasure intense as pain; and the songs of the winds, the love-whispers of June midnights, the gathering roar of autumn tempests, the rattle of thunder, the breathless and lurid pause before a tropic storm,—all these the Spark enhanced and vivified; till, seeing how blest in herself and the company of Nature the Child of the Kingdom grew, Queen Lura deliberated silently and long whether she should ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... before the glare Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening, 485 Strange night upon some Indian ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... which once gave rise to the ancient superstition of "corpse lights" and the will-o'-the-wisp. It was really due, I knew, to living bacteria. But there surely had been no time for such micro-organisms to develop, even in the almost tropic heat of the Novella. Could she have been poisoned by these phosphorescent bacilli? What was it—a strange new mouth- malady that had attacked this notorious adventuress ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... dreaming that the dark and silent shape upon which she had so carelessly thrown a seed was a hotbed of tropic intensity. Had she known Boldwood's moods, her blame would have been fearful, and the stain upon her heart ineradicable. Moreover, had she known her present power for good or evil over this man, she would have trembled at her responsibility. Luckily for her present, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... better judgment tells me that it will never be perused by other eyes than mine, and that even though it should, it would be too late to avail me. I am alone upon the summit of the great cliff overlooking the broad Pacific. A chill south wind bites at my marrow, while far below me I can see the tropic foliage of Caspak on the one hand and huge icebergs from the near Antarctic upon the other. Presently I shall stuff my folded manuscript into the thermos bottle I have carried with me for the purpose ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... big three-decked boat were alone in our modernity, if one forgot the line of gay buildings on the shore. Everything else might have been of the time when the world supposed Elephantine to be placed directly on the Tropic of Cancer, and believed in the magic lamp which lit the unfathomable well; the time when quarries of red and yellow clay gave riches to the island, and all Egypt thanked its gods when Elephantine's Nilemeter showed that the Two ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... from good San Antonio, my Lady Bird—when the sea-breeze makes—then the old brig will reel off the knots! But see! just now not a breath to keep a tropic bird's wings out. There, look ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... convey to the mind a just idea of its magnitude. Stretching from the 115th to the 153rd degree of east longitude, and from the 10th to the 37th of south latitude, it averages 2700 miles in length by 1800 in breadth; and balanced, as it were, upon the tropic of that hemisphere in which it is situated, it receives the fiery heat of the equator at one extremity, while it enjoys the refreshing coolness of the temperate zone at the other. On a first view we should be led to expect that this extensive tract of land possessed more ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... the still, breathless nights of the tropic seas. Pedro's small strong hands had not grasped the helm for a half-hour before the wind freshened, and then a tremendous gust swept down upon the flagship hurling her right upon the unknown shore. ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... fly-flap, is also an ornament used by both sexes. The most ordinary kind are made of the fibres of the cocoa-nut, tied loose in bunches to the top of a smooth polished handle. The tail-feathers of the cock, and of the tropic-bird, are also used in the same manner; but the most valuable are those which have the handle made of the arm or leg bones of an enemy slain in battle, and which are preserved with great care, and handed down from father to son, as trophies ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... could stand. Why did he plead but for one moment? Battle! before that word she laid down her weapons. Under that glare of awful fire the walls of ice melted, as never iceberg under tropic sun. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... American continent is the range of the black bear. He can live, and no doubt enjoy life, in all climates. He is equally at home in the icy regions of Canada and the tropic swamps of Louisiana. He is found from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific. He inhabits thick forests, and ranges in rocky desert regions, where scarcely any timber grows. He prefers wooded districts, however; and in these is most ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... world, for the broad girdle of British dominion had during her reign extended to embrace the globe. India led the way, the rejoicing over the royal jubilee of its empress extending throughout its vast area, from the snowy passes of the Himalayas on the north to the tropic shores of Cape Comorin on the south. Other colonies joined in the festivities, the loyal Canadians vieing with the free-hearted Australians, the semi-bronzed Africanders and the planters of the West Indies, in the celebration of the joyous ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the densely packed quarters of the slave ships may be imagined by any who have sailed on tropic seas. With seasickness added it was wretched; when dysentery prevailed it became frightful; if water or food ran short the suffering was almost or quite beyond endurance; and in epidemics of scurvy, small-pox ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... returned to his native Kerry; and from a bay sheltered by the lofty mountain that is now known by his name, he set sail for the Atlantic land; and, directing his course towards the south-west, in order to meet the summer solstice, or what we should call the tropic, after a long and rough voyage, his little bark being well provisioned, he came to summer seas, where he was carried along, without the aid of sail or oar, for many a long day. This, which it is to be presumed was the great gulf-stream, brought his vessel to ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... and to Beethoven quite as much as any living musician. Quite as much as that of any other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, his magistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio of the scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeys and birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in the finale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields of Europe, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... patio he had stepped onto by mistake earlier in the day. Bheel stepped respectfully aside. Tyndall looked out into the garden: the sun was beginning to set, the long shadows stretched across the dim recesses of tropic greenery. The huge insect-like thing was still there, stretched out in a narrow strip of sunlight, catching the last failing waves of warmth from ...
— Grove of the Unborn • Lyn Venable
... of a strange bluish drab colour, and a conservative, round Panama hat without the cock-a-loop indentations and cants with which Northern fanciers disfigure the tropic head-gear. Moreover, he was the homeliest man I have ever seen. His ugliness was less repellent than startling—arising from a sort of Lincolnian ruggedness and irregularity of feature that spellbound you with wonder and dismay. So may have looked afrites or the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... humidity; and, in this contrivance of the seasons, there must appear an ample provision for those alternate operations in every part; for as the place of the vertical sun is moved alternately from one tropic to the other, heat and cold, the original causes of evaporation and condensation, must be carried over all the globe, producing either annual seasons of rain or diurnal seasons of condensation and evaporation, or both these ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the oldest portion of the American Continent. It was also, and aside from the visits of the Scandinavians, the first to be discovered by Europeans,—the Cabots having come to land here more than a year before Columbus found the tropic mainland on his third voyage. And to-day it is that part of the continent which has been least explored. No one, to my knowledge, has ever crossed it: perhaps no one could do so. I am not aware that any European has penetrated it deeply. Hinds pushed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... which the mosquito takes from man and after a short time gives over to another subject. This discovery attracted world-wide attention and many looked again towards the innumerable species of biting insects that dwell in the Tropic Zone, as possible carriers of the obscure diseases which also prevail ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... also Tonquin, are actually in the tropics. Whether the houses there do really face north—which I have never noticed—or whether the expression is merely symbolical, I cannot say; but the idea is "to the regions where, when the sun is on the tropic, you have to ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... upon the sea. A shoal of porpoises,—a whale or two,—some flying-fish,—a few species of sea-birds,—sharks and dolphins,—are nearly all the living creatures that are ever seen, even upon the longest voyages. Most of our course lay due southward, and directly across the northern tropic, and, of course, the weather was hot nearly all the time,—so hot that the pitch oozed out from the seams of the planking, and the soles of our shoes parted with a creaking noise every step we took ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... Mean Height, in within 1 French foot Temperature English Tropic [1.006 of the of the feet, above Zones. English foot] air. the level below the of the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... their opportunities by a species of social inhibition. The rail-splitter can be so easily encouraged to believe that rail-splitting is his vocation. The tragedy in the life of Mr. J.M. Barrie's "Admirable Crichton" was not due to any legal prohibition of his conversion in England, as on the tropic island, into a veritable chief, but that on English soil he did not in his own soul want any such elevation and distinction. His very loyalty to the forms and fabric of English life kept him fatuously content ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... find plenty of beauty in the familiar northern scenes; but we miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic outbursts, the tropic glow, and all the surprising manifold and tender and sweet-scented outpourings of soil and sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating underneath ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the geographical distribution of the coffee tree shows that it is grown in well-defined tropical limits. The coffee belt of the world lies between the tropic of cancer and the tropic of capricorn. The principal coffee consuming countries are nearly all to be found in the north temperate zone, between the tropic of cancer and the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... beautiful groves and extensive forests, consisting of trees which are verdant during the whole year, and never lose their leaves, producing innumerable fruits entirely different from ours. This land is situated in the torrid zone, directly under the parallel described by the tropic of cancer, and in the second climate, where the pole is elevated 23 degrees above the horizon[9]. While there, a prodigious number of people came to see us, wondering at our colour and appearance, and inquiring ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... what a woman's done at the end of a year, if you got a good mem'ry, but tryin' to guess what she is goin' to do has got the weather man backed off inter a corner an' squealin' for help. They ain't all like Kansas. My first resembled it, the second was sorter tropic—she run off with a rainmaker an' I hear she's been divorced three times since then. Mebbe that's an exaggeration. My third must have been born someways nigh the no'th pole. W'en she got mad she'd freeze ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... in existence the country round about was under the sea; before that under glaciers; before that under the tropics, and I don't know how many times it has swung on its pendulum between Frigid, Temperate and Tropic Zones. ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... elevation, the water power at the deep bend of Grass River (where at that moment only a trace of water marked the river's grassy right of way), the fine farming land—everything ready for a sudden leap into prosperity. And, gentlemen, the A. and T. (Arctic and Tropic) North and South Railroad will begin grading down this very stream inside of thirty days. A town here this year will be a city next year, a danged sight bigger city than Careyville will ever be. Why, that town's got its growth and is beginning to decay right now. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Obeying the directions he had received, he chartered a cab, and after a half-hour's tumultuous journey found himself alighting before a pretty villa in Prahran, with a well-ordered garden in front of it full of English shrubs and flowers, amidst which were interspersed a number of sub-tropic plants and trees. He was shown with no delay into a shaded room, where he had some difficulty in making out the figure of a gray-haired lady who sat in an arm-chair to receive him, and who did not rise ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... has been quite thoroughly studied with results of great interest. When heated with baryta-water or hydrochloric acid, it takes up a molecule of water and is split into tropine, C{8}H{15}NO, and tropic acid, C{9}H{10}O{3}. This latter is phenyl-oxypropionic acid. Tropine, when heated to 180 deg.C. with concentrated hydrochloric acid, splits off a molecule of water, and yields tropidine, C{8}H{13}N, a liquid base, with an odor resembling ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... came to me in the blazing heat of tropic day, in the cool of eve, in the calm serenity of night, a voice calling, calling infinite pitiful and sweet, yet mocking me ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... which we ran the longitude down, in the parallel of 38 and 39 south, till in longitude 57 east, where the weather being very stormy, we hauled to the north-east till in 35 south latitude, and then ran east till in 90 east, when we steered to the east-north-east, and crossed the tropic in 102 east, which was probably too far west. The south-east trade hung far to the eastward, and made it difficult to fetch Java Head, which had we not succeeded in doing at first, might have caused considerable delay, as the wind still blew out ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... World, unclouded by the climacteric episode of the publishing of his journal and his subsequent arrogant bearing before the Holy Father, which had provoked his fate. Under the beneficent influences of the soft climate and the new interests of this tropic land he began to feel a budding of something like confidence, and the suggestions of an unfamiliar ambition to retrieve past failure and yet gratify, even if in small measure, the parental hope which had first directed him as a child into the fold of the Church. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Pacific coast was long and wearisome. For some days we felt seriously the ill effects of the island life and the tropic heat, and could only endure; until, one morning, we came up on deck, and there were the beautiful serrated hills of Old California. We had rounded Cape St. Lucas, and had a strong, exhilarating breeze from the coast, and began ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... had stepped onto by mistake earlier in the day. Bheel stepped respectfully aside. Tyndall looked out into the garden: the sun was beginning to set, the long shadows stretched across the dim recesses of tropic greenery. The huge insect-like thing was still there, stretched out in a narrow strip of sunlight, catching the last failing waves of ...
— Grove of the Unborn • Lyn Venable
... Haydn and to Beethoven quite as much as any living musician. Quite as much as that of any other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, his magistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio of the scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeys and birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in the finale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields of Europe, smells of the hay, gives again the nun-like close ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... good San Antonio, my Lady Bird—when the sea-breeze makes—then the old brig will reel off the knots! But see! just now not a breath to keep a tropic bird's wings out. ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... her feet and began investigating. She went awesomely as one would tiptoe over a haunted house. In the next room she came upon what was an odd treasure trove for an isolated bamboo cabin tucked far away under the Tropic of Cancer. It was a printer's shop, after a fashion. The case was a block of stone, in whose surface the little compartments had been chiseled. They were sparsely accoutred with type and plentifully with cigar ashes. As for a press, there was none. But a form had been made up on a slab of marble, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... yelps growing fainter and fainter in the valley far below. The goral was lost, and as though the Fates were laughing at us, ten minutes later a puff of wind sucked the cloud out of the canon as swiftly as it had come, and above us shone a sky as clear and blue as a tropic sea. ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... home, the strength you boast of seems a weakness; manhood leans into childish memories, and melts—as Autumn frosts yield to a soft south-wind coming from a Tropic spring. You feel in a desert, where you once felt at home,—in a bounded landscape, that was ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... as a tropic night, and as courageous as a captain. Somewhere below his courage and his calm was an appalling sense of ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... sporting under the bows like pups ashore. But, at intervals, the gray albatross, peculiar to these seas, came flapping his immense wings over us, and then skimmed away silently as if from a plague-ship. Or flights of the tropic bird, known among seamen as the "boatswain," wheeled round and round us, whistling shrilly ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... of them circumscribing the world by voyaging in opposite directions, until they meet at these islands, which are numerous and of varying size; they are properly called Filipinas, and are subject to the crown of Castilla. They lie within the tropic of Cancer, and extend from twenty-four degrees north latitude to the equinoctial line, which cuts the islands of Maluco. There are many others on the other side of the line, in the tropic of Capricorn, which extend for twelve degrees in south latitude. [40] The ancients affirmed that each ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... countries, were considered as injurious to trade in some lights, yet necessary to its welfare in others. The West India Company of that country, originally erected in 1621, held, by an exclusive charter, the commerce of the coast of Africa, from the tropic of Cancer to the Cape of Good Hope, and that of America, from the southern point of Newfoundland in the N.E. all along the eastern coast to the Straits of Magellan or Le Maire, and thence northwards again along ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... East, Rang, shone, spake, shuddered around us: the night was an altar with death for priest. The channel that sunders England from shores where never was man born free Was clothed with the likeness and thrilled with the strength and the wrath of a tropic sea. As a wild steed ramps in rebellion, and rears till it swerves from a backward fall, The strong ship struggled and reared, and her deck was upright as a sheer cliff's wall. Stern and prow plunged under, alternate: a glimpse, a recoil, a breath, And she ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... country is pleasant and fruitful, full of woods and forests which are always green, as they never lose their foliage. The fruits are numberless and totally different from ours. The land lies within the torrid zone, under the parallel which describes the Tropic of Cancer, where the pole is elevated ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... were below we could hear them smashing the treasure-chests. While they were busy in the storeroom I hacked away at the scuttle-board, which was thick and of hard wood, well seasoned by continual wetting and drying in the tropic sun. ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... in our star! Since I met you I see it shining clearer over the heights. We mount, we mount, peak beyond peak. We have enemies enough now, thick as the serpents in tropic forests. Well, let them soil with their impure slaver the hem of our garments. But how they will crawl fangless when Ferdinand—the Elect of the People—makes his solemn entry into Berlin. And at his side, drawn by six white horses, his blonde darling, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... wife and children with them, and where white-aproned stewardesses took care of the galley and the cleaning of the floating hearthside, sharing the dangers of the ruddy and tranquil sailors exempt from the temptation that contact with women provokes. On Sundays, under the tropic sun or in the ash-colored light of the northern heavens, the boatswain would read the Bible. The men would listen thoughtfully with uncovered heads. The women had dressed themselves in black with lace headdress and ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... its rigors she brought a front of resolute gayety. A new stove graced the parlor, a stove with the proud nickeled title of "Frost King"; a title seen to be deserved when Clem had it properly gorged with dry wood. Within its tropic radiations Miss Caroline bloomed and was hale of being, ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... victualled, and watered, for her return to England; and our captain, for some reason or other, not thinking it convenient for him to revisit his native country at this time, exchanged with a gentleman, who, on the other hand, wished for nothing so much as to be safe without the tropic: all his care and tenderness of himself being insufficient to preserve his complexion from the injuries of ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... present the greatest anomaly, if its assigned inclination of axis (75 deg.) can be relied on as correct, which is doubtful. Its tropic zone extends nearly to the pole, and at the same time the winter at the other pole reaches the equator. The short period of this planet causes it to present the south pole to the sun only one hundred and twelve days after it has been scorching the one at the north. This ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... before her approach, as the iceberg thaws and dissolves beneath the rays of a tropic sky. He had floated into the old latitudes of love and warmth again, and his cold heart once more began to beat—his hardness to pass away; leaving ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... so in the swelter of Texas I had felt it foolish to be lugging a bundle of heavy clothing. By midnight I began to credit myself with foresight. The windows were closed, yet the land of yesterday seemed far behind indeed. I wrapped my heavy coat about me. Toward four we crossed the Tropic of Cancer into the Torrid Zone, without a jolt, and I dug out my gray sweater and regretted I had abandoned the old blue one in an empty box-car. Twice I think I drowsed four minutes with head and elbow on my bundle, but except for two or three women who jack-knifed on the long bench no one found ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... the water, The water steaming hot! A spoonful for each man of us, Another for the pot! We shall not drink from amber, No Capuan slave shall mix For us the snows of Athos With port at thirty-six; Whiter than snow the crystals Grown sweet 'neath tropic fires, More rich the herb of China's field, The pasture-lands more fragrance yield; Forever let Britannia wield The teapot of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... might obtain the fullest information regarding the various objects of interest, to visit which we had adopted an unusual and circuitous course. We embarked on a gulf running generally from east to west, about midway between the northern tropic and the arctic circle. As this was the summer of the northern hemisphere, we should thus enjoy a longer day, and should not suffer from the change of climate. After taking leave of our friends, we went down below to take possession of the fore part ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... lovely Youth! I guess The panther in the wilderness Was not so fair as he; And when he chose to sport and play, No dolphin ever was so gay Upon the tropic sea. ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... gorges, which descend to the coast, are filled up to the depth of about a hundred feet, by rudely divided layers of sand, muddy clay, and fragmentary masses; in these beds, Mr. Seale has found the bones of the tropic-bird and of the albatross; the former now rarely, and the latter never visiting the island. From the difference between these layers, and the sloping piles of detritus which rest on them, I suspect that they were deposited, when the gorges stood beneath the sea. Mr. Seale, moreover, has shown that ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... native of Athens, but was invited by Ptolemy Euergetes to Alexandria, and placed at the head of the library. His great achievement was the determination of the circumference of the earth. This was done by measuring on the ground the distance between Syene, a city exactly under the tropic, and Alexandria, situated on the same meridian. The distance was found to be five thousand stadia. The meridional distance of the sun from the zenith of Alexandria he estimated to be 7 deg. 12', or a fiftieth part of the circumference of the meridian. Hence the circumference of the earth ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... having formed a very high estimate of your talents and acquirements, and of the spirit of enterprise and decision, united with prudence and discretion, exhibited in your recently published travels through the territories of the Maselakatze to the Tropic of Capricorn, has been pleased to select you to conduct the mission which the British Government has resolved to send to Sahela Selasse, the king of Shoa, in Southern Abyssinia, whose capital, Ankober, is supposed to be about ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... been notable as a place of residence even in Adelle's childhood, but now it was almost completely converted to industrial uses. The stove factory had grown like a tropic plant, and had spawned about itself a number of parasitic industries, such as tack-mills, paper-box factories, and other occupations that use the labor of women and children. It was one long, smoky, grimy thoroughfare, where in a small, congested area the coarser labors of humanity ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... he was ordered below, and as the tropic sun was sinking over that eery floating tombstone, which according to Professor Stevens marked a nation's grave, the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... the antelope for food. What Cigarette was, that nature had made her; she was no more trained to self-control, or to the knowledge of good, than is the tiger's cub as it wantons in its play under the great, broad tropic leaves. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... eastward into China, and northward across the Himalayan snows. He had dwelt among strange peoples and looked on strange gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and learnt their polity and their ways. He had seen the bewildering fecundity of nature in the tropic jungle, and her barren and terrible beauty in the out-stretch of the naked desert. And the thought of all this set Dickie's imagination on fire. The return of Roger Ormiston was, to him, as the return of the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... trade wind's spindrift, down into the blue-green swirling trough! To chase the shrimps on a summer evening, when the sky is red and the light's all pink within the foam! To lie on the top, in the doldrums' noonday calm, and warm your tummy in the tropic sun! To wander hand in hand once more through the giant seaweed forests of the Indian Ocean, seeking the delicious eggs of the pop-pop! To play hide-and-seek among the castles of the coral towns with their pearl and jasper windows spangling the floor ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... deep and grand, forever wrapt in myth and mystery. Lo he laughs along the highlands, leaping o'er the granite walls: Lo he sleeps among the islands, where the loon her lover calls. Still like some huge monster winding downward through the prairie plains, Seeking rest but never finding, till the tropic gulf he gains. In his mighty arms he claspeth now an empire broad and grand; In his left hand lo he graspeth leagues of fen and forest land; In his right the mighty mountains, hoary with eternal snow. Where a thousand foaming fountains singing seek the plains below. Fields of ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... direction of the earth's annual revolution; retrograde, when it proceeds contrary to these conditions; by sidereal is meant the motion of a body with respect to the fixed stars.—Tropical motion is the movement of a body in respect to the equinox or tropic, which has itself a slow motion among the stars, as shown under precession. (See PROPER MOTION.)—Motion, in mechanics, is either simple or compound, as one or more powers are used. The momentum of a moving body, or quantity of ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... land, I can see a beautiful home or villa, seemingly about to tumble off the rocky point on which it rests. Indeed, so scant is the space about the building that none is left for trees to shade the white house from the heat of the tropic sun. But shade must be had to break the glare of the noonday. The vine and the grape thrive amazingly near the sea, and this necessity evolved the pergola. It was compact, could be made straight or curving, short or long, ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... were the only parts of us open to view, the beads of perspiration. It was a marvellous experience. The memory of the crimson comforters has remained with me through life; light as sunset clouds, they accomplished the miracle of importing tropic warmth into the circle of the frozen arctic. I think we must have been undressed and night-gowned before this treatment; at any rate, I have forgotten how we got to bed, but to bed we somehow got, and slept the blessed sleep ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... 421. X. Buds and Flowers expanded by Warmth, Electricity, and Light. Drawings with colourless sympathetic Inks; which appear when warmed by the Fire, 457. XI. Sirius. Jupiter and Semele. Northern Constellations. Ice-islands navigated into the Tropic Seas. Rainy Monsoons, 497. XII. Points erected to procure Rain. Elijah on Mount-Carmel, 549. Departure of the Nymphs of Fire like sparks from ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... out it will be made plain why "Shorty" O'Day, of the Columbia Detective Agency, resigned his position. And, for a lighter pastime, it shall be a duty and a pleasing sport to wander with Momus beneath the tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere. Now to cause laughter to echo from those lavish jungles and frowning crags where formerly rang the cries of pirates' victims; to lay aside pike and cutlass and attack with quip and jollity; to draw one saving titter of mirth from ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... again," muttered the wounded man, apparently oblivious to the other's response. As he spoke he withdrew his hand from that of his brother. At that moment the tropic sun was bathing him in its light and the white walls shone with luster. "No; it's like the desert; the dark hour before the sand-storm." Upon his brow the perspiration gathered, but his lip curled ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... course we thenceforth steered. He accordingly took the direction of things into his own hands: the wind, which had moderated, was still from the west, and he put the boat before it, and lashed the helm. The peculiar appearance of the atmosphere still continued. During the morning a number of tropic birds flew by us, the first that we had seen since our separation from the ship. About noon, two noddies alighted on the gaff, and the little native climbed the mast after them; but though they are generally so tame, or so stupid, as to permit ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... flung back into Earth's history. Like this, ancient travelers of the surface of the sea were herded by pirates to walk the plank, or put ashore, marooned upon some fair desert island of the tropic Spanish main. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... and undergrowth, but for most of the space was covered with bright green grass; the whole having the appearance of a well-kept lawn that had been artificially sodded or strewn with seed, which flourished with the luxuriance of every species of vegetation in that tropic country. ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... that I was doomed so soon to repent; a hundred visions of her start to my eyes; and there is the trade-wind singing in the rigging, and loosening a tress of my darling's hair, till it flies like a tiny golden streamer in the tropic sun. There, it is out! I have called her what she was to be in my heart ever after. Yet at the time I must argue with her—with her! When all my courage should have gone to love-making, I was plucking ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... would make precious silks for fine ladies, it would cut precious jewels for their adornment; it would carry long trains of softly upholstered cars across deserts and over mountains; it would drive palatial steamships out of wintry tempests into gleaming tropic seas. And the fine ladies in their precious silks and jewels would eat and sleep and laugh and lie at ease—and would know no more of the stunted creatures of the dark than the stunted creatures knew of them. Hal reflected upon this, and subdued his Anglo-Saxon ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... and preserves the region of the mind in serenity. Whatsoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel his pulse), I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to me there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwelt in the body of ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... on the purple plain Of Polynesian main, Where never yet adventurer's prore Lay rocking near its coral shore: A tropic mystery, which the enamored deep Folds, as a beauty in a charmed sleep. There lofty palms, of some imperial line, That never bled their nimble wine, Crowd all the hills, and out the headlands go To watch on distant reefs the lazy brine Turning its fringe of snow. There, when the sun stands ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... contained in earth and air, revealing by the stages of intermediate life, from man, through spirits, angels, archangels, seraphim, and cherubim, to God, the glorious destiny of every soul. There is a vine growing in the islands of the tropic seas that thrives best upon the ancient ruins or crumbling walls of some edifice built by man; yet ever as it thrives, the tiny tendrils penetrate between the fibres of the stone, cutting and cutting till the whole fabric disappears, leaving only ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the sun is in its plane. On each side are the two tropics, at the distance of 23 deg. 30 min., and described by the sun when in his greatest declination north and south, or at the summer and winter solstices. That on the north side of the equinoctial is called the tropic of Cancer, because the sun describes it when in that sign of the ecliptic; and that on the south side is, for a similar reason, called the tropic of Capricorn. Again, at the distance of 231/2 degrees from the poles are two other parallels ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... induce thy abler genius to undertake a more extensive one. If any difficulties have arisen, or fevers come on, they have been caused by the periodical rains which fall in torrents as the sun approaches the Tropic of Cancer. In dry weather there would be no ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... with blooms of hill and wildwood, That shame the toil of art, Mingled the gorgeous blossoms Of the garden's tropic heart. ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... from the time of that early punishment when each and every one of them contemplated running off and going to sea. Most of them still contemplate that running off. They visualize great spaces, and freedom, and tropic isles, and—well, you know. "Where there ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst." (You ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... such exceptional weather, although the weather of my acquaintance invariably is exceptional. No sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted and blended into the soft darkness of a summer night than we appeared to sail straight into tropic heat and a sluggish vapor, brooding on the water like steam from a giant geyser. This simmering, oily, exhausting temperature carried us close to the line. "What is before us," we asked each other languidly, "if it be hotter than this? How can mortal man, woman, still ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... as an orchid to cloying tropic airs, she drew on her sheerest chemise, her most frivolous silk stockings. In a dreaming enervated joy she saw how smooth were her arms and legs; she sleepily resented the redness of her wrists and the callouses of the texture of corduroy that scored her palms from holding ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... part of his reign, attempted the reduction of Ethiopia and Arabia Felix. They marched near a thousand miles to the south of the tropic; but the heat of the climate soon repelled the invaders, and protected the un-warlike natives of those sequestered regions. [2] The northern countries of Europe scarcely deserved the expense and labor of conquest. The forests and morasses ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... life of this sequestered nook; but it is in fact a crowded thoroughfare. No tropic jungle more swarms with busy existence than these midsummer waters and their bushy banks. The warm and humming air is filled with insect sounds, ranging from the murmur of invisible gnats and midges, to the impetuous whirring of the great Libellulae, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... island of Hainan, and also Tonquin, are actually in the tropics. Whether the houses there do really face north—which I have never noticed—or whether the expression is merely symbolical, I cannot say; but the idea is "to the regions where, when the sun is on the tropic, you have to ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... every climate from the tropic to the pole, and armed against every malady from Ague to Zoster. He carried also the paternal watch, a solid silver bull's-eye, and a large pocketbook, tied round with a long tape, and, by way of precaution, pinned into his breast-pocket. He talked about having a pistol, in case he were ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the heroes and the fairies. Or late in the evening, just before the lamps in the nursery were put out, he would suddenly mount me, and we would gallop through Africa. There we would pass by night through tropic forests, and come upon dark rivers sweeping by, all gleaming with the eyes of crocodiles, where the hippopotamus floated down with the stream, and mysterious craft loomed suddenly out of the dark and furtively passed away. And when we had passed through the forest lit by ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... approaching a land the child of tropic seas and volcanic lava, and many of the features were new and strange to us. The mountains looked familiar in outline, but the colors of the landscape, the soft lilacs, greens, and browns, and the whole atmosphere of the scene, were unlike anything we had ever before seen. ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... His history, the veteran, in reply, Was neither slow nor eager; but, unmoved, And with a quiet, uncomplaining voice, A stately air of mild indifference, He told in few plain words a soldier's tale— That in the Tropic Islands he had served, Whence he had landed scarcely three weeks past; That on his landing he had been dismissed, And now was traveling toward his native home. This heard, I said, in pity, "Come with me." He stooped, and straightway from the ground took up, An oaken staff by ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... convent, in some authority, one day, in passing up the aisle to matins, wilfully gave Kate a push; and in return, Kate, who never left her debts in arrear, gave the servant for a keepsake a look which that servant carried with her in fearful remembrance to her grave. It seemed as if Kate had tropic blood in her veins, that continually called her away to the tropics. It was all the fault of that 'blue rejoicing sky,' of those purple Biscayan mountains, of that tumultuous ocean, which she beheld daily from the nunnery gardens. Or, if only half of it was their fault, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... been northward toward warmer seas. It was winter in their home land and, though they knew it not, Christmas day. There the tropic sun blazed overhead from an absolutely cloudless sky. There was no vestige of breeze to stir the canvas of the solitary sail or ripple the glassy surface of the smoothed out ocean. The boat lay still. ...
— And Thus He Came • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... fair Earth spake: the glad Sun speeded forth, Hearing her matron words, and backward drave To frozen caves the icy Wind of the North,— And bade the South Wind from the tropic wave Bring watery vapors over river and plain,— And bade the East Wind cross her path, and lave The lowlands, emptying there her laden mist,— And bade the Wind of the West, the best wind, blow After the early and the latter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... awe inspired by a tropic forest is certainly greater than the mystic fear which any wooded wilderness of the North could ever have created. The brilliancy of colors that seem almost preternatural; the vastness of the ocean of frondage, and the violet ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... said, O Muse, and sound the trump For him not least among our noble tars Who first on tropic isle was made to jump By reason of a pericranial thump And prospect of a galaxy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... shattered star Set in the silver crescent of the sand. The palm trees' plume uplifted dauntlessly To call the morning. At the forest's brim The day was made alive by human flowers, Sweet maidens who against the emerald Showed warm and brown in purest harmony. The fierce bright flame that is the tropic sea Burned on their eyes and called them to its heart. Like eager sea birds they forgot the land, And, happy as the amorous waves, they gave Their slim brown bodies to the sea's embrace. They found them driftwood and astride they leapt The feathered breakers, one with ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... her bosom. Both these aspects are majestic, Grand, and pleasing, and inspiring. On a bark we will convey us Through the peering rocks and islands, Where the Summer brings its sunshine, And the Winter frost and snow-storms, For a season to the lone isles. Then unto the tropic regions, Where the proud sun pours its glory On the burning sandy deserts; Streams of brightness everlasting, Like ten thousand mountains blazing; And the khamsheens wild and fiercely Sweep in burning flakes along them, And torment the weary traveller ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... hand-in-hand with God. He takes the forces of nature and the laws of the material world, and bends them to the needs and use of man. Sky and sea or desert may be about him. He knows the arctic cold, the tropic heat; the forest and the plain; the mountain and the marsh; the brook and river; the peak and the precipice; the glacier and the tempest in their course. Out of the very elements he is daily building new paths for man to tread. Soon he, too, must pass; laid after death, it may be, beside some mighty ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Pole itself, and the sources of the Nile—how many have struggled through ice and snow, or burned themselves with tropic heat, in the effort to penetrate these secrets of the earth! And how many have left their bones to whiten on the desert or lie hidden beneath icebergs at the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... strong and as cruel as you are. That is Nature's law: and is it not at first sight a fearful law? Internecine competition, ruthless selfishness, so internecine and so ruthless that, as I have wandered in tropic forests, where this temper is shown more quickly and fiercely, though not in the least more evilly, than in our slow and cold temperate one, I have said: Really these trees and plants are as wicked as ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... illumination flooded the other end of the parlor a minute after, and the chess board came into requisition. If Miss Morris found little skill necessary to discomfit her opponent, and wondered thereat, she could not see, as he saw, a dark face, bowed on tropic blooms, flushed with unwonted glad color, lips apart and aquiver, wide eyes lustrous with purple light, shining through the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is the case in the whole of Atlantic Europe, and also to a great extent in Southern Europe. The temperature of springs in northern regions, when the surface water is frozen, is higher than the mean temperature of the superincumbent atmosphere; and in the countries from the south of Europe to the Tropic, the temperature of springs is lower than that of the medium ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... on. Through the long hall, lighted to pleasant dusk by real Jack-o'-lanterns, stray couples strolled, with subdued murmurs and soft laughter. In the big white and gold parlour, in the dining-room, billiard-room, and in the tropic jungle of the immense palm-garden the party had bestowed itself in congenial groups, ever intersecting and forming anew. Little flutters of high laughter now and then told of tests that were being made with roasting chestnuts, apple-parings, ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... Alexandria, and placed at the head of the library. His great achievement was the determination of the circumference of the earth. This was done by measuring on the ground the distance between Syene, a city exactly under the tropic, and Alexandria situated on the same meridian. The distance was found to be five thousand stadia. The meridional distance of the sun from the zenith of Alexandria, he estimated to be 7 degrees 12', or a fiftieth part of the circumference of the meridian. Hence the circumference of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... wind, still bearing in his garments the odors of the tropic bowers where he had slept, the fair day descended softly in his arms to earth, and, seating herself upon the hills, wove a drapery of golden mist, bright as love, and tender as maidenhood. Then, wrapped in this bridal veil, she floated, still in the arms of the gentle wind, through the forests, ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... sea birds, allured by the stillness of those retreats, resorted thither to pass the night. At the hour of sunset we perceived the curlew and the stint skimming along the sea shore; the cardinal poised high in air; and the white bird of the tropic, which abandons, with the star of day, the solitudes of the Indian ocean. Virginia loved to repose upon the border of this fountain, decorated with wild and sublime magnificence. She often seated herself beneath the shade of the two cocoa trees, and ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... Moluccas, in latitude 2 deg. 35' N.[2] The variation here was 5 deg. 20' easterly. By noon of this day we were fourteen leagues N. by E. from the place where we had been at anchor for twenty days.[3] The 1st June, passed the tropic of Cancer. The 2d, being in lat 25 deg. 44' N. we laid our account with seeing the islands of Dos Reys Magos.