"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 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 or ophthalmia the misery reached the limit of human experience. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... 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
... 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 draft The great throat of ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... 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
... 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 ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... 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
... pictured each by each? We fondly deemed that where our 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 ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... fair Earth spake: the glad Sun speeded forth, Hearing her matron words, and backward drave To frozen caves the icy Wind of the North,— And bade the South Wind from the tropic wave Bring watery vapors over river and plain,— And bade the East Wind cross her path, and lave The lowlands, emptying there her laden mist,— And bade the Wind of the West, the best wind, blow After the early and the latter rain,— And beamed himself, and oft the sweet Earth kissed, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... 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
... 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, labor and co-operative ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... 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
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... 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
... 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 old, true, ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... 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 |