[4] Accordingly, about four p.m. we had sight of a very low island, and soon afterwards of the high land over the low, there being many little islands, to the number of ten or eleven, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... continental lands except Australia, and to have been in a state of singular prosperity. As is often the case with other vigorous genera of mammals, the species were adapted to a very great variety of climates, and were fitted to endure tropic heat as ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... clear sky ahead, and in a few minutes more he is at the forest's outmost edge. Before him stretches an expanse of plain altogether treeless, but clothed with tall grass, whose culms stirred by the night breeze, and silvered by the moonbeams, sway to and fro, like the soft tremulous wavelets of a tropic sea; myriads of fire-flies prinkling among the spikes, and emitting a gleam, as phosphorescent ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... designing to indicate Ceylon, is undeniable; since, amongst other imaginary characteristics of Taprobane, they make it extend considerably to the south of the line. Now, with respect to Ceylon, this is notoriously false; that island lies entirely in the northern tropic, and does not come within five (hardly more than six) degrees of the equator. Plain it is, therefore, that Taprobane, it construed very strictly, is an ens rationis, made up by fanciful composition from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... from its moorings and drifted off on seas that soon grew tropic: should it be Bermuda, after all? Oleanders and a turquoise bay—what a ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... borne on the zephyr at eventide's hour; It falls on the heart like the dew on the flower,— An infinite essence from tropic to pole, The promise, the home, ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... virtue: to be free From foolishness is wisdom's first degree. Think of some ill you feel a real disgrace, The loss of money or the loss of place; To keep yourself from these, how keen the strain! How dire the sweat of body and of brain! Through tropic heat, o'er rocks and seas you run To furthest India, poverty to shun, Yet scorn the sage who offers you release From vagrant wishes that disturb your peace. Take some provincial pugilist, who gains A paltry cross-way prize for all his pains; Place ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... breeze; the tables d'hote express a relaxed enterprise in the nonchalance of the management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow rooms; the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of their windows in a show of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with their retarded displays of butcher's ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... rail-splitter can be so easily encouraged to believe that rail-splitting is his vocation. The tragedy in the life of Mr. J.M. Barrie's "Admirable Crichton" was not due to any legal prohibition of his conversion in England, as on the tropic island, into a veritable chief, but that on English soil he did not in his own soul want any such elevation and distinction. His very loyalty to the forms and fabric of English life kept him fatuously content with the mean truckling ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... would sail upon the tropic seas, Where fathom long the blood-red dulses grow, Droop from the rock and waver in the breeze, Lashing the tide to foam; while calm below The muddy mandrakes throng those waters warm, And purple, gold, and ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, from the rising to the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved! And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers—-young women how lovely, young men bow noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting toward us amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous corymbi ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... the regency of hope. In every age memory has been an unpopular goddess. The poet Byron pictures this divinity as sitting sorrowing midst mouldering ruins and withering leaves. But the orators unveil the future as a tropic realm, magical, mysterious and surpassingly rich. The temple where hope is worshiped is always crowded; her shrines are never without gifts of flowers ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... chuckled. "Oh, a diver is not in real danger from a shark," he went on, "his suit protects him. But there are plenty of other dangers. Maybe I'll tell you some of them at another time. Why, I declare, it is nearly sunset. You don't know it, children, but the bottom of the tropic sea has colors in it as beautiful as the lights in that sky. The sea-bottom, where the diver is apt to find pearl shells, is covered with all sorts of sea growths—sponges twelve feet high, coral cups like inverted ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... thaw frozen flesh with snow, So Spring will not her time forerun, Mix polar night with tropic glow, Nor cloy us with unshaded sun, Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance, But she has the temperance Of the gods, whereof she is one,— Masks her treasury of heat Under east winds crossed with sleet. Plants ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... were dismissed, and gladly got rid of coatee, rifle, and belt, to have a lounge in the cool of the evening; the dinner was ready in the captain's cabin, where lights already appeared; and, soon after, the tropic night came on, as if with a bound. The sky was of a purple black, studded with its myriads of stars, which were reflected with dazzling lustre from the smooth surface of the sea. But not only were the bright star shapes there to give splendour to the wave, for as ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... longitude 78 degrees east, just below Saint Paul's Island, a distance of some three thousand miles. We accomplished this in another fortnight after rounding the Cape; and then, steering up the chart again, we shaped our course nor'-east by north, so as to cross the southern tropic in longitude 102 ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... warfare with the most potent empire upon earth, and which, during the progress of the struggle, becoming itself a mighty state, and binding about its own slender form a zone of the richest possessions of earth, from pole to tropic, finally dictates its decrees ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... peculiarities by facts of ancestry,—of finding hints of the Powwow or the Grand Custom in each grotesque development. We were conscious of something warmer in this old soul than in ourselves, and something wilder, and we chose to think it the tropic and the untracked forest. She had scarcely any being apart from her affection; she had no morality, but was good because she neither hated nor envied; and she might have been a saint far more easily than far ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... many a tropic isle, In the bosom of the deep; Where the skies forever smile, And th' oppressed forever weep! O'er the negro's night of care Pour the living light of heaven; Chase away the fiend despair, Bid ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... zone of light, as swiftly as the air, one could pursue the same sunset all the world over, and see the fiery face of the sun ever sinking to his setting, over the broad furrows of moving seas, over tangled tropic forests, out to the shapeless wintry land of the south. Day by day has the same pageant enacted itself, for who can tell what millions of years. And in that vast perspective of weltering aeons has come the day when God has set me here, a tiny sentient point, conscious, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to us as far as the Northern Tropic, was succeeded by a calm that lasted twelve days. The ocean, as far as the eye could reach, was as smooth as a mirror, and the heat almost insupportable. Sailors only can fully understand the disagreeableness of this situation. The activity usual on shipboard gave ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... must be divided into Spain the frigid and Spain the semi-tropic; for while snow lies a foot deep at Christmas in the north, in the south the sun is shining brightly, and flowers of spring are peeping out, and a nosegay of heliotrope and open-air geraniums is the Christmas-holly and mistletoe of Andalusia. There ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... freedom on the dark blue sea. Now I wandered in fairy caverns among the bones of primaeval monsters. I fought at the side of Leonidas, and the Maccabee who stabbed the Sultan's elephant, and saw him crushed beneath its falling bulk. Now I was a hunter in tropic forests—I heard the parrots scream, and saw the humming birds flit on from gorgeous flower to flower. Gradually I took a voluntary pleasure in calling up these images, and working out their details into words with all the accuracy and care for which my small ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... January 1, 1919, and after that Mr. and Mrs. Murat would be signaling each other to come up-stairs into the maid's room and be holding a few ain't-them-people-got-no-home conversations. Also, Mawruss, for the rest of their married life, Mawruss, every time the tropic of who invited them in the FIRST place comes up at meal-times, y'understand, either Mr. or Mrs. Murat is going to get up from the table and lock themselves up in the bedroom for the remainder of the evening. ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... see some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorial woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. We almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box, artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... only clothed in silver ornaments. This neglige dress in the privacy of their homes is merely a matter of custom and climate, for these people are no more savages than we are. These glimpses of a native tropic life, entirely uninfluenced by European civilization, are ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... had spent itself and nothing new had come to take its place. We are beginning to see now that we too have been passing through a twilight zone whose contrasts are all the more dramatic through the more than tropic swiftness with which the high lights of the Victorian period darkened into the distractions and disillusionments of our own time. The best one can say is that there was on the part of the more sensitive a widespread anticipation of all this, as if the chill of a coming shadow had fallen ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... feet wide, affording room for a double set of rails, and the panting trains have already begun to cross its web-like span, gliding into sight from the cliff-top on one side, only to disappear the next moment on the other in a green wilderness of ferns and tropic flowers. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... this meant a tropic development for the imagination of a delicate child. All the games and daily talk concerned fanciful semi-African conditions and strange primal possibilities. The children of that day believed in spells and charms and bad-luck signs, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... as for the rest, the best representation of the divine was the human. Now, conceive such an idea taking hold, however slowly, of a people of rare physical beauty, of acutest eye for proportion and grace, with opportunities of studying the human figure such as exist nowhere now, save among tropic savages, and gifted, moreover, in that as in all other matters, with that inmate diligence, of which Mr. Carlyle has said, "that genius is only an infinite capacity of taking pains," and we can understand somewhat of the causes which produced those statues, human ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... very spirit and impersonation of the gaunt, wild, hungry, avenging mob which rose against aristocratic oppression; and in like manner, Sojourner, singing this hymn, seemed to impersonate the fervor of Ethiopia, wild, savage, hunted of all nations, but burning after God in her tropic heart, and stretching her scarred hands towards the glory ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... singers sit. The parents sit together upon the sofa; and as the song proceeds the hand of the mother steals into that of the father, which holds it closely, while his arm creeps noiselessly around her waist. Their hearts float far away upon that music. His eyes droop as when he was speaking of the tropic islands—as if he were hearing the soft language of those shores. As his wife looks at him she sees on his face, beneath the weariness of its expression, the light which shone there in the days when they sang "Bonnie Doon" together. He draws ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... ceased from their destroying toil. Peace, an ominous peace, brooded on the place, and everywhere, save for the flames that crackled among the cedar-wood beams in the roofs of the cloisters, was deep silence, such as in tropic lands precedes the bursting of a cyclone. To Miriam who watched, it seemed as though in the midst of this unnatural quiet Jehovah was withdrawing Himself from the house where His Spirit dwelt and from the people who worshipped Him with their lips, but rejected ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... about the 22nd parallel of south latitude we fairly entered into the region of flying fish, and dolphins as they are commonly called; tropic birds were now also frequently seen, which had not up to this moment been the case; we often also met hereabouts with a dark-coloured bird with bronzed wings, having a cry precisely like a Snipe. I know not the name of this bird. ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... submerged the next moment and blotted out. About two o'clock single raindrops began to splash so loudly on the veranda roof just outside my window that the noise waked me; after that I only slept fitfully, and my ears were never free from the loud roaring of the tropic rain that began presently to fall upon Aiken. I dreamed that somebody had stolen the Great Lakes and while being hotly pursued had dropped them. All day it rained like that, and all the following night, ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... written this account. With your rich stores of knowledge, you could have remarked and understood a thousand things of interest and beauty that escaped my ignorance; and the brilliant colours of your style would have carried into a thousand sickrooms the sea air and the strong sun of tropic islands. It was otherwise decreed. But suffer me at least to connect you, if only in name and only in the fondness of imagination, with the voyage of the ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cloudless wind-storms that these colossal pines are most impressively beautiful. Then they bow like willows, their leaves streaming forward all in one direction, and, when the sun shines upon them at the required angle, entire groves glow as if every leaf were burnished silver. The fall of tropic light on the crown of a palm is a truly glorious spectacle, the fervid sun-flood breaking upon the glossy leaves in long lance-rays, like mountain water among boulders at the foot of an enthusiastic cataract. But to me there is something more impressive ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... the hot and stifling Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean, toward the sunny plains of India. Away from the snowy ridge of the Himalayas, down across the bare plains of the north and the rice fields and cocoa-nut palms of the tropic south, India lies like a vast continent, embracing one-fifth of the human race. It was held before the war by some 75,000 British and twice as many Indian troops. The numbers are completely altered now. Almost ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... the spot sailed the galleon; Where, for a twelvemonth, off and on The hundred and eightieth degree She rose and fell on a tropic sea. But lo! when it came to the ninth of May, All of a sudden becalmed she lay One degree from that fatal spot, Without the power to move a knot; And of course the moment she lost her way, Gone was her chance to save ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... abundantly supplied with rivers, and of a larger magnitude, than any out of the tropics, the Murray alone excepted; and doubtless a journey across the island within the tropic would present fewer difficulties than one direct from Perth to Sydney, or Adelaide; but, excepting for the advancement of geographical knowledge, there is no object to be gained by such a journey. The best way is along the valley of the lakes, guided as the party proceeds, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... discreetly hidden behind dingy shutters; the rare officials, undisguisedly somnambulant; and the customary loiterers, even to the middle-aged woman with the ulster and the handbag, fled to more congenial scenes. As in the inmost dells of some small tropic island the throbbing of the ocean lingers, so here a faint pervading hum and trepidation told in every corner of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that land, And Summer's lap spilled o'er with fruits and flowers, And tropic trees cast shade on every hand, And ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... for social joys impair The heart that like the lib'ral air All Nature's self embraces; That in the cold Norwegian main, Or mid the tropic hurricane Her varied ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... some retreat Deep in yonder shining-Orient when; my life began to heat: Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, Breadths of tropic shady, and palms in clusters, Knots of Paradise. There the passions, cramp'd no longer, shall have scope and breathing space; I will take some ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... from the false shame of that eager demand for one, which she saw ready to leap to words in his eyes. He read it, sitting in the Richford library alone, while the great rhododendron bloomed outside, above the shaven sunny sward, looking like a monstrous tropic bird alighted to brood an hour ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost-line back with tropic heat; And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed. The house dog on his paws outspread Laid to the fire his drowsy head, The cat's dark silhouette on the wall A couchant ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... neighbours. Jewesses, for example, are always precocious, earlier by one or two years. So are colored girls, and those of creole lineage. We can guess the reasons here. No doubt these children still retain in their blood the tropic fire which, at comparatively recent periods, their forefathers felt under the vertical rays of the ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... business on hand. Whether a man shall shake hands with welcome in the distinguished elevation of respect, or shrink from contempt in the abject corner of insignificance: whether he shall wanton under the tropic of plenty, at least enjoy himself in the comfortable latitude of easy convenience, or starve in the arctic circle of dreary poverty; whether he shall rise in the manly consciousness of a self-approving mind, or sink ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... said the skipper. "I'm a cold-rife man by my nature; I have a cold blood, sir. There's neither fur, nor flannel—no, sir, nor hot rum, will warm up what they call the temperature. Sir, it's the same with most men that have been carbonadoed, as they call it, in the tropic seas." ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... distinguishable from the Chinese. The same colour, except in a few instances as I have elsewhere observed, the same eyes, and general turn of the countenance prevail, on the continent of Asia, from the tropic of Cancer to the Frozen Ocean[36]. The peninsula of Malacca, and the vast multitude of islands spread over the eastern seas, and inhabited by the Malays, as well as those of Japan and Lieou-kieou, have clearly ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, while a few were attired in grotesque costumes. Felicita was dressed as a princess of the court of the ancient Incas, with a head dress of the rich plumage of tropic birds. I was dressed in the Highland ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... Colonial Government in 1879, and the excellent water with which the station is now provided. On a clear sunny day the charnel-house, I repeat, is lovely, mais c'est la mort; it is the terrible beauty of death. Mrs. Melville says, with full truth, 'I felt amidst all the glory of tropic sunlight and everlasting verdure a sort of ineffable dread connected with the climate.' Even when leaving the 'pestilent shore' she was 'haunted by the shadowy presence.' This is womanly, but a little reflection must suggest ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... mingled sounds of dock and river which came to her she could hear the roar of surf upon a golden beach. The stuffy air of Limehouse took on the hot fragrance of a tropic island, and she sighed again, but this time rapturously, for in spirit she was a child once more, lulled by the voice ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... held in light esteem by lizards. Their blood need not be highly oxygenated; it nourishes just as well when impure. In temperate climes lizards lie torpid and buried all winter; some species of the tropic deserts sleep peacefully all summer. Their anatomy includes no means for the continuous introduction and expulsion of air; reptilian lungs are little more than closed sacs, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... a little bag his paints and plumes. Sitting in the grass, they decorated themselves until they assumed all hues—some red, and others half white or red across the face, while the ponies came in for streaks and daubs, grotesque as tropic birds. ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... charm is broken by this warning from the primitive powers that counterbalance each other behind the peace of the tropic night. By and by, one grows accustomed to the uncanny neighbourhood of the volcano, and only the more formidable eruptions attract notice. Sometimes, while at work, I hear one of the boys exclaim, "Huh, huh!" to call my attention to the fact that a particularly violent outbreak has taken place; ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... with her, showing a bleak and rugged face, which poetically should indicate the abode of savages and ogres, to Hans Christian Andersen and his hospitable countrymen, but lavishing the eternal summer of her tropic sea upon barbarians who eat baked enemy under her palms, or throw their babies to her crocodiles,—this stiff, unaccommodating Nature relents into a little expressiveness in the neighborhood of the Mormons, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... just ready to enjoy the evening of life, when the night of death closed upon him with tropic suddenness. He left one child only, his daughter Mildred, then just turned of eighteen; and as Mrs. Kinloch had only one son to claim her affection, the motherless girl would seem to be well provided for. Mildred was sweet-tempered, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... America, have spotless upper wings, obtain pale or white spots at Para and on the Lower Amazon, and also that the AEneas group of Papilios never have tails in the equatorial regions and the Amazon valley, but gradually acquire tails in many cases as they range towards the northern or southern tropic. Even in Europe we have somewhat similar facts, for the species and varieties of butterflies peculiar to the Island of Sardinia are generally smaller and more deeply coloured than those of the mainland, and the same has been ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... Fierce rival boars with side-long fury wield The pointed tusk, and guard with shoulder-shield; Bounds the dread tiger o'er the affrighted heath Arm'd with sharp talons, and resistless teeth; The pouncing eagle bears in clinched claws The struggling lamb, and rends with ivory jaws; 110 The tropic eel, electric in his ire, Alarms the waves with unextinguish'd fire; The fly of night illumes his airy way, And seeks with lucid lamp his sleeping prey; Fierce on his foe the poisoning serpent springs, And insect armies dart their ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... steer W.S.W. until he reached the tropic of Capricorn,* and this direction was kept ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... Mysteries, the nailing up of the body of Osiris in the chest or ark was termed the aphanism, or disappearance [of the Sun at the Winter Solstice, below the Tropic of Capricorn], and the recovery of the different parts of his body by Isis, the Euresis, finding. The candidate went through a ceremony representing this, in all the Mysteries everywhere. The main facts in the fable were ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... men also who will plough and sow for her, who will behave kindly and righteously for her, who will bring up their children to love her, and who will gladden themselves in the brightness of her glory, more than in all the light of tropic skies. ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... distinguished this apartment was heightened by the vast conservatory into which it led, blazing with light and beauty, groups of exotic trees, plants of radiant tint, the sound of a fountain, and gorgeous forms of tropic birds. ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... that busy day between the demands that business made on him, and once even in the midst of dictating to his typewriter, his thoughts kept turning to that far-away island in the Southern seas, where Tusitala's road gleams white under the tropic sun. He had met Robert Louis Stevenson once, the tale-teller of Eugenia's story, and he well understood the influence of that noble life over the old ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... up the next morning, and the tropic night flashed suddenly into the tropic day, Amyas was pacing the deck, with dishevelled hair and torn clothes, his eyes red with rage and weeping, his heart full—how can I describe it? Picture it to yourselves, picture ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Melanesia, the great archipelago or rather chain of archipelagoes, which stretches round the north-eastern and eastern ends of New Guinea and southward, parallel to the coast of Queensland, till it almost touches the tropic of Capricorn. Thus the islands lie wholly within the tropics and are for the most part characterised by tropical heat and tropical luxuriance of vegetation. Only New Caledonia, the most southerly of the larger islands, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... strong feeling upon me at times that I should once more like to be wandering amidst the beautiful islands of the Eastern Seas, watching the wondrous beauties of the world beneath the shallow waters, or the glorious greens of the trees upon the tropic shores. The boy who loves nature goes on loving nature to the end, for I may say that Uncle Dick spoke the truth when he said that I ought to be called Nat the Naturalist, for I feel that I am ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... the hand of the mother steals into that of the father, which holds it closely, while his arm creeps noiselessly around her waist. Their hearts float far away upon that music. His eyes droop as when he was speaking of the tropic islands—as if he were hearing the soft language of those shores. As his wife looks at him she sees on his face, beneath the weariness of its expression, the light which shone there in the days when they sang "Bonnie Doon" together. He draws her closer to him, and his head bows as if by long habit ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... to the spot sailed the galleon; Where, for a twelvemonth, off and on The hundred and eightieth degree She rose and fell on a tropic sea. But lo! when it came to the ninth of May, All of a sudden becalmed she lay One degree from that fatal spot, Without the power to move a knot; And of course the moment she lost her way, Gone was her chance to ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... by certain combinations. In the first place, the slight variation in the length of the days. Then I must try and make a rough calculation of the sun's parallax. And then my botany will help me a little; spices furnish a clew; there are one or two that will not grow outside the tropic. It was the longitude that beat me, and now we have conquered it. Hurrah! Now I know what to diffuse, and in what direction; east, southeast; the ducks have shown me that much. So there's the first ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... and Arawaks showed a strictly tropical distribution from Hayti to the southern watershed of the Amazon. The Tupis, moving down the Parana-La Plata system, made a short excursion beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, though not beyond the hot belt, then turned equator-ward again along the coast.[195] In North America we find some exceptions to the rule. For instance, though the main area of the Athapascan stock is found ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... and th' droning twang Of stringed instruments; while there before Mine eyes brown, yielding beauties dance in time To the pulsing music of a saraband! And yet there is a flavor of the sea, [Sipping wine. The long-drawn heaving of the ocean wave, The gentle cradling of a tropic tide; Its native golden sun—I fear you sleep? Or do the travels of the wine so rock Your soul that self is lost in revery? Why, man, dream not too much of placid bliss; Nor wine, nor man, can reach this clear perfection Until ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... skirt the beaches of a chain of thickly wooded islets, which gave forth a sweet smell, mingled with the odours of nono blossoms; for during the night rain had fallen after a long month of dry weather, and Nature was breathing with joy. High overhead there floated some snow-white tropic birds—those gentle, ethereal creatures which, to the toil-spent seaman who watches their mysterious poise in illimitable space, seem to denote the greater Mystery and Rest that lieth beyond all things; and lower ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... with fig, peach, almond, olive, pomegranate and other fruit trees; others, again, were planted with ornamental trees only: the tamarisk, the cassia, the acacia, the myrtle, the mimosa, and some still rarer gum-trees found beyond the cataracts of the Nile, under the Tropic of Cancer, in the oases of the Libyan Desert, and upon the shores of the Erythrean Gulf; for the Egyptians are very fond of cultivating shrubs and flowers, and they exact new species as a tribute from the peoples they ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... overflow from the lake was escaping to the Caribbean. My friends "Dusty" and H—— had carried their canoe to the Chagres below, and before nine we were off down the river. It was a day that all the world north of the Tropic of Cancer could not equal; just the weather for a perfect "day off." A plain-clothes man, it is true, is not supposed to have days off. Some one might run away with the Administration Building on the edge of the Pacific and the telephone wires be buzzing ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... of driftwood logs upon the smouldering fire. Around them sharp tongues of flame—rose and saffron, amber, sea- green, and heliotrope, glories as of a tropic sunset—leaped upward. She stood watching these, her left hand resting on the edge of the mantelpiece, her right holding up the front of her black skirt. Her right foot rested on the fender curb, thereby displaying a discreet interval of openwork silk stocking and a neatly ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... those who worked the terrible engines ceased from their destroying toil. Peace, an ominous peace, brooded on the place, and everywhere, save for the flames that crackled among the cedar-wood beams in the roofs of the cloisters, was deep silence, such as in tropic lands precedes the bursting of a cyclone. To Miriam who watched, it seemed as though in the midst of this unnatural quiet Jehovah was withdrawing Himself from the house where His Spirit dwelt and from the people who worshipped ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... for in whatever part of the ecliptic he is to be found, he makes winter, summer, autumn, and spring, and makes the whole globe of the earth to receive within itself the aforesaid four seasons; for never is it hot at one side unless it is cold on the other; when it is to us very hot in the tropic of Cancer it is very cold in the tropic of Capricorn; so that for the same reason it is winter in that part when it is summer in this, and to those who are in the middle, it is temperate according ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... Ravish'd whole towns: and forts from Spaniards reft As his last legacy to Britain left. The ocean, which so long our hopes confined, Could give no limits to his vaster mind; Our bounds' enlargement was his latest toil, Nor hath he left us pris'ners to our isle; 20 Under the tropic is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath received our yoke. From civil broils he did us disengage, Found nobler objects for our martial rage; And, with wise conduct, to his country show'd The ancient way of conquering abroad. Ungrateful then! if we no tears allow To him, that ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... of Torres Straits to about the Tropic of Capricorn, extends, at a distance of fifty to a hundred miles from the shore, an enormous bed of coral, named the Barrier Reef. There, untold millions of minute insects are still noiselessly pursuing their toil, and raising fresh ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... seems to have existed on all the continental lands except Australia, and to have been in a state of singular prosperity. As is often the case with other vigorous genera of mammals, the species were adapted to a very great variety of climates, and were fitted to endure tropic heat ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... to die—the almighty pomp in which this great idea of Death appareled itself to my young suffering heart—the corresponding pomp in which the antagonistic idea, not less mysterious, of life, rose, as if on wings, to the heavens, amidst tropic glories and floral pageantries, that seemed even more solemn and more pathetic than, the vapory plumes and trophies of mortality—all this chorus of restless images, or of suggestive thoughts, gave to my father's return, which ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... wings of the morning, and follow that flying zone of light, as swiftly as the air, one could pursue the same sunset all the world over, and see the fiery face of the sun ever sinking to his setting, over the broad furrows of moving seas, over tangled tropic forests, out to the shapeless wintry land of the south. Day by day has the same pageant enacted itself, for who can tell what millions of years. And in that vast perspective of weltering aeons has come the day when God has set me here, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ago. In dealing with the Philippine people we must show both patience and strength, forbearance and steadfast resolution. Our aim is high. We do not desire to do for the islanders merely what has elsewhere been done for tropic peoples by even the best foreign governments. We hope to do for them what has never before been done for any people of the tropics—to make them fit for self-government after the fashion of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... interesting business on hand. Whether a man shall shake hands with welcome in the distinguished elevation of respect, or shrink from contempt in the abject corner of insignificance; whether he shall wanton under the tropic of plenty, at least enjoy himself in the comfortable latitudes of easy convenience, or starve in the arctic circle of dreary poverty; whether he shall rise in the manly consciousness of a self-approving mind, or sink beneath a galling load of regret and remorse—these are alternatives ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... a depressing time, for as the hours passed on, the rain never ceased for a moment, but kept on in a regular tropic deluge; while, in spite of food and stimulants, exhaustion and suffering from their wounds told more and more, till one by one the men gave up, and the boat at last drifted with the swift current into which ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... or altering in any way the weight of the ship. There is a nice clear space just ahead, with ample room in which to show ourselves and to make a downward plunge again beneath that large ship, the barnacle-covered bottom of which seems to tell of a long voyage through tropic seas. Now take up your stations of observation, gentlemen, and note the consternation which our unexpected appearance ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... wheels, and with all the power of steam or electricity to lift us and bear us onward. We shall skim the prairies and leap the mountains, and roam over the ocean like the wandering albatross. To-day we shall breathe the warm, spicy breath of the tropic islands, and to-morrow we shall sight the white gleam of the polar ice-pack. When the storm gathers we shall mount above it, and looking down we shall see the lightning leap from cloud to cloud, and the rattling thunder will come upward, not downward, ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... estimate of your talents and acquirements, and of the spirit of enterprise and decision, united with prudence and discretion, exhibited in your recently published travels through the territories of the Maselakatze to the Tropic of Capricorn, has been pleased to select you to conduct the mission which the British Government has resolved to send to Sahela Selasse, the king of Shoa, in Southern Abyssinia, whose capital, Ankober, is supposed to be about four hundred miles inland from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... on slender stalks, brushing the high glass roof. In the midst of the conservatory a pool slumbered between rocky margins, overgrown with a profusion of reeds, grasses, and water-plants. There floated the giant leaves and blossoms of the tropic water-lily; and on a fragment of rock rising above the surface dozed a small crocodile, not more than four feet long, but looking as old, dried up, and coldly cruel ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... lies the Land to which yon Ship must go? Festively she puts forth in trim array; As vigorous as a Lark at break of day: Is she for tropic suns, or polar snow? What boots the enquiry? Neither friend nor foe She cares for; let her travel where she may, She finds familiar names, a beaten way Ever before her, and a wind to blow. Yet still I ask, what Haven is her mark? And, almost as it was ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... till noon next day; at which time we observed in latitude 23 deg. 18', longitude made from the Isle of Pines 1 deg. 54' E. In the afternoon we had little wind from the south, and a great swell from the same direction: And many boobies, tropic, and men-of-war birds were seen. At eleven o'clock a fresh breeze sprung up at W. by S., with which we stood to the south. At this time we were in the latitude of 23 deg. 18', longitude 169 deg. 49' E., and about forty-two ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... the level of the ocean slowly crawled up the slant of the deck. We battened down the engine-room hatch, and the sea rose to it and over it and climbed perilously near to the cabin companion-way and skylight. We were all sick with fever, but we turned out in the blazing tropic sun and toiled madly for several hours. We carried our heaviest lines ashore from our mast-heads and heaved with our heaviest purchase until everything crackled including ourselves. We would spell off and lie down like dead men, then get up and heave and crackle again. ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... our own array, McKibben in his black shirt, Ludlow in his white leggings, and the rank and file of the escort, the bronzed, blue-trousered troopers, erect and motionless upon their mounts. It was war, and it was magnificent, seen there under the flash of a tropic sun with all that welter of green to set it off, and there was a bigness about it so that to be there seeing it at all, and, in a way, part of it, made you feel that for that moment you were living larger ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... rousing freebooters and tarry pirates, tearing in there under full sail with their loot from the Spanish Main. How often those quiet moonlit streets must have roared with brutal revelry, and the fierce clamour of pistol-belted scoundrels round the wine-casks have gone up into the still, tropic night. ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... side are the two tropics, at the distance of 23 deg. 30 min., and described by the sun when in his greatest declination north and south, or at the summer and winter solstices. That on the north side of the equinoctial is called the tropic of Cancer, because the sun describes it when in that sign of the ecliptic; and that on the south side is, for a similar reason, called the tropic of Capricorn. Again, at the distance of 231/2 degrees from the poles are ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... life was perceptible but the porpoises and other fish sporting under the bows like pups ashore. But, at intervals, the gray albatross, peculiar to these seas, came flapping his immense wings over us, and then skimmed away silently as if from a plague-ship. Or flights of the tropic bird, known among seamen as the "boatswain," wheeled round and round us, whistling shrilly ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... And the delicious, languid, semi-tropic summer came hovering over the valley. The apricots turned golden, the peaches glowed, the grapes filled and hardened, like opaque emeralds hung thick under the canopied vines. The garden was a shade brown, and the roses had all ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Hidden Water in great drops, warmed by the sultry air. At the first flurry the dust rose up like smoke, and the earth hissed; then as the storm burst in tropic fury the ground was struck flat, the dust-holes caught the rush of water and held it in sudden puddles that merged into pools and rivulets and glided swiftly away. Like a famine-stricken creature, the parched earth could not drink; its bone-dry dust set like cement beneath the too ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... the lands widened, with now a whole farm added, and now a single field. Could he leave Arden, and the kingdom that he had created for himself, to roam in sandy deserts, and hob-and-nob with Kaffir chiefs under the tropic stars? ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... steaming jungle, is massed a splendid exhibit of those island trees and flowers that most of us know only through pictures and stories of southern seas. Around the central source of light, which is hidden under tropic vines, stands a circle of royal palms; and planted thickly over the remaining space are jungle trees, vivid enough to our imagination, but many of which have never before been seen in ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the strain, Haughty thought be far from me; Tones of penitence and pain, Moanings of the Tropic sea; Low and tender in the cell Where a captive sits in chains, Crooning ditties treasured well From his Afric's torrid plains. Sole estate his sire bequeathed— Hapless sire to hapless son— Was the wailing song he breathed, And his chain when life ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... geographical compilations disguised as books of travel, what visions do they not summon up! Visions of the realm of the Frost King and of his Regent, the White Tzar, as fantastic as any of those narrated of tropic climes by Scheherezade, and with which we are far more familiar than we are with the history of ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... back single-handed, and what would he not have given to be on the bridge again, with Jo and the rest of the old crew on deck, and the Sea Eagle pushing her nose out through the Golden Gate, heading for the enchanted regions of the tropic seas. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... same tarven, which made me glad, for I like 'em both as stars differin'. Elder Wessel I regarded more as one of the little stars in the Milky Way, but Evangeline as one of the big radiant orbs that flashed over our heads in them tropic nights. ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... be produced when volcanic islands are leveled by waves and ocean currents, and when submarine plateaus, ridges, and peaks are built up by various organic agencies, such as molluscous and foraminiferal shell deposits. The reef-building corals, whose eggs are drifted widely over the tropic seas by ocean currents, colonize such submarine foundations wherever the conditions are favorable for their growth. As the reef approaches the surface the corals of the inner area are smothered by silt and starved, and their ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... her approach, as the iceberg thaws and dissolves beneath the rays of a tropic sky. He had floated into the old latitudes of love and warmth again, and his cold heart once more began to beat—his hardness to pass away; leaving ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... He had dwelt among strange peoples and looked on strange gods. He had hunted strange beasts, moreover, and learnt their polity and their ways. He had seen the bewildering fecundity of nature in the tropic jungle, and her barren and terrible beauty in the out-stretch of the naked desert. And the thought of all this set Dickie's imagination on fire. The return of Roger Ormiston was, to him, as the return ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... pictures, for I had no native skill; and he tried to teach me his own system of miniature-painting as applied to natural history. I was forced, in deep depression of spirits, to turn from my grotesque monographs, and paint under my Father's eye, and, from a finished drawing of his, a gorgeous tropic bird in flight. Aided by my habit of imitation, I did at length produce some thing which might have shown promise, if it had not been wrung from me, touch by touch, pigment by pigment, under the orders of ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... ocean, where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, from the rising to the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved! And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers—-young women how lovely, young men bow noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting toward us amidst music and incense, ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... Glossy as jet, and dull black bows; Slim ladies' shoes with two-inch heel And sprinkled beads of gold and steel— 'How anyone can wear such things!' On either side the doorway springs (As in a tropic jungle loom Masses of strange thick-petalled bloom And fruits mis-shapen) fold on fold A growth of sand-shoes rubber-soled, Clambering the door-posts, branching, spawning Their barbarous bunches like an awning Over the windows and the doors. But, framed among ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... 'India's coral strand.' In thinking upon it he forgot to listen to the speech. He saw the flags, banners, and pennons floating in the sunshine and in the heavy breeze; he felt the reverberation of the tropic sun on his head; he saw the crowded humanity of the Square attired in its crude, primary colours; he saw the great brass serpentine instruments gleaming; he saw the red dais; he saw, bursting with infancy, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... anxious to see them at the soil and among the crops. The sun was still south of the equator, coming north only about twelve miles per day, so, to save time, we booked on the next steamer for Hongkong to meet spring at Canton, beyond the Tropic of Cancer, six hundred miles farther ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... perhaps, exotic— Young shoots from a tropic brain, They need to be better rooted To endure the wind and rain; You may well admire the markings On each graceful stem and leaf, But if taken from the hot-house, They will ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... just before nightfall. Dark had come with the suddenness of the tropic seas. There was a puff of wind, followed by a steady breeze, and the schooner once more sped southward. Robert, anxious to breathe the invigorating air, came upon deck, and standing near the mainmast watched the sea rushing by. The captain paused near him and said ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... fallen so. We are our fathers' sons: let those who lead us know! 'T was only yesterday sick Cuba's cry Came up the tropic wind, "Now help us, for we die!" Then Alabama heard, And rising, pale, to Maine and Idaho Shouted a burning word. Proud state with proud impassioned state conferred, And at the lifting of a hand sprang forth, East, west, and south, and north, Beautiful armies. ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... "Time" again, but he paid no attention; so I stole upon him, with the stealth of a wild Indian, and smote him behind. This action was unsportsmanlike, but conclusive. He shot out into the ocean, where probably some not over-particular tropic fish attempted ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... to every breeze From dawn to setting sun, We have fought in every clime or place Where we could take a gun— In the snow of far-off northern lands And in sunny tropic scenes, You will find us always on the job— The ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... Rosinante. I fought in tournays and went errant upon quests, and met Ulysses and the heroes and the fairies. Or late in the evening, just before the lamps in the nursery were put out, he would suddenly mount me, and we would gallop through Africa. There we would pass by night through tropic forests, and come upon dark rivers sweeping by, all gleaming with the eyes of crocodiles, where the hippopotamus floated down with the stream, and mysterious craft loomed suddenly out of the dark and furtively passed away. And when we had passed through the forest lit by the fireflies ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... its other parts, that it may arrest the attention of its benefactors the bees. According to Henderson, the plant, which is found in our Southern States and over the Mexican border, grows also in the Khasia Mountains of India, but in no intervening place. Several members of the tropic-loving genus, that produce large, highly colored flowers, have been introduced to American hothouses; but the blue butterfly pea is our only native representative. The genus is thought to take its name from kleio, to shut up, in reference to the habit these peas have of seeding ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... and Hamilton was one of them. Although tall and slight, he was knit with a close and peculiar elegance, which made him look his best on a horse and in white linen. His face was burnt to the hue of brick-dust by the first quick assault of the tropic sun, but it was a thin face, well shaped, in spite of prominent cheek bones, and set with the features of long breeding; and it was mobile, fiery, impetuous, and very intelligent: ancestral coarseness had been polished fine ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... like occurr'd two travellers between. One was of those Who wear a microscope, I ween, Each side the nose. Would you believe their tales romantic, Our Europe, in its monsters, beats The lands that feel the tropic heats, Surcharged with all that is gigantic. This person, feeling free To use the trope hyperbole, Had seen a cabbage with his eyes Exceeding any house in size. 'And I have seen,' the other cries, Resolved to leave his fellow in the ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... been quite thoroughly studied with results of great interest. When heated with baryta-water or hydrochloric acid, it takes up a molecule of water and is split into tropine, C{8}H{15}NO, and tropic acid, C{9}H{10}O{3}. This latter is phenyl-oxypropionic acid. Tropine, when heated to 180 deg.C. with concentrated hydrochloric acid, splits off a molecule of water, and yields tropidine, C{8}H{13}N, a liquid base, with an odor resembling conine. When ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... in from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost-line back with tropic heat; And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed. The house dog on his paws outspread Laid to the fire his drowsy head, The cat's dark silhouette on ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... follow the Flag Wherever she goes, Into the tropic sun, Into the northern snows; Go where the guns ring out Scattering steel and lead, Painting the hills with blood, Strewing the fields with dead. But in each heart must be, And back of each bitter gun, Love for the best in life After ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... thousand changes years have brought in ships and men, And the knots on Time's old log-line that have reeled away since then, And I saw a fast full-rigger with her swelling canvas spread, And the steady trade-wind droning in her royals overhead, Fleecy trade-clouds on the sky-line—high above the Tropic blue— And the curved arch of her foresail and the ocean gleaming through; I recalled the Cape Stiff weather, when your soul-case seemed to freeze, And the trampling, cursing watches and the pouring, pooping seas, And the ice on spar and jackstay, and the cracking, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... came in again and after him Pemberton, and with them was a tall girl in layers of cloaks and veils, and layers of snow, which being taken off, she came out as balmy and calm as a tropic coast, and enough to make a man forget his old troubles and lay in new ones. Captain Buckingham only looked at ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... thought so once, but now I see that they are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is gold hair more beautiful than black any more, or black than gold. They are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is thy white skin, O Saxon lady, more beautiful than hers of tropic bronze. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... he longs for sympathy, recognition, applause. He respects his fellow-creatures, because he beholds in him a possible reader. To write a book, to send it forth to the world and the critics, is to a sensitive person like plunging mother-naked into tropic waters where sharks abound. It is true that, like death, the terror of criticism lives most in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criticised, and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man's life. Most men endure criticism with commendable ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... now go back to the Empress, which we left somewhere about the Tropic of Capricorn, in a heavy gale of wind, approaching to a hurricane. The weather having come on very thick, she soon lost sight of her consort, when the heavy sea which got up compelled Captain Adair either to heave the ship to or to run before the wind. He chose the former alternative, ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... inked brush be swept seawards round Africa, passing into the Mediterranean, round North and South America, round India, then continuously south of Java and round Australia south of Tasmania and northward to the tropic, this broad band will represent the encircling ribbon-like "deep," which gives strength to the suggestion that the continents in their main features are permanent forms and that their structural connexion with the oceans is not temporary and accidental. The great protruding or "squeezed" segments ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... from the port door of the chart-house. The deck-chairs were on that side, so I stole around on the starboard side of the chart-house in order to fling overboard unobserved the dreadful thing I carried. But, drying on the surface in the tropic heat and still pulsing inside, it stuck to my hand, so that it was a bad cast. Instead of clearing the railing, it struck on the pin-rail and stuck there in the shade, and as I opened the door to go below and wash my hands, ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... largest room on the steamer—a cabine de luxe indeed, that for a week's voyage on an Atlantic liner would have cost a small fortune, while here for a sea sojourn of more than double the time, under tropic skies, and while other and worthier women were sweltering three in a stuffy box below, it had cost but a smile. The captain had repented him of his magnanimity before the lights of Honolulu faded out astern. The General began to realize that he had been ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... Bakahenzie in his red and green feathers mumbling incantations with doubt and disfavour. Indeed Bakahenzie seemed to them the symbol of the fallen god and a past regime; impotent and as mistaken as they were. In each and every one of them were suspicions and fears growing like weeds in tropic rain that he had made an error in not propitiating the new god in time, an impulse which required but a few hours' growth to propel them out to the north-east after ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... comfort as an orchid to cloying tropic airs, she drew on her sheerest chemise, her most frivolous silk stockings. In a dreaming enervated joy she saw how smooth were her arms and legs; she sleepily resented the redness of her wrists and the callouses of the texture of ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... son, my son, would God I had died for thee!' But weeping is in vain. The noble lad sleeps there under the palm-trees, beside the mighty tropic stream, while the fair Basset, 'his bride in the sight of God,' recks not of him as she wanders in the woods of Umberleigh, wife to the son of Raleigh's deadliest foe. Raleigh, Raleigh, surely God's blessing ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... be seen upon our foreheads and noses, which were the only parts of us open to view, the beads of perspiration. It was a marvellous experience. The memory of the crimson comforters has remained with me through life; light as sunset clouds, they accomplished the miracle of importing tropic warmth into the circle of the frozen arctic. I think we must have been undressed and night-gowned before this treatment; at any rate, I have forgotten how we got to bed, but to bed we somehow got, and slept the blessed sleep ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... It ain't so hard to set down what a woman's done at the end of a year, if you got a good mem'ry, but tryin' to guess what she is goin' to do has got the weather man backed off inter a corner an' squealin' for help. They ain't all like Kansas. My first resembled it, the second was sorter tropic—she run off with a rainmaker an' I hear she's been divorced three times since then. Mebbe that's an exaggeration. My third must have been born someways nigh the no'th pole. W'en she got mad she'd freeze the blood ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... Haunt of white tropic-bird and big ruffled owl, Up rises the firstborn child of the pali. He climbs, he climbs, he climbs up aloft, Kaholo-ku'-iwa, the pali of Ha'i. 5 Accomplished now is the steep, The ladder-like series of steps. Malu-o is left ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... stimulus, Dr. Bose proceeded to study the nature of responses evoked in plants by the stimuli of the natural forces. He found that plants respond visibly, by movements, to environmental stimuli. But the movements induced—'tropic' movements—are extremely diverse. Light, for example, induces sometimes positive curvature, sometimes negative. Gravitation, again, induces one movement in the root, and the opposition in the shoot. Dr. Bose applied himself to find out whether the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... the false shame of that eager demand for one, which she saw ready to leap to words in his eyes. He read it, sitting in the Richford library alone, while the great rhododendron bloomed outside, above the shaven sunny sward, looking like a monstrous tropic bird alighted to brood ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Mambookei chain of mountains, and in the central portion of Africa, below the tropic, are the Bechuanas, who inhabit an extent of country as yet imperfectly known to us. These may ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... commercial voyages were still confined to the limit of Rhapta. We have just stated that Prasum, according to the most moderate hypothesis, must be fixed seven degrees to the south of Rhapta. Marinus, however, fixes it either in thirty-five degrees south, or under the tropic of Capricorn. He was led into this and similar errors by assigning too great a number of stadia to the degree. Ptolemy endeavours to correct him, and places Prasum in latitude 15, 30 south; it is remarkable that the Prasum of Ptolemy is precisely at Mosambique, the last of the ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... that wonderful Gulf Stream, once a myth, still a mystery, the strange current of human existence bears each and all of us with a strong, steady sweep from the tropic lands of sunny childhood, enameled with verdure and gaudy with bloom, through the temperate regions of manhood and womanhood, fruitful or fruitless as the case may be; on to the often frigid, lonely shores of old age, snow-crowned ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... they were below we could hear them smashing the treasure-chests. While they were busy in the storeroom I hacked away at the scuttle-board, which was thick and of hard wood, well seasoned by continual wetting and drying in the tropic sun. ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... law of average here. In dry times it was a desert, lacking wholly, however, in the beauty, the mystery, and the spell of a desert; in wet times it was a gehenna of mud and slush and stickiness, and entirely minus that beauty and freshness that attends the rainy seasons in a tropic clime. It was a land peopled by a hard-bitten race of nesters—come from God knows where and for God knows why—starved in mind and body, slaves of a hideous environment from which they lacked ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... notwithstanding these drawbacks, I contrived to catch a glimmering, if not something more, of the author's meaning. It was hard work, but I struggled on, down page after page, fascinated, my imagination vividly depicting the various scenes of which I read. I saw the deep blue tropic sea heaving and sparkling in the joyous sunshine, and the stout ship, with her gleaming wide-spread canvas, sweeping bravely over its bosom. I stood upon the deck of that ship, among the seamen, peering eagerly ahead, and saw a faint grey cloud gradually shape ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... world indeed, where Love is lord and Death is driven forth? or dost thou seek to soothe us with lying pictures of Paradise, such as the shipwrecked mariner in tropic seas beholds beneath the sultry brine? Is thy beacon in very truth a star; shining eternal in our cimmerian sky, a guide infallible to life's worn voyager; or a wandering fire such as the foolish follow,—a lying ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the Goodspeed, had sailed with thirty others, five years before, from Dartmouth in a bark named the Concord. He had not made the usual long sweep southward into tropic waters, there to turn and come northward, but had gone, arrow-straight, across the north Atlantic—one of the first English sailors to make the direct passage and save many a weary sea league. Gosnold and his men had seen Cape Ann and Cape Cod, and had built ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... that ancient watery park—within that pathless chase where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, and which stretches from the rising to the setting sun. Ah! what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands, through which the pinnace moved. And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers—young women how lovely, young men how noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting towards us amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous corymbi from ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... of that tropic season soon wore away, and, when I looked landward, at day-dawn, I perceived two strange boats at anchor near the key. As this gave me some uneasiness, I mentioned it to the captain and his wife, but they laughed at my suspicions. After an early meal we began to discharge our heaviest cargo with ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... voice to welcome in the May: "For thee, sweet month, the groves green liveries wear, If not the first, the fairest of the year: For thee the Graces lead the dancing hours, And Nature's ready pencil paints the flowers: When thy short reign is past, the feverish sun The sultry tropic fears, and moves more slowly on. So may thy tender blossoms fear no blight, Nor goats with venomed teeth thy tendrils bite, As thou shalt guide my wandering feet to find The fragrant greens I seek, my brows to bind." His vows addressed, within the grove ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... to occupy, at last understood how the model of the Mirabelle had been so painstakingly arranged inside a bottle. For the time seemed long between glimpses of shore and shore, or until they sailed for a time along some wild and beautiful tropic coast. Then Chris would lean on the side of the ship looking at the mountainous or jungled shore. A scent such as comes from the opened door of a hothouse would drift out to sea to the sailors, who looked ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... there was a loneliness in the desert. That was part of the big feeling of it, the still, stealing sense of immensity reaching out its shadowy hands for you.... Loneliness and restlessness.... These tropic nights, when the stars burned low and bright, and the hot sands seemed breathing.... Loneliness and restlessness—but they gave a man dreams.... And were those dreams to ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... interloper. The spiritual lion was that Brant was connected with Lysbeth van Goorl, once known as Lysbeth de Montalvo, a lady who had brought her reputed husband no luck. Often and often during dreary hours of reflection beneath tropic suns, for which the profession of galley-slave gave great leisure, the Senor Ramiro remembered that very energetic curse which his new affianced wife had bestowed upon him, a curse in which she ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... reject," Helen repeated.—Then she busied herself with a small black fig, splitting it deftly open, disclosing the purple, and rose, and clear living greens of the flesh and innumerable seeds of it, colours rich as those of a tropic sky at sunset.—"And there are so many of those women it seems to me! I am coming to have a quite pathetic fellowship for them." She buried her white teeth in the softness of the fig.—"Not without reason, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... set out to be the most gorgeous cinema in the Five Towns; and it simply was. Its advertisements read: "There is always room at the top." There was. Over the ceiling of its foyer enormous crimson peonies expanded like tropic blooms, and the heart of each peony was a sixteen-candle-power electric lamp. No other two cinemas in the Five Towns, it was reported, consumed together as much current as the Imperial de Luxe; and nobody could deny that ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... did rot*, etc. The ship becalmed in tropic seas, and the slimy things engendered there, were a vision in Coleridge's mind before "The Ancient Mariner" was thought of. In the lines contributed to Southey's "Joan of Arc" in 1796 (published, with additions, ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... The tropic day's redundant charms Cool twilight soothes away, The sun slips down behind the palms And leaves the landscape grey. I want to take you in my arms And kiss your ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... danced at Government House,—we exiles of the Temperate Zone,—keeping up to the last the fiction that New Year's Day under a tropic sky and within sound of the tiger's wail was really January first. But every remembrance and association was, in our homesick thoughts, grouped about an open arch fire, with the sharp, crisp creak of sleigh-runners outside, in a frozen land fourteen ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... then lightly got and as lightly spent by the English in India. The baron was accompanied by his wife, a native, we have somewhere read, of Archangel. This young woman who, born under the Arctic circle, was destined to play the part of a Queen under the tropic of Cancer, had an agreeable person, a cultivated mind, and manners in the highest degree engaging. She despised her husband heartily, and, as the story which we have to tell sufficiently proves, not without reason. She was interested by the conversation and flattered by the attentions of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... detail, from the dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and the white-painted, green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistressly waitresses in the dining-room, has a clump of palmettos beside it, swaying and sighing in the tropic breeze, and you know that when it migrates back to the New England hill-country, at the end of the season, you shall find it with the palmettos still before its veranda, and equally at home, somewhere in the Vermont or New Hampshire July. There will be the same American groups ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sea, O shapes of air, O lands whose names are made of spice and tar, Old painted empires that are ever fair, From Cochin-China down to Zanzibar! O Beauty simple, soul-less, and bizarre! I would take Danger for my bosom-wife, And light our bed with some wild tropic star— O how I long ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... upon China, are scarcely distinguishable from the Chinese. The same colour, except in a few instances as I have elsewhere observed, the same eyes, and general turn of the countenance prevail, on the continent of Asia, from the tropic of Cancer to the Frozen Ocean[36]. The peninsula of Malacca, and the vast multitude of islands spread over the eastern seas, and inhabited by the Malays, as well as those of Japan and Lieou-kieou, have clearly been peopled from the same common stock. ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... knew not what conditions? He recoiled from either of these alternatives; and then suddenly, as he racked his brains, a wild idea flashed over him. For years he had talked and dreamed of escaping from civilization. He had pictured himself upon some tropic island, where bananas and cocoanuts grew; or again in some Northern wilderness, where he might hunt and fish, and live like the pioneers. And now—why not do it? He had an axe and a rifle and a fishing-rod; and only a few days previously he had heard ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, wide sea? The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the mariner really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that no wreckers or divers ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Indian day. My friend the notary and I were crossing the island by a wonderful road which wound up through tropic forest to the clouds, and thence looped down again, through gold-green slopes of cane, and scenery amazing of violet and blue and ghost-gray peaks, to the roaring coast of the trade winds. All the morning we had been ascending,—walking ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... to Cumana, the most eastern part of the New Continent, was very fine. We cut the tropic of Cancer on the 27th; and though the Pizarro was not a very fast sailer, we made, in twenty days, the nine hundred leagues, which separate the coast of Africa from that of the New Continent. We passed fifty leagues west of Cape Bojador, Cape Blanco, and ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... big stores were as hot or hotter than Peter Rolls's that July; but it seemed to Winifred Child that the Tropic of Cancer might have breezes which the Hands missed. Those of the salespeople who did not look as if at any moment their eyes might come out and all their veins burst, were living advertisements for Somebody's Anti-Anemia Mixture before the mixture ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... supplied with rivers, and of a larger magnitude, than any out of the tropics, the Murray alone excepted; and doubtless a journey across the island within the tropic would present fewer difficulties than one direct from Perth to Sydney, or Adelaide; but, excepting for the advancement of geographical knowledge, there is no object to be gained by such a journey. The best way is along the valley of the lakes, guided as the party ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... now those untaught melodies Broke the luxurious silence of the skies, The sweet siesta of a summer day, The tropic afternoon of Toobonai, When every flower was bloom, and air was balm, And the first breath began to stir the palm, The first yet voiceless wind to urge the wave All gently to refresh the thirsty cave, 110 Where sat the Songstress with the stranger boy, Who taught her ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... had dined, Fritz, Molly, and I, proceeded to investigate the place by carriage. The day was warm, but Bethlehem has the luxury of admirably-shaded streets; and although tropic heat may flood the outer world, they lie temptingly cool beneath the great boughs; delightful breezes sweeping from the mountains, so that a ride is always enjoyable. There are regulation drives, and there are other drives, for one can take a different route every day for a ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... the other, these ledges of lime and sandstone, some red, some yellow, some white; and, heaped upon the top like a rich coating of chocolate, was the brownish-black cap of the lava. In ages long past each layer had been a mud bank at the bottom of a tropic sea, until the weight of waters had pressed them down and time had changed them to stone. Then Mother Earth had breathed and in a slow, century-long heave, they had emerged from the bottom of the sea, there to be broken ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... a lovely lake, wood embosomed, from or near which the bright St. Vrain and other streams take their rise. I thought how their clear cold waters, growing turbid in the affluent flats, would heat under the tropic sun, and eventually form part of that great ocean river which renders our far-off islands habitable by impinging on their shores. Snowy ranges, one behind the other, extended to the distant horizon, folding ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... was a lovely Youth! I guess The panther in the wilderness Was not so fair as he; And when he chose to sport and play, No dolphin ever was so gay Upon the tropic sea. ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... South Carolina, and westward to the Pacific. It had been nibbled at, for a hundred years, by Spaniards, French and English, but no permanent hold had been got upon it. Here were thousands upon thousands of square miles in which nature rioted unrestrained, with semi-tropic fervor; the topography of which was unknown, and whose character in any respect was a matter of pure conjecture. This wilderness was on one side; on the other were a worthless king, a handful of courtiers, and a couple of highly gifted doctrinaires, Lord Shaftesbury ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... he forged, out of one golden thought, A key to open his prison; when the King Released him for a tale of faerie gold Under the tropic palms; when those grey walls Melted before his passion; do you think The gold that lured the King was quite the same As that which Raleigh saw? You ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... took each from a little bag his paints and plumes. Sitting in the grass, they decorated themselves until they assumed all hues—some red, and others half white or red across the face, while the ponies came in for streaks and daubs, grotesque as tropic birds. ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... richest blue, out of which the sun darted his flaming rays by day, and in which the stars blazed like jewels at night; of tranquil seas of sapphire in which creatures of strange forms and brilliant hues disported themselves; of tropic shores, coral fringed and clothed with graceful feathery palms backed by noble forest trees of precious woods, made glorious by flowers of every conceivable hue and shape, amid which hovered birds of such gorgeous plumage that they gleamed and shone in the sun like living gems; of rich and luscious ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the South Seas, from one tropic to another, we find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when the resources of even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the improvident Polynesian trembled for the future. We may accept some of the ideas of Mr. Darwin's theory of coral islands, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of rest. There was also Hallinan's Hotel, that was very far from being a mere country hotel. The stately bow-windows of its coffee-room have already been mentioned, but its wide verandah must not be forgotten, stone-paven, glass-roofed, umbrageous with tropic vegetation, beneath whose shade, on the sunny days that are enjoyed by the lesser world of men, sad anglers, in ancient tweed suits, lolled, broken-heartedly, in basket-chairs. And, finally, on the town's highest level, was The Mall, reserved, dignified, with a double row of great beech-trees, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... month, Bedient came in at noon from a long ride across the lands, and reaching the great porch of the hacienda, he turned to observe a tropic shower across the valley. The torrent approached at express speed. It was a clean-cut pouring, several acres in extent. Bedient watched it fill the spaces between the little hills, sweep from crest to crest, and ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... Beethoven quite as much as any living musician. Quite as much as that of any other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, his magistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio of the scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeys and birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in the finale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields of Europe, smells of the hay, gives again the nun-like close of day in temperate skies. ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... view. Accidents usually occur in crossing the equator. The Red Sea and the Indian Ocean are especially difficult to cross. This could be overcome by sending the transport by way of Cape Town, where a part of the trip could be made south through the Tropic of Cancer. It has been demonstrated that horses not older than from ten to sixteen years should be selected for service abroad. No fear need be felt as to the feeding of the horses, for our horses are accustomed to little ...
— Operations Upon the Sea - A Study • Franz Edelsheim
... navigation along the east coast of Terra Australis, both without and within the tropic; also ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... of hermit nations have been opened; commerce has bound men in common interests, and so prepared "a highway for our God"—Japan, India, China, Africa, Polynesia, amid the solitudes of icy north, and in the lands of tropic suns, world-wide there are signs of the coming of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. The veil which has so long blinded the eyes of the ancient people, our Lord's kinsmen according to the flesh, is being taken away. We bless God for the good example of martyrs like Patteson, Mackenzie, Parker, ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... and not a single sound Breathes on the eternal stillness all around; 'Tis tropic noon! and yet the sultry time Seems like the twilight of some fairy clime. Spreading in lone luxuriance round is seen The mangrove's tangled maze of sombre green; Thro' mists that dwell those baneful ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... of February, after the 23d of the month. The management was left to the pontiffs—ad metam eandem solis unde orsi essent—dies congruerent; "that the days might correspond to the same starting-point of the sun in the heavens whence they had set out." That is, taking for instance the Tropic of Cancer for the place or starting-point of the sun any one year, and observing that he was in that point of the heavens on precisely the 21st of June, the object was so to dispense the year, that the day on which the sun was ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... stone benches of the lovely room sat Aileen, the level pool of water before her, the sunrise glow over every thing, tropic birds in their branches, and she, her hair disheveled, her face pale, one arm—her left—hanging down, ripped and bleeding, trickling a thick stream of rich, red blood. On the floor was a pool of blood, fierce, scarlet, like some rich cloth, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... actually in the tropics. Whether the houses there do really face north—which I have never noticed—or whether the expression is merely symbolical, I cannot say; but the idea is "to the regions where, when the sun is on the tropic, you have to turn ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... the zephyr at eventide's hour; It falls on the heart like the dew on the flower,— An infinite essence from tropic to pole, The promise, the home, and the heaven ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... pomegranate and other fruit trees; others, again, were planted with ornamental trees only: the tamarisk, the cassia, the acacia, the myrtle, the mimosa, and some still rarer gum-trees found beyond the cataracts of the Nile, under the Tropic of Cancer, in the oases of the Libyan Desert, and upon the shores of the Erythrean Gulf; for the Egyptians are very fond of cultivating shrubs and flowers, and they exact new species as a tribute from the peoples they ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... brought in ships and men, And the knots on Time's old log-line that have reeled away since then, And I saw a fast full-rigger with her swelling canvas spread, And the steady trade-wind droning in her royals overhead, Fleecy trade-clouds on the sky-line—high above the Tropic blue— And the curved arch of her foresail and the ocean gleaming through; I recalled the Cape Stiff weather, when your soul-case seemed to freeze, And the trampling, cursing watches and the pouring, pooping seas, And the ice on spar and jackstay, and the cracking, volleying sail, And the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... wonder what he THINKS—or if his head "Is just a piece o' metal, too!" She said It laughin'-like. She didn't understand, She couldn't know that we have dreams as grand, As any SHE could have. We wonder where Th' rivets that we make are goin' to, An' if th' engine wheels we turn, will go Through tropic heat, or if they'll plow through snow; An' as we watch, we sorter grow to care About th' steel. Why it's as shiny blue As j'ew'ls! An' every bit is, well, a part Of life to us. Sometimes my very heart Thanks God that I've ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... ribbons. We wondered and wondered whether young Derry Willard would come. Carol thought he wouldn't. I thought he would. Rosalee wouldn't say. Carol thought it would be too cold. Carol insisted that he was a tropic. And that tropics couldn't stand the cold. That if a single breath of cold air struck a tropic he blew up and froze. Rosalee didn't want young Derry Willard to blow up and freeze. Anybody could see that ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... a tropic isle, The hush of the forest, the ocean blue, A lament for all that is false and vile, A paean for all that is good and true. Pompadour's fan, or Louis's queue, Mournful or merry, right or wrong. ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... done so much, welcomed, in his capacity of Chamberlain of the City of London, Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson to the honorary freedom of the City. The setting star saluted the rising star. Nelson was then thirty-nine. He had been at sea since he was twelve. He had voyaged in polar seas and tropic waters. He had fought the Americans. He had fought the French. "Hate a Frenchman as you would the devil" was his simple-minded counsel of perfection. He had fought the Spaniards. He had lost an eye at Calvi. He had lost an arm at ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... who live in chill degree, As map informs, of fifty-three, And do not much for cold atone, By bringing thither fifty-one, Methinks all climes should be alike, From tropic e'en to pole arctique; Since you have such a constitution As nowhere suffers diminution. You can be old in grave debate, And young in love-affairs of state; 10 And both to wives and husbands show The vigour of a plenipo. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... now suddenly he was satiate of her. But Katherine, he had thought, was so young and bright and beautiful; a child that had lived within the cloister and had grown to maidenhood in sweet innocence. 'Twas like finding in some tropic clime, embowered and shaded by thick, waxy leaves, a glorious, ripe pomegranate, which he would grasp and drink from its rich, red pulp, a portion that would cool and 'suage a burning thirst; while Constance, by the side of Katherine, was like a russet apple, into whose heart ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... brightest of all that summer. It was one of those days when there was not the filmiest cloud to veil the sun; you could see the ether shimmering over the land, and the fields of yellow grain looked like lakes of molten metal. Shaded by our wide straw hats, Penelope and I had no thought of the tropic heat. We were engrossed in the reaper as it cut its way through the wheat; we followed it, counting the sheaves as they dropped with mechanical precision; we stepped along untiringly in its wake, as though the rough ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... "sea-green" of the shallow North Sea to the turquoise-blue of the Bay; from the grey-white rush of the Irish Sea to the clear-cut emerald of the Clyde Estuary; from the colourless, oily swell of the Equatorial Atlantic to the paraffin-hued rollers of the Tropic of Cancer, the sea varies as human nature itself. To the artist, I imagine, no two square miles are alike, no two sunsets, no ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... little acts are grand, Beheld from land to land, There as they lie in time, Within their native clime Ships with the noontide weigh, And glide before its ray To some retired bay, Their haunt, Whence, under tropic sun, Again they run, Bearing gum Senegal and Tragicant. For this was ocean meant, For this the sun was sent, And moon was lent, And ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... want to know, first, where this wonder is. Get out the map of the Western Hemisphere, put your finger on any of the lines running north and south, through North America, and called meridians; follow it south until you come to the Tropic of Cancer, running east and west; then "left-about-face!" and, following the tropic, sail out into the calm Pacific. After a voyage of about two thousand miles, you'll run ashore on one of a group ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... single sheet of paper, evidently left there on purpose. The doctor snatched it up, glanced at it, handed it to Father Brown, and crying, "Good God, look at that!" plunged toward the glass room beyond, where the terrible tropic flowers still seemed to keep a crimson memory ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... tradition, knowest thou any corner of the world where at least FORCE is not? The drop which thou shakest from thy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but to-morrow thou findest it swept away; already on the wings of the Northwind, it is nearing the Tropic of Cancer. How came it to evaporate, and not lie motionless? Thinkest thou there is aught motionless; without Force, and ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... frontier of Italy along the finest coast-line in the world. Every shade of blue was on sky or sea or mountain, while the deep morning shadows were transparent and almost luminous. From the pinewoods a scent of resin swept seaward, mingled with the subtle odour of the tropic foliage near the shore. The sky was cloudless. This was indeed the ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... because the rocks in it had been smoothed by mountain torrents during thousands of wet seasons, and the walls protected one from the biting wind, a wind that went through me, for I had been stewing for nine months and more in tropic and ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... all parts of the world; and the Skimmers, so called from the dexterity with which they skim the surface of the water, keeping the under mandible immersed, and the upper dry, in search of prey. Next to the gulls are placed the Tropic Birds (161), the name of which indicates their native clime. These birds prey upon fish; some, as the red-tailed tropic bird, darting upon the flying-fish; and others, as the darters, boldly plunging into the tide from overhanging ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... and far behind him. The incredible greenness of tropic verdure, of the jungle which rings Rio all about. The many glitterings of sunlight upon glass, and upon the polished domes of sundry public buildings, and the multitudinous shimmerings of the tropic sun upon the bay. The ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... forgotten; but the stars that shone for them are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same equinoxes call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman to the harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic as he did when his course began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star and constellation and galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom, and the love, which placed them in the heavens and ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... sultry tropic day, when the last flicker of the far southeast trade was fading out and the seasonal change for the northwest monsoon was coming on, the Kittiwake lifted above the sea-rim the ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... waves were so many obstacles to the way of a ship on the sea and of a master on the bridge—they were that to him, and nothing more. He had seen, and yet not seen, the many marvels and wonders of far lands. Under his eyelids burned the brazen glories of the tropic seas, or ached the bitter gales of the North Atlantic or far South Pacific; but his memory of them was of mess-room doors stove in, of decks awash and hatches threatened, of undue coal consumption, of long passages, and of fresh paint-work spoiled ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... come after you. Your destiny can be no exception to the common lot; be grateful that your love is overlooked thus early, before it can claim any affinity to passion. An hour's fret, a pang of envy, suffice to express what you feel. Jealousy hot as the sun above the line, rage destructive as the tropic storm, the clime ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... E. Long., it crosses the Red Sea about 16 deg. north of the equator, and at 120 deg. it falls at Borneo, several degrees below it;—and the points of the greatest heat, in this line, are in Abyssinia, nearer the tropic of Cancer than to the equator. On the other hand, the greatest mean cold points, according to the opinions of Humboldt, Sir David Brewster, and others, do not coincide, as would seem natural, with the geographical poles, but they are both to be found in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... wooden spire in the shallow valley, about which were gathered a few white houses, giving signs of life thrice a day in tiny threads of smoke rising from their prim chimneys; and over all, the pallid skies of New England, where the sun wheeled his shorn beams from east to west as coldly as if no tropic seas mirrored his more fervid glow thousands of miles away, and the chilly moon beamed with irreproachable whiteness across the round gray hills and the straggling pond, beloved of frogs and mud-turtles, that Greenfield held in honor under the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... country, within that ancient watery park, within that pathless chase of ocean, where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, from the rising to the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved! And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers—-young women how lovely, young men bow noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting toward us amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous corymbi from vintages, amidst ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... night and day, But never a whiff can you take away: And never a song of a tropic bird Outside of its palm-decked ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... summits lone, Mont Blanc, on his eternal throne,— The city-gemmed Peruvian peak,— The sunset portals landsmen seek, Whose train, to reach the Golden Land, Crawls slow and pathless through the sand,— Or that, whose ice-lit beacon guides The mariner on tropic tides, And flames across the Gulf afar, A torch by day, by night a star,— Not thus, to cleave the outer skies, Does my serener mountain rise, Nor aye forget its gentle birth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... she lay at ease upon the brown carpet of pine needles, warm and aromatic after the tropic day's sunshine. "The child has divined me already, Catherine," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... time and again he moves his readers in describing the wonders of the great waste places, the melancholy deserts and wildernesses, the deadly fascination of the jungle, and the awful glory of the tropic dawns and sunsets. When something awakened his imagination he could write passages full of the magic of poetry. Witness this, it is not a description of scenery, but a vision of the true ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... has the peculiar habit of dropping down from its branches "bush-ropes," as they are called. These take root and become stout trunks. There is literally a "rubber belt" around the world, for nearly all rubber comes from the countries lying between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. More than half of all that is brought to market is produced in the valley of the Amazon River; and some of this "Para rubber," as it is called, from the seaport whence it is shipped, is the best ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... never seemed so beautiful as in the early morning of the day Shane and Kayak and Harlan sailed away in search of help. The electricity of adventure, of hope was in the air, and the wind was as soft and balmy as a breath from tropic seas. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... feint note. 'Tis but a snow-white tropic bird, suspended in mid-air on motionless wing, his long scarlet pendrices almost invisible at such a height. Presently, as he discerns you, he lets his aerial, slender form sink and sink, without apparent motion, till he is within fifty feet, and then he turns ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... it is poetry, the result, which we want, and we do not care from what material it is produced. The honey is the same, whether the bee stores it from the meadow-clover and the wild-flower of our own fields, or, loitering over city wharves, gathers it from ships laden with tropic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... the orator having drawn for the letters, the urns are prepared accordingly by one of the commissioners and the two censors. The preparation of the urns is After this manner. If the Senate be to elect, for example, the list called the tropic of magistrates, which ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... on the altar, and the brazen-winged eagle of the lectern. Strange-shaped patterns of wine-colour and violet were cast from the stained glass windows upon the walls and pillars, enriching the grey fabric of the church, like tropic flowers. The window nearest me was a favourite of ours. It was dedicated, so saith the bronze tablet beneath, to the memory of Cosmo John, fifth son of an Earl of Aberfalden. He had died at the age of fifteen, not a tender age to me, ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... unclouded by the climacteric episode of the publishing of his journal and his subsequent arrogant bearing before the Holy Father, which had provoked his fate. Under the beneficent influences of the soft climate and the new interests of this tropic land he began to feel a budding of something like confidence, and the suggestions of an unfamiliar ambition to retrieve past failure and yet gratify, even if in small measure, the parental hope which had first directed him as a child ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Earth twice ten degrees and more From the Sun's axle; they with labour pushed Oblique the centric globe: some say the Sun Was bid turn reins from the equinoctial road Like distant breadth—to Taurus with the seven Atlantic Sisters, and the Spartan Twins, Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amain By Leo, and the Virgin, and the Scales, As deep as Capricorn; to bring in change Of seasons to each clime. Else had the spring Perpetual smiled on Earth ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... and gesture, he sends out his energies. Oftentimes a single speech has effected great reforms. Oft one man's act has deflected the stream of the centuries. Full oft a single word has been like a switch that turns a train from the route running toward the frozen North, to a track leading into the tropic South. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like .. Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... who worked the terrible engines ceased from their destroying toil. Peace, an ominous peace, brooded on the place, and everywhere, save for the flames that crackled among the cedar-wood beams in the roofs of the cloisters, was deep silence, such as in tropic lands precedes the bursting of a cyclone. To Miriam who watched, it seemed as though in the midst of this unnatural quiet Jehovah was withdrawing Himself from the house where His Spirit dwelt and from the ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... often Rosinante. I fought in tournays and went errant upon quests, and met Ulysses and the heroes and the fairies. Or late in the evening, just before the lamps in the nursery were put out, he would suddenly mount me, and we would gallop through Africa. There we would pass by night through tropic forests, and come upon dark rivers sweeping by, all gleaming with the eyes of crocodiles, where the hippopotamus floated down with the stream, and mysterious craft loomed suddenly out of the dark and furtively passed ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... its plane. On each side are the two tropics, at the distance of 23 deg. 30 min., and described by the sun when in his greatest declination north and south, or at the summer and winter solstices. That on the north side of the equinoctial is called the tropic of Cancer, because the sun describes it when in that sign of the ecliptic; and that on the south side is, for a similar reason, called the tropic of Capricorn. Again, at the distance of 231/2 degrees ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Brendan returned to his native Kerry; and from a bay sheltered by the lofty mountain that is now known by his name, he set sail for the Atlantic land; and, directing his course towards the south-west, in order to meet the summer solstice, or what we should call the tropic, after a long and rough voyage, his little bark being well provisioned, he came to summer seas, where he was carried along, without the aid of sail or oar, for many a long day. This, which it is to be presumed was the great ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... there before Mine eyes brown, yielding beauties dance in time To the pulsing music of a saraband! And yet there is a flavor of the sea, [Sipping wine. The long-drawn heaving of the ocean wave, The gentle cradling of a tropic tide; Its native golden sun—I fear you sleep? Or do the travels of the wine so rock Your soul that self is lost in revery? Why, man, dream not too much of placid bliss; Nor wine, nor man, can reach this clear perfection Until they pass the rack of thunder and Of hurricane.—'Tis ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... can be called, of the mower's scythe, the rustle of acacia leaves, and the notes of the stock-dove, looking back as upon a nightmare to the horn of the tramway conductor, and the perpetual grind of the stone-mason's saw. Yes! to quit Paris at a time of tropic heat, and nestle down in some country resort is, indeed, like exchanging Dante's lower circle for Paradise. The heat has followed us here, but with a screen of luxuriant foliage ever between us and the burning blue sky, and with a breeze rippling the leaves ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... land. The foul, deep swamp that reached for miles on every side, the towering trees that sprouted their spiny trunks and limbs from it, the interlaced razor-edged vines and creeper-growths—all was a stirring welter of tropic life, life varied and voracious and untamed. From the tiny poisonous bansi insects layers deep on the nearest tree to the monster gantor that crouched in a clump of weeds, gently sawing his fangs back and forth, all the creatures of this world were ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... wilt not without difficulty credit. I have possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the distribution of the seasons the sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of the crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto eluded my authority, and multitudes ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Council, having formed a very high estimate of your talents and acquirements, and of the spirit of enterprise and decision, united with prudence and discretion, exhibited in your recently published travels through the territories of the Maselakatze to the Tropic of Capricorn, has been pleased to select you to conduct the mission which the British Government has resolved to send to Sahela Selasse, the king of Shoa, in Southern Abyssinia, whose capital, Ankober, is supposed to be about four hundred miles inland from the port of Tajura, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... meaning of the different cries, and to trace them back to their sources. There was one which puzzled me for a long time—a sharp, pealing cry that ended in a wail of angry despair, and, rising high above all other sounds, impressed the spirit like the cry of that bird in the tropic forests which the terrified Spaniards called the alma perdida. After many days of listening and trembling, I found that it proceeded from a wretched, sun- burnt girl, who carried about some dozens of knotty pears, and whose hair hung disheveled ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... of white people holding this newest continent first flaunted their banner of "No Trespassers" in the face of the multicolored millions of Asia, they declared their willingness to sweat and toil even under tropic skies, and develop their country without the aid of the cheap labor of the rice-eating, mat-sleeping, fast-breeding spawn of the man-burdened East. But this policy came well-nigh to being the death-blow to one little industry of the north, so far from the ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the water if a cold or warm sea current sweeps along below them. If now our friend the albatross, travelling westwards over the islands of Polynesia, wishes to be carried along by the wind, he knows that he has only to keep between the Tropic of Capricorn and the equator in order to be in the belt of the south-east trade-wind. And no doubt he has also noticed that this wind gives rise to the equatorial current which, broad and strong, sets westwards across the Pacific Ocean. If he wishes to fly ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... the Bering Strait and wandered around in Asia and died, all except a few to carry on the preparation with. There were six of those glacial periods, with two million years or so between each. They chased those poor orphans up and down the earth, from weather to weather, from tropic temperature to fifty degrees below. They never knew what kind of weather was going to turn up next, and if they settled any place the whole continent suddenly sank from under them, and they had to make a scramble for dry land. Sometimes a volcano would turn itself loose ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the bows like pups ashore. But, at intervals, the gray albatross, peculiar to these seas, came flapping his immense wings over us, and then skimmed away silently as if from a plague-ship. Or flights of the tropic bird, known among seamen as the "boatswain," wheeled round and round us, whistling shrilly ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... more abundantly supplied with rivers, and of a larger magnitude, than any out of the tropics, the Murray alone excepted; and doubtless a journey across the island within the tropic would present fewer difficulties than one direct from Perth to Sydney, or Adelaide; but, excepting for the advancement of geographical knowledge, there is no object to be gained by such a journey. The best way is along the valley ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... violet waking, lifted up Where bent the lily her deep, fragrant cup; And folded buds, 'gainst many a leafy spray— The wild-woods' voiceless nuns—knelt down to pray. There roses, deep in greenest mosses swathed, Kept happy tryst with tropic blooms, sun-bathed. No sounds of sadness surged through listening trees: The waters babbled low; the errant bees Made answer, murmurous; nor paled the hue The jonquils wore; nor chill the wild breath grew Of daisies clustered white in dewy croft; Nor ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... spoonful for each man of us, Another for the pot! We shall not drink from amber, Nor Capuan slave shall mix For us the snows of Athos With port at thirty-six; Whiter than snow the crystals, Grown sweet 'neath tropic fires, More rich the herbs of China's field, The pasture-lands more fragrance yield; For ever let Britannia wield The tea-pot of ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... they turned, and however sudden the changes of their march, they found the country laid waste—the houses unroofed, the cattle driven away, the fields burned or inundated, and nothing but a desert under their feet, and flames on the horizon, while the sun of the tropic grew daily hotter overhead. These were disadvantages; but the French had greatly the superiority in numbers, in experience, and in supplies of ammunition. Yet, for many weeks, they failed in all their attempts. They left their dead before the entrance of the Plateaux, or ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... meat was very good and tender and as a great number of the fish were caught, proved a grateful relief to our salt diet. The atmosphere was very damp and before the vessel entered the trade we had lightning every night, but it ceased the moment that we were within its limits. Tropic and other oceanic birds, some of a dark brown colour, hovered about us and were our daily companions, particularly the latter which preyed upon the small fish that ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... more she mounts the circles from Fundy to the Horn, From Cuba to the Cape runs down the tropic morn, Explores the Vast Uncharted where great bergs ride in ranks, Nor shouts a broad "Ahoy" to the dories on the Banks. No more she races freights to Zanzibar and back, Nor creeps where the fog lies blind along the ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... A gigantic ice-cap extending from Canada has glaciated all the minor mountain ranges to the south, sweeping over the whole continent. The drift and boulders still remain to prove the fact, as far south as only 15 deg. north of the tropic. A warm oceanic current, like the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic, would shorten a glacial period. Speaking of Scotland, one authority states that "if the Gulf Stream were diverted and the Highlands upheaved to the height of the New Zealand Alps, the whole country ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... Lucia, and St. Vincent soon shared its fate. The Earl of Albemarle and Admiral Sir George Pococke sailed in early spring on a more important errand, landed in June near Havana with eleven thousand soldiers, and attacked Moro Castle, the key of the city. The pitiless sun of the tropic midsummer poured its fierce light and heat on the parched rocks where the men toiled at the trenches. Earth was so scarce that hardly enough could be had to keep the fascines in place. The siege works were little ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... this expedition. Professor, this young red-head is Martin Grey, a sort of nephew by adoption who knows more about night life than most cabaret proprietors—and not much of anything else. He has shaken the dangers of the gold-diggers to face with us the dangers of the tropic seas." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... step of Akron on the stair, and the still fainter murmur from the streets. The very goldfish in the fountain do not stir, and the long line of slaves against the marble wall, save for their branded foreheads, might be gaunt caryatides hewn in Egyptian wood or carved in ebony and amber. That gaudy tropic bird scarce ruffles a feather. What is the difference between life and death? A voice, a call, some sudden strange or familiar message on old paths, to the consciousness that lies under that apparent unconsciousness, will waken all these semblances ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... now and then a windjammer was borne in by the winds of romance. It reminded Philip of the dirty little harbour with its colliers at Blackstable, and he thought that there he had first acquired the desire, which was now an obsession, for Eastern lands and sunlit islands in a tropic sea. But here you felt yourself closer to the wide, deep ocean than on the shore of that North Sea which seemed always circumscribed; here you could draw a long breath as you looked out upon the even vastness; and the west wind, the dear soft salt wind of England, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... slipped softly from its moorings and drifted off on seas that soon grew tropic: should it be Bermuda, after all? Oleanders and a turquoise bay—what a relief to ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... may call the hair of a negro his wig. Just because the woolly savage is remote and barbaric he seems to be unnaturally neat and tidy. Everyone must have noticed the same thing in the fixed and almost offensive color of all unfamiliar things, tropic birds and tropic blossoms. Tropic birds look like staring toys out of a toy-shop. Tropic flowers simply look like artificial flowers, like things cut out of wax. This is a deep matter, and, I think, not unconnected with divinity; but anyhow it is the truth that ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... windows, and two doors opposite to each other, and the trade-wind always blowing, the state of affairs after daylight was much like that which prevailed in England when King Alfred invented lanterns, while in the latter end of June the days were, of course, as short as they could be on the tropic of Capricorn, so that Patteson got up in the dark at 5-30 ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... far out at sea to mark Thy westward way, O Princess, through the dark. The rose-red sunset dies into the dusk, The silver dusk of the long twilight hour, And opal lights come out, and fiery gleams Of flame-red beacons, like the ash-gray husk Torn from some tropic blossom bursting into flower, Making the sea ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... and a fifth—of the island. As it extends twelve degrees within the tropics, its productions partake of a different character from those of the older colonies, and sugar, corn and cotton are staples. The Tropic of Capricorn crosses the middle of the province. The southern portion has 7,000,000 sheep, but the exports of the gold, copper and tin mines exceed those of the animal and vegetable industries. The colony has the finest series of landscapes in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... seas to bring back upon their return evidence of the existence of a new world far across the wide waste of waters. In fancy we picture that sturdy band kneeling with Columbus, richly attired, upon the tropic sands, while over them floats the blood and gold banner of Spain, as the priest clothed in vestments of his office asks the blessings of Almighty God upon the land which Columbus claims in the name of the House of Castile. In the background we see waving palms and dark-skinned men who gaze ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... Naiad released. Frost assailed. Whale attacked, 421. X. Buds and Flowers expanded by Warmth, Electricity, and Light. Drawings with colourless sympathetic Inks; which appear when warmed by the Fire, 457. XI. Sirius. Jupiter and Semele. Northern Constellations. Ice-islands navigated into the Tropic Seas. Rainy Monsoons, 497. XII. Points erected to procure Rain. Elijah on Mount-Carmel, 549. Departure of the Nymphs of Fire like sparks from artificial ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... demands that business made on him, and once even in the midst of dictating to his typewriter, his thoughts kept turning to that far-away island in the Southern seas, where Tusitala's road gleams white under the tropic sun. He had met Robert Louis Stevenson once, the tale-teller of Eugenia's story, and he well understood the influence of that noble life over the old chiefs ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... stocks or families found in North America above the Tropic of Cancer, about five-sixths were confined to the tenth of the territory bordering Pacific ocean; the remaining nine-tenths of the land was occupied by a few strong stocks, comprising the Algonquian, Athapascan, Iroquoian, Shoshonean, Siouan, and ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... along the highlands, leaping o'er the granite walls: Lo he sleeps among the islands, where the loon her lover calls. Still like some huge monster winding downward through the prairie plains, Seeking rest but never finding, till the tropic gulf he gains. In his mighty arms he claspeth now an empire broad and grand; In his left hand lo he graspeth leagues of fen and forest land; In his right the mighty mountains, hoary with eternal snow. Where a thousand foaming fountains singing seek the plains below. Fields ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... lat. 23 deg. 30' or directly under the tropic of Capricorn, is a bay now called St Augustine. If that in the text, the latitude 1s erroneous a ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... our latitude 24 deg. 10' N. at which time we were beyond Ras-al-nef about three leagues, whence the latitude of that cape is 24 deg. N. From this it appears that the ancient city of Berenice was built upon this cape Ras-al-nef as Ptolomy places it on this coast under the tropic of Cancer, making the greatest declination of the sun at this place almost 23 deg. 50'. Likewise Pliny says that at Berenice the sun at noon in the summer solstice gives no shadow to the gnomon, by which that city appears to have stood ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... me to it. How about that lovely, untootered savage that you lures into your foul clutches so's you can make yourself king of Aranuka? Hey? Hey? How about that little tropic wild flower you carelessly plucked an' thrun away? Oh, I'll admit she was a savage, but she was sweet an' human for all that an' she had feelin's. She had a heart to bust an' you busted ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... news of his mother's death. As much a victim of the war as any stricken soldier or sailor at the front, she was numbered on the roll of the fallen. The war had killed her as certainly, as surely, as any Mauser bullet sped from a tropic thicket. Raymond had only the consolation of knowing that Miss Latimer had been with her at the last and that she had followed his mother to the grave. Her letter, tender and pitiful, filled him with an inexpressible emotion. His little world ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... and the excellent water with which the station is now provided. On a clear sunny day the charnel-house, I repeat, is lovely, mais c'est la mort; it is the terrible beauty of death. Mrs. Melville says, with full truth, 'I felt amidst all the glory of tropic sunlight and everlasting verdure a sort of ineffable dread connected with the climate.' Even when leaving the 'pestilent shore' she was 'haunted by the shadowy presence.' This is womanly, but a little reflection ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... descent. As though their scintillant flickerings had met In the vague meshes of some airy net! And now mysteriously I seemed to guess, While watching their tumultuous loveliness, What fervor of deep passion strangely thrives In the warm richness of these tropic lives, Whose wings can never tremble but they show These hearts of living fire that ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... forth in the programme of this tropic vaudeville that it would be made known why Shorty O'Day, of the Columbia Detective Agency, lost his position. Also that Smith should come again to tell us what mystery he followed that night on the shores of Anchuria when he strewed so many cigar stumps ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture of beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet without poetry they would be less alive, their minds would be less young. As children, most of us would have flushed before the beauty of a sunrise on a tropic ocean, felt dimly if profoundly—and forgotten. The poet—like the painter—has caught, has interpreted, has preserved the experience, so that, like music, it may be renewed. And he can perform that miracle for ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... semi-tropic sun, he glowered at the lily-drift. Then he snarled at Crump to reverse the motor. Tedge ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... each from a little bag his paints and plumes. Sitting in the grass, they decorated themselves until they assumed all hues—some red, and others half white or red across the face, while the ponies came in for streaks and daubs, grotesque as tropic birds. ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... hangs limp and loose, giving an occasional flap, so feeble as to show that this proceeds not from any stir in the air, but the mere balancing motion of the vessels. For there is now not enough breeze blowing to flout the long feathers in the tail of the Tropic ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... and conceal from men through seventeen centuries: this city I will bury, but not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my mysterious anger; set in azure light through generations to come: for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas." This city, therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating along the noiseless depths of ocean: and oftentimes in glassy calms, through the translucid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... a little refreshing, as by very ripe and sweet grapes, which the fruitfulness of the earth at that season of winter, it may seems strange that those fruits were then there growing. But the reason thereof is this, because they being between the tropic and the equinoctial, the sun passeth twice in the year through their zenith over their heads, by means whereof they have two summers; and being so near the heat of the line they never lose the heat of the sun so much, ...
— Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World • Francis Pretty
... side-long fury wield The pointed tusk, and guard with shoulder-shield; Bounds the dread tiger o'er the affrighted heath Arm'd with sharp talons, and resistless teeth; The pouncing eagle bears in clinched claws The struggling lamb, and rends with ivory jaws; 110 The tropic eel, electric in his ire, Alarms the waves with unextinguish'd fire; The fly of night illumes his airy way, And seeks with lucid lamp his sleeping prey; Fierce on his foe the poisoning serpent springs, And insect ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... an island of the same nature, yields not a cloud, and yet our islands ever dropping and inclining to rain. The Atlantic Ocean is still subject to storms, but in Del Zur, or Mare pacifico, seldom or never any. Is it from tropic stars, apertio portarum, in the dodecotemories or constellations, the moon's mansions, such aspects of planets, such winds, or dissolving air, or thick air, which causeth this and the like differences of heat and cold? Bodin relates of a Portugal ambassador, that coming ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... this lane than on the outside rough rock, because the rocks in it had been smoothed by mountain torrents during thousands of wet seasons, and the walls protected one from the biting wind, a wind that went through me, for I had been stewing for nine months and more in tropic and equatorial swamps. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the point which our ancestors had reached even thirty generations ago. In dealing with the Philippine people we must show both patience and strength, forbearance and steadfast resolution. Our aim is high. We do not desire to do for the islanders merely what has elsewhere been done for tropic peoples by even the best foreign governments. We hope to do for them what has never before been done for any people of the tropics—to make them fit for self-government after the fashion of the really ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... loneliness in the desert. That was part of the big feeling of it, the still, stealing sense of immensity reaching out its shadowy hands for you.... Loneliness and restlessness.... These tropic nights, when the stars burned low and bright, and the hot sands seemed breathing.... Loneliness and restlessness—but they gave a man dreams.... And were those dreams ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... desolate, the languages they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same equinoxes call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman to the harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic as he did when his course began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star and constellation and galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom, and the love, which placed them in the heavens ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... were in the house the German merchant built, the Chinese millionaire bought, and the Admiral, without a fleet since the 1st of May, rented. The furnishing was rich; there were frescoes that were aglow with the tropic birds and window curtains that were dreams. The vast mansions of the ex-officials were not, however, such as would have been sought as accommodations for the management of the military and other affairs, and there was much lacking ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... spars; With eyes that were a language and a spell, A form like Aphrodite's in her shell, With all her loves around her on the deep, Voluptuous as the first approach of sleep; Yet full of life—for through her tropic cheek The blush would make its way, and all but speak: The sun-born blood suffused her neck, and threw O'er her clear nut-brown skin a lucid hue, Like coral reddening through the darken'd wave, Which draws the diver to the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Guinea. We now pass to the natives of Melanesia, the great archipelago or rather chain of archipelagoes, which stretches round the north-eastern and eastern ends of New Guinea and southward, parallel to the coast of Queensland, till it almost touches the tropic of Capricorn. Thus the islands lie wholly within the tropics and are for the most part characterised by tropical heat and tropical luxuriance of vegetation. Only New Caledonia, the most southerly of the larger islands, differs somewhat ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... Yet more than tropic's soft abundance thralling, My stormy North-land wilderness is calling! Her snowflake flocks, her gleaming midnight frosts, The glory of grim forests on her coasts, Green tinted Steppes with distant bluish rim— The trooping clouds in heaven's spaces dim. ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... American. The liberty of manner, the independence of expression, could not be mistaken in a country of established forms. She had abundant brown hair skillfully arranged under a smart French hat. Her eyes were blue; not the blue of any painted color; it was the blue of remote spaces in the tropic sky. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... to see how quiet a pirate ship could be. The ruffians were bone-weary, for one thing, after the struggle to bring the vessel through the storm. And the scourge of tropic fever had left its marks. Moreover, the rum was running short because some of the casks had been staved in the heavy weather and Blackbeard was doling it out as grog with an ample dilution of water. There was ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... between them, and pouting equally and simultaneously at both. There was also the stout German who talks about "de sturm und der vafes." And beside him was the statuesque English beauty, whose eyes are of the rich blackness of the tropic sky, whose voice has a large assortment of sudden notes of haughtiness, while the studied insolence of her manner first freezes her victims and then incontinently and inconsistently scorches them. Eventually ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... will—some day. But d'y' remember Kingston Harbor, where the black boys dive through the green waters for the silver sixpenny pieces, and Kingston port, where the white roads and the white walls throw back the tropic sun so that it seems twice as hot as it really is—Kingston, Guy—in Jamaica, where the sun sets like a blood-orange salad in a purple dish? D'y' remember, Guy, and the day we were lying into Kingston ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... My men would be devoted to me, and my word would be their law. I would decide for myself whether this or that proceeding would be proper, generous, and worthy of my unlimited power; when tired of sailing, I would retire to my island,—the position of which, in a beautiful semi-tropic ocean, would be known only to myself and to my crew,—and there I would pass happy days in the company of my books, my works of art, and all the various treasures I had taken from the mercenary ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... coast was long and wearisome. For some days we felt seriously the ill effects of the island life and the tropic heat, and could only endure; until, one morning, we came up on deck, and there were the beautiful serrated hills of Old California. We had rounded Cape St. Lucas, and had a strong, exhilarating breeze from the coast, and began to be ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... are exact duplicates of each other; and that behind every human eye there lies an undiscovered country, as mysterious, as fascinating, as that which Alice found behind the looking-glass,—a country like, and yet unlike, the one we know, where dreams grow beautiful as tropic plants, and passions crouch like wild beasts in ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... Akron on the stair, and the still fainter murmur from the streets. The very goldfish in the fountain do not stir, and the long line of slaves against the marble wall, save for their branded foreheads, might be gaunt caryatides hewn in Egyptian wood or carved in ebony and amber. That gaudy tropic bird scarce ruffles a feather. What is the difference between life and death? A voice, a call, some sudden strange or familiar message on old paths, to the consciousness that lies under that apparent unconsciousness, will waken all these semblances of inanimation into new life of arms ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond spots down his back, his flat head with deadly tooth, did not harmonise as the green snake does with leaf and grass. He was too marked, too prominent—a venomous foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or native to our wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had escaped from the glass ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... careless usage. The chairs were common kitchen chairs, and the table a plain deal one. But the driftwood burned with flames whose forked tongues sang silently but eloquently of wanderings under many skies, of rainbow isles in sunny seas, of vivid golden days and the black wonders of tropic nights, of storms and calms, and all the untold mysteries of the ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... is like the moonlight Where tropic Summers glow, And love is like the twilight When dreams begin ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... eternal throne,— The city-gemmed Peruvian peak,— The sunset portals landsmen seek, Whose train, to reach the Golden Land, Crawls slow and pathless through the sand,— Or that, whose ice-lit beacon guides The mariner on tropic tides, And flames across the Gulf afar, A torch by day, by night a star,— Not thus, to cleave the outer skies, Does my serener mountain rise, Nor aye forget its gentle birth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... feet aloft, on slender stalks, brushing the high glass roof. In the midst of the conservatory a pool slumbered between rocky margins, overgrown with a profusion of reeds, grasses, and water-plants. There floated the giant leaves and blossoms of the tropic water-lily; and on a fragment of rock rising above the surface dozed a small crocodile, not more than four feet long, but looking as old, dried up, and coldly cruel as ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Norah was with us, and the language, that Jimmy poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly, a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur was ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... above a subtle invigorating odour of marjoram, rosemary, lavender, growing wild like heather, comes down to mingle with the more languid breath of tropic plant and flower. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... was not unknown, engineers and construction men who could talk of things that were comprehensible to him, gamblers and adventurers who took him poignantly back to the life he had left so far behind him. Along that crowded and shifting half-way house for the tropic-loving American he found more than one passing friend to whom he talked hungrily and put many wistful questions. Sometimes it was a rock contractor tanned the color of a Mexican saddle. Sometimes it was ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... shape, seems to have existed on all the continental lands except Australia, and to have been in a state of singular prosperity. As is often the case with other vigorous genera of mammals, the species were adapted to a very great variety of climates, and were fitted to endure tropic heat as well ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... unmistakable signs where flesh or fat has fallen away, and the skin has become loose. The neck was simply an intricate surface of seams and wrinkles, and sun-scarred with the burning of the Desert. The Far East, the Tropic Seasons, and the Desert—each can have its colour mark. But all three are quite different; and an eye which has once known, can thenceforth easily distinguish them. The dusky pallor of one; the fierce red-brown of the other; and of the third, the dark, ingrained burning, as though it had become a ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... national roads traversing every part of the land. Vast herds of llamas were domesticated, from the hair of which the exquisitely woven cloth was made. Agriculture flourished. The country, upraised from the sea by the great range of mountains, afforded every variety of {70} climate from temperate to tropic, and the diversified products of the soil corresponded with the opportunities presented. And every foot of space was utilized for a population of millions of industrious workers, with an economy and resourcefulness only emulated ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... assured me, I might obtain the fullest information regarding the various objects of interest, to visit which we had adopted an unusual and circuitous course. We embarked on a gulf running generally from east to west, about midway between the northern tropic and the arctic circle. As this was the summer of the northern hemisphere, we should thus enjoy a longer day, and should not suffer from the change of climate. After taking leave of our friends, we went down below to take possession ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... ocean slowly crawled up the slant of the deck. We battened down the engine-room hatch, and the sea rose to it and over it and climbed perilously near to the cabin companion-way and skylight. We were all sick with fever, but we turned out in the blazing tropic sun and toiled madly for several hours. We carried our heaviest lines ashore from our mast-heads and heaved with our heaviest purchase until everything crackled including ourselves. We would spell off and lie down like dead men, then get up and heave ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like .. Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... small planet has many millions of square miles of surface, and a single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to find by random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting for sport would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. So if they found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperate zone. Cattle would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The mine would not be on a prairie. ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... to be alert to keep up with Jack Meredith—to understand his speech; and he rather liked the necessity, which was a change after the tropic indolence in ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... wonderful night up on deck, filled with all the majesty and beauty of starlight and a tropic calm. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the Behring Strait, In moony jungles where the tigers roar, In tropic isles where civil servants wait, And wonder what the deuce they're waiting for, In lonely lighthouses beyond the Nore, In English country houses crammed with Jews, Men still will study, spell, perpend and pore And ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the singer, Late into the midnight she sang—the bunch of blossoms that was in her hand as she came on board still shedding its pungent odors round her as the blossoms died—strange wild songs that she had learned in the two years of her tropic life; ancient and plaintive Spanish airs; Moorish songs whose savage tunes were sweet as the honey of the rocks; wild and mournful Indian airs that the Spaniards might have heard in those Caribbean islands when first they burst upon their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... there has been a good deal said in poetry about the fringed gentian and the harebell of rocky districts and waysides, and I know that it is possible for maidens to bloom in very slight soil into a wild-wood grace and beauty; yet, the world through, they lack that wealth of charms, that tropic affluence of both person and mind, which higher and more stimulating culture brings,—the passion as well as the soul glowing in the Cloth-of-Gold rose. Neither persons nor plants are ever fully themselves until ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... arches shall come tripping children, like white fairies, to laugh and talk with the girl who lies dreaming and reading in the hammock there, beneath the black velvet canopy of the great cedar- tree, like some fair Tropic flower hanging from its boughs. Then they shall wander down across the smooth-shorn lawn, where the purple rhododendrons hang double, bush and image, over the water's edge, and call to us across the stream, 'What sport?' and the old Squire shall beckon the keeper over the ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... to an anchor under a little island in the latitude of 23 degrees 28 minutes, being just under the northern tropic, and about twenty leagues from the island. Here we lay thirteen days, and began to be very uneasy for my friend William, for they had promised to be back again in four days, which they might very easily have done. However, at the ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... the next morning, and the tropic night flashed suddenly into the tropic day, Amyas was pacing the deck, with dishevelled hair and torn clothes, his eyes red with rage and weeping, his heart full—how can I describe it? Picture it to yourselves, picture it ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... is the range of the black bear. He can live, and no doubt enjoy life, in all climates. He is equally at home in the icy regions of Canada and the tropic swamps of Louisiana. He is found from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific. He inhabits thick forests, and ranges in rocky desert regions, where scarcely any timber grows. He prefers wooded districts, however; and in these is most commonly ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... the distance of 23 deg. 30 min., and described by the sun when in his greatest declination north and south, or at the summer and winter solstices. That on the north side of the equinoctial is called the tropic of Cancer, because the sun describes it when in that sign of the ecliptic; and that on the south side is, for a similar reason, called the tropic of Capricorn. Again, at the distance of 231/2 degrees from the poles are two other parallels called ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... stone as a jeweler approaches a casket to unlock the hidden gems. Geikie causes the bit of hard coal to unroll the juicy bud, the thick odorous leaves, the pungent boughs, until the bit of carbon enlarges into the beauty of a tropic forest. That little book of Grant Allen's called "How Plants Grow" exhibits trees and shrubs as eating, drinking and marrying. We see certain date groves in Palestine, and other date groves in the desert a hundred ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... to the mind a just idea of its magnitude. Stretching from the 115th to the 153rd degree of east longitude, and from the 10th to the 37th of south latitude, it averages 2700 miles in length by 1800 in breadth; and balanced, as it were, upon the tropic of that hemisphere in which it is situated, it receives the fiery heat of the equator at one extremity, while it enjoys the refreshing coolness of the temperate zone at the other. On a first view we should be led to expect that this extensive tract of ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... rendered extremely swarthy by the long exposure to weather, and tropic weather at that, which he had undergone. The expression of his face was of that abstract and thoughtful, nay, even melancholy, cast which we commonly associate with the student rather than the man of affairs. He was dressed ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... good gift to be refused? And this was his first love! The brilliant Renee, many-hued as a tropic bird! his lady of shining grace, with her sole fault of want of courage devotedly amended! his pupil, he might say, of whom he had foretold that she must come to such a pass, at the same time prefixing his fidelity. And he was handing her over knowingly to one kind of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the silver crescent of the sand. The palm trees' plume uplifted dauntlessly To call the morning. At the forest's brim The day was made alive by human flowers, Sweet maidens who against the emerald Showed warm and brown in purest harmony. The fierce bright flame that is the tropic sea Burned on their eyes and called them to its heart. Like eager sea birds they forgot the land, And, happy as the amorous waves, they gave Their slim brown bodies to the sea's embrace. They found them driftwood and astride they leapt ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... against cannon-mouths for love of England, we may find men also who will plough and sow for her, who will behave kindly and righteously for her, who will bring up their children to love her, and who will gladden themselves in the brightness of her glory, more than in all the light of tropic skies. ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... incognita. ..and yet in likelihood it may be so, for without all question, it being extended from the tropic of Capricorn to the circle Antarctic, and lying as it doth in the temperate zone, cannot choose but yield in time some flourishing kingdoms to succeeding ages, as ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... was rapidly drawing near when I was to begin my second series of bouts with John Barleycorn. When I was fourteen, my head filled with the tales of the old voyagers, my vision with tropic isles and far sea-rims, I was sailing a small centreboard skiff around San Francisco Bay and on the Oakland Estuary. I wanted to go to sea. I wanted to get away from monotony and the commonplace. I was in the flower of my adolescence, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... bloodiest and most brutal wars that even Spain ever waged with her own colonists, the United States intervened, and in a brief summer campaign destroyed the last vestiges of the mediaeval Spanish domain in the tropic seas alike of the West ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... through the enchanted wood in the luminous green gloom that filled it, lulled by the swaying motion of the elephant's stride. The soothing silence of the woodland was broken only by the crowing of a jungle cock. The thick, leafy screen overhead excluded the glare of the tropic sunlight; and the heat was tempered to a welcome coolness ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... the morning to the noise, if noise it can be called, of the mower's scythe, the rustle of acacia leaves, and the notes of the stock-dove, looking back as upon a nightmare to the horn of the tramway conductor, and the perpetual grind of the stone-mason's saw. Yes! to quit Paris at a time of tropic heat, and nestle down in some country resort is, indeed, like exchanging Dante's lower circle for Paradise. The heat has followed us here, but with a screen of luxuriant foliage ever between us and the burning blue ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... occupied by North and South Carolina, and westward to the Pacific. It had been nibbled at, for a hundred years, by Spaniards, French and English, but no permanent hold had been got upon it. Here were thousands upon thousands of square miles in which nature rioted unrestrained, with semi-tropic fervor; the topography of which was unknown, and whose character in any respect was a matter of pure conjecture. This wilderness was on one side; on the other were a worthless king, a handful of courtiers, and a couple of highly gifted doctrinaires, Lord Shaftesbury and John ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... of the Rattlesnake party were less varied and exciting than might have been expected in a voyage of four years in the tropic seas and among barbarian tribes, the mental adventures through which Huxley passed in the time must have been of the most surprising kind. It was a four-years' course in the great university of nature, and when ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... visited that land, And Summer's lap spilled o'er with fruits and flowers, And tropic trees cast shade on every hand, And twined boughs ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... social joys impair The heart that like the lib'ral air All Nature's self embraces; That in the cold Norwegian main, Or mid the tropic hurricane Her varied ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... by climate in his bodily development than any other animal; his frame is at the same time so hardy and flexible, that he thrives and increases in every variety of temperature and situation, from the tropic to the pole; nevertheless, in extremes such as these, his complexion, size, and vigor usually undergo considerable modifications.[229] Among the Red Men of America, however, there is a remarkable similarity of countenance, form, manners, and habits, in every ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... soiled by long usage, had patiently guided generations of boys and girls through the mysteries of lands and seas, icebergs, trade winds, deserts, and plains. Still patiently they marked for the boy's bewildered brain latitude and longitude, the tropic of cancer, the arctic circle, and the poles. Were they hanging there still? the man wondered. Were they still patiently leading the way through a wilderness of islands and peninsulas, capes and continents, rivers, lakes, and sounds? Or ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... must press on to the sea, but he cured himself by eating a magic sweet-fern leaf and came running after us, tripping over his sash. The trekking took a long time, and when we reached the end of the point we were quite exhausted and flung our weary frames down on the tropic sand to rest. All at once Jerry ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... no exception to the common lot; be grateful that your love is overlooked thus early, before it can claim any affinity to passion. An hour's fret, a pang of envy, suffice to express what you feel. Jealousy hot as the sun above the line, rage destructive as the tropic storm, the clime ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... never breaking through after the brutal manner of civilization. The fire-flies gleamed in the brushwood on either hand, and from every side rose that all-pervading hum of busy insects through which the tropic forest is never still. ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... quests, and met Ulysses and the heroes and the fairies. Or late in the evening, just before the lamps in the nursery were put out, he would suddenly mount me, and we would gallop through Africa. There we would pass by night through tropic forests, and come upon dark rivers sweeping by, all gleaming with the eyes of crocodiles, where the hippopotamus floated down with the stream, and mysterious craft loomed suddenly out of the dark ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... zephyr at eventide's hour; It falls on the heart like the dew on the flower,— An infinite essence from tropic to pole, The promise, the home, and the ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... blinding sunshine; underneath that immense roof-foliage was a solemn twilight. The trees shed continual showers of tropic dew. As we struggled on through the mud, the perspiration exuded from every pore; our clothes were soon wet and heavy. Every man had to crawl and scramble as he best could. Sometimes prostrate forest-giants barred ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... beginning of Libra; and it is divided by two arcs from it, one towards the North and one towards the South; the points of these two said arcs are equi-distant from the first circle in every part by twenty-three degrees and one point more, and the one point is the tropic of Cancer, and the other is the tropic of Capricorn; therefore it must be that Maria in the sign of Aries can see, when the Sun sinks below the mid-circle of the first Poles, this Sun to revolve round the Earth below, or rather the ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... me have sailed the seas, Known tropic suns, and braved the Arctic breeze, We've heard on Popocatepetl's peak The savage Tom-Tom sharpenin' of his beak, We've served the dreadful Jim-Jam up on toast, When shipwrecked off the Coromandel coast, And when we heard the frightful Bim-Bam rave, Have plunged ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... above a feint note. 'Tis but a snow-white tropic bird, suspended in mid-air on motionless wing, his long scarlet pendrices almost invisible at such a height. Presently, as he discerns you, he lets his aerial, slender form sink and sink, without apparent motion, till he is within fifty feet, and then he turns his graceful head from ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... house for some distance was a forest of tall fruit-trees. They had of course all been planted in times past by the Dayaks' ancestors, and every tree had its owner, but they had become mixed up with many beautiful wild tropic growths which had sprung up between the trees. Some of these fruit-trees, such as the "durian," "rambutan," mango, mangosteen, "tamadac" or jackfruit, "lansat" and bananas, were familiar to me, but there were a great number of fruits that I had never ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... in the midst of which is a ragged opening like a gateway-a thing that is common enough in nature, and not apt to excite suspicions of a deep human design—and above the bottom of the gateway, project, in the most careless way! a few broad tropic leaves and brilliant flowers. All of a sudden, through this bright, bold gateway, you catch a glimpse of the faintest, softest, richest picture that ever graced the dream of a dying Saint, since John saw the New Jerusalem glimmering ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... has there been such exceptional weather, although the weather of my acquaintance invariably is exceptional. No sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted and blended into the soft darkness of a summer night than we appeared to sail straight into tropic heat and a sluggish vapor, brooding on the water like steam from a giant geyser. This simmering, oily, exhausting temperature carried us close to the line. "What is before us," we asked each other languidly, "if it be hotter ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... itself, and the sources of the Nile—how many have struggled through ice and snow, or burned themselves with tropic heat, in the effort to penetrate these secrets of the earth! And how many have left their bones to whiten on the desert or lie hidden beneath icebergs at the end of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Elephantine vineyards, and fig-trees never lost their leaves. We ourselves, and our big three-decked boat were alone in our modernity, if one forgot the line of gay buildings on the shore. Everything else might have been of the time when the world supposed Elephantine to be placed directly on the Tropic of Cancer, and believed in the magic lamp which lit the unfathomable well; the time when quarries of red and yellow clay gave riches to the island, and all Egypt thanked its gods when Elephantine's Nilemeter showed that the Two Lands would ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... glass nor the others showed any good landing there. As the launch drew in towards the cliffs I began to get the lie of the place more clearly; and especially of what I call the mainland, which was wonderfully fresh and green in the sunlight and seemed to have some of the tropic luxuriance of more southern islands. About four miles long, I judged it to be, from the high black rock to which it rose at the southward point, to the low dog's-nosed reef which defended it to the north. ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... brings to my tree, She thought, the free air's choice extremes, But yet it grows as joyfully And floods my chamber with its beams, So that some tropic land it seems Where oranges with ruddy gleams, And aloes, whose weird flowers the creams Of long rich centuries one deems, Wave through the softness of the gloom,— And these may blush a deeper bloom Because they gladden so ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Mine eyes brown, yielding beauties dance in time To the pulsing music of a saraband! And yet there is a flavor of the sea, [Sipping wine. The long-drawn heaving of the ocean wave, The gentle cradling of a tropic tide; Its native golden sun—I fear you sleep? Or do the travels of the wine so rock Your soul that self is lost in revery? Why, man, dream not too much of placid bliss; Nor wine, nor man, can reach this clear perfection Until they pass the rack of thunder and Of hurricane.—'Tis on us now! Awake! ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... look forward to the time when I may go to a more accustomed place. Either from long association with other scenes or because of some inexpressible deficiency in this tropic splendor, I am not satisfied even though I am exuberantly entertained. Something I miss. For weeks I wondered what single element I missed most. Out of the numberless associations of childhood and youth and eager manhood it is ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... flashes of dazzling brilliancy, the low, deep booming of thunder was heard, and soon the island vanished behind a violet veil of tropical rain, only to reappear, a quarter of an hour later, fresh, green, and sparkling in the ardent rays of the tropic sun. ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... delightful—is a season when continued cold weather and chilly rains hold back all but the hardiest birds, until—like the dammed-up piles of logs trembling with the spring freshets—the tropic winds carry all before them, and all at once winter birds which have sojourned only a few miles south of us, summer residents which should have appeared weeks ago, together with the great host of Canadian and other nesters of the north, ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... of 1812 the frigate cruised beneath tropic suns, much of the time off the coast of Brazil. Today the health and comfort of the bluejacket are so scrupulously provided for in every possible way that a battleship is the standard of perfection for efficiency in ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... for on the 19th a fair breeze sprang up, and sent us at a moderate and agreeable rate upon our course. The heat, however, was most oppressive; even awnings being unable to afford sufficient shelter. We were fast approaching the tropic of Cancer, and every day experienced a greater degree of sultriness; till at length, on the 25th, we crossed that imaginary boundary. Here we were visited, according to custom, by Neptune and his wife; and as the ceremony of shaving may be unknown ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... white wings in the harbor of Palos and sped across the unknown seas to bring back upon their return evidence of the existence of a new world far across the wide waste of waters. In fancy we picture that sturdy band kneeling with Columbus, richly attired, upon the tropic sands, while over them floats the blood and gold banner of Spain, as the priest clothed in vestments of his office asks the blessings of Almighty God upon the land which Columbus claims in the name of the House of Castile. In the background we see waving palms and dark-skinned ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... W.S.W. until he reached the tropic of Capricorn,* and this direction was kept until the 28th ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... The water steaming hot! A spoonful for each man of us, Another for the pot! We shall not drink from amber, Nor Capuan slave shall mix For us the snows of Athos With port at thirty-six; Whiter than snow the crystals, Grown sweet 'neath tropic fires, More rich the herbs of China's field, The pasture-lands more fragrance yield; For ever let Britannia wield The tea-pot of ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... rushed into the darkness, through the streaming deluge of that tropic clime. For the seraphic frenzy had now come upon the mage in good earnest, and all the Thought-reader burned in ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... found in it little more than a "record of crimes and miseries." A map of the globe, coloured crimson as to those countries where blood has flowed in armed conflicts between men, would present a circling splash of red; but the vast island which is balanced on the Tropic of Capricorn, and spreads her bulk from the tenth parallel of south latitude to "the roaring forties," would show up white in the spacious diagram of carnage. No foreign foe has menaced her thrifty progress since the British planted ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... of any husbandman and that extended, on and on, for leagues and leagues of velvet verdure, to the backbone of the great island, the towering mountain range flung up by some ancient earth-cataclysm, serrated and gullied but not yet erased by the erosive tropic rains. But the grass! He had crawled into it a dozen yards, buried his face in it, smelled it, and broken down in a ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... at full speed through the air, took flying leaps over outlying spurs of mountain ranges that lay in their path, swooped down into valleys, and flew over level plains fifty yards from the ground, like an albatross over the surface of a smooth tropic sea. Then he soared up from the earth again, until the horizon widened out to vast extent, and they could see the mighty buttresses of "the Roof of the World" stretching out below them in an endless succession of ranges as far as the ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... their very feet; in which, while their brows are swept by the cool breezes of a temperate zone, they can see far below, dim through their everlasting vapor-bath of rank hot steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colors of the tropic forest. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the street, past others in the doorways, past children and dogs and goats, the pair marched briskly to the faded blue house whence the federal superintendent ruled the town with tropic indolence. There they found a thin, fever-worn, gravely courteous ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... usually so unpliant to the spirit of people who live with her, showing a bleak and rugged face, which poetically should indicate the abode of savages and ogres, to Hans Christian Andersen and his hospitable countrymen, but lavishing the eternal summer of her tropic sea upon barbarians who eat baked enemy under her palms, or throw their babies to her crocodiles,—this stiff, unaccommodating Nature relents into a little expressiveness in the neighborhood of the Mormons, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... Lesbia, who had been curiously interested in this little bit of conversation—interested first because Smithson had seemed agitated by the mention of the Spaniard's name; secondly, because of the description of the man, which had a romantic sound. The very word tropic suggested a romance. And Lesbia, whose mind was jaded by the monotony of a London season, the threadbare fabric of society conversation, kindled at any image which ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the streets, with their high collars and nice clothes, their newspapers and walking-sticks and gloves. What did they know? I'd been like that, just as ignorant, just as conceited and narrow-minded. And I thought of the Corydon and the blue tropic sea! ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... days stay at that place, taking in a supply of wood and water, and procuring refreshments, they sailed from thence on the 24th July. Next day, they were in lat. 25 deg. 30' N. under the tropic of Cancer, fifty leagues from land. Being completely supplied with all necessaries, they continued their voyage, without stopping any where, and arrived at Plymouth on Monday the 26th of September, 1580, having been absent two years, nine months, and thirteen days. By their ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... is a thriving business centre. Perhaps it is on this account that its appearance from the car window is not as attractive as that of Riverside or Pasadena, which from all points of view seem peacefully embowered in half-tropic foliage. But away from the railroads San Bernardino also has its charming residence district, with the same general characteristics as its ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... alone vessels may emerge from the bay—is ever languid and faint. It comes from gardens of citrons and cloves, spiced with all the spices of the Tropic of Capricorn. And, like that old exquisite, Mohammed, who so much loved to snuff perfumes and essences, and used to lounge out of the conservatories of Khadija, his wife, to give battle to the robust sons of Koriesh; even so this Rio land-breeze ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. We almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box, artificially ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... one of those days when there was not the filmiest cloud to veil the sun; you could see the ether shimmering over the land, and the fields of yellow grain looked like lakes of molten metal. Shaded by our wide straw hats, Penelope and I had no thought of the tropic heat. We were engrossed in the reaper as it cut its way through the wheat; we followed it, counting the sheaves as they dropped with mechanical precision; we stepped along untiringly in its wake, as though the rough stubble were the smoothest of ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... that awaits any nation that lays unholy hands on an American citizen or violates any sacred American right. It has drawn from an admiring world unstinted applause for the invincible army, that under tropic suns, despite privations and disease, untrained but undismayed, has swept out of their own trenches and routed from their own battlements, like chaff before the wind, the trained forces of a formidable power. It has bodily stripped the past of lustre and ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... other end of the parlor a minute after, and the chess board came into requisition. If Miss Morris found little skill necessary to discomfit her opponent, and wondered thereat, she could not see, as he saw, a dark face, bowed on tropic blooms, flushed with unwonted glad color, lips apart and aquiver, wide eyes lustrous with purple light, shining through the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... champion of the Truth, whate'er it be! World-wand'rer over this terrestrial frame; Twin-named with Darwin on the roll of fame; This day we render homage unto thee; For in thy steps o'er alien land and sea, Where life burns fast and tropic splendours flame. Oft have we follow'd with sincere acclaim To mark thee unfold Nature's mystery. For this we thank thee, yet one thing remains Shall shrine thee deeper in the heart of man, In ages yet to ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... rare officials, undisguisedly somnambulant; and the customary loiterers, even to the middle-aged woman with the ulster and the handbag, fled to more congenial scenes. As in the inmost dells of some small tropic island the throbbing of the ocean lingers, so here a faint pervading hum and trepidation told in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thing is proved by similar evidence. A gigantic ice-cap extending from Canada has glaciated all the minor mountain ranges to the south, sweeping over the whole continent. The drift and boulders still remain to prove the fact, as far south as only 15 deg. north of the tropic. A warm oceanic current, like the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic, would shorten a glacial period. Speaking of Scotland, one authority states that "if the Gulf Stream were diverted and the Highlands upheaved to the height of the New Zealand ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... orders for the yacht to continue her route, steering to the west of the Canary group, and leaving Teneriffe on her larboard. She made rapid progress, and passed the Tropic of Cancer on the second of September ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... water chambers or altering in any way the weight of the ship. There is a nice clear space just ahead, with ample room in which to show ourselves and to make a downward plunge again beneath that large ship, the barnacle-covered bottom of which seems to tell of a long voyage through tropic seas. Now take up your stations of observation, gentlemen, and note the consternation which our unexpected appearance ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... cheered him up, and he could not brook our absence. At last the long day drew to an end and the shadows, to our intense relief, began to darken in our little room, where we were holding our watch. The tropic night closes quickly in. Soon the city was shrouded in darkness, and we sallied out to the beach at the head of the bay to find relief in movement. The time passed quicker then, and at last we sat down on some wreckage there and watched the tropic night as it revealed its wealth of stars, and ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Bascomb's talk, especially, of cloudless skies of richest blue, out of which the sun darted his flaming rays by day, and in which the stars blazed like jewels at night; of tranquil seas of sapphire in which creatures of strange forms and brilliant hues disported themselves; of tropic shores, coral fringed and clothed with graceful feathery palms backed by noble forest trees of precious woods, made glorious by flowers of every conceivable hue and shape, amid which hovered birds of such gorgeous plumage that they gleamed and shone in the sun like living ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... guess at by certain combinations. In the first place, the slight variation in the length of the days. Then I must try and make a rough calculation of the sun's parallax. And then my botany will help me a little; spices furnish a clew; there are one or two that will not grow outside the tropic. It was the longitude that beat me, and now we have conquered it. Hurrah! Now I know what to diffuse, and in what direction; east, southeast; the ducks have shown me that much. So there's the first step ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... gorgeous tropic land, and, with its bounteous rainfall and sunshine, brings forth many of the most highly prized productions of the tropics, with some that are peculiar to itself. Its botany is as yet very imperfectly known. Some of its forest trees are very valuable as timber, and others produce hard-veined ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
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