"Upas" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to his brutal assassins, with an eloquence which would have disarmed the savage tiger, could have won wretches so much more pitiless than the most ferocious beasts of the wilderness, or saved him from their slow but sure poison, whose breath was worse than the upas tree to all who ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... with might and main on the prostrate trunks may be seen numberless insects of various species. Impalpably, however, the poison of the dead and decaying vegetation is inhaled into the system with a result sometimes as fatal as that which is said to arise from the vicinity of the Upas-tree. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... as many physiologists have insisted,[909] an affinity for special organic substances, whether natural or foreign to the body. We see this in the cells of the kidneys attracting urea from the blood; in the worrara poison affecting the nerves; upas and digitalis the muscles; the Lytta vesicatoria the kidneys; and in the poisonous matter of many diseases, as small-pox, scarlet-fever, hooping-cough, glanders, cancer, and hydrophobia, affecting certain ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... soil; the only hereditary condition that fastened itself upon us was servitude. Nature works in sincerity, and is ever true to its law. The bee hives honey; the viper distils poison; the vine stores its juices, and so do the poppy and the upas. In like manner every thought and every action ripens its seed, each according to its kind. In the individual man, and still more in a nation, a just idea gives life, and progress, and glory; a false conception portends disaster, shame, and death. A hundred and twenty years ago a West Jersey Quaker ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... thus be made to blossom as the rose. Others are dry land of a general character; but there is water enough to make all fruitful: so that instead of the thorn, the myrtle; and instead of the thistle, the fig; and instead of the deadly upas, the olive ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... therefore, an individual has as little right to fulfill his own conceptions by disgusting thousands, as, were his body as impenetrable to steel or poison, as his brain to the effect of the beautiful or true, he would have to decorate his carriage roads with caltrops, or to line his plantations with upas trees. ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... accepted. The people united in sincere effort to show a whole-souled hospitality to all strangers deserving of it. Gentlemen in the government were received with frank and free-handed kindness; and even a wretch, who had wintered in the shade of the Washington upas, was allowed to flutter about and not be gunned for by the double-barreled spectacles ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... on a grander scale, are presented by the extinct crater in the Island of Java called "Guevo Upas," the Poison-Valley. It is a level about half a mile in circumference, surrounded by precipitous rocks. From various parts of its soil carbonic acid gas is discharged in such quantities as to prove fatal to any animal venturing nigh. ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... fact, by thus emptying his mind of its serious and accustomed occupations, Mary made room for the very development she dreaded to flourish like an upas tree. For although he breathed no word of it, although he showed no sign of it, to Morris the memory of the dead was a constant companion. Time heals all things, that is the common saying; but would it be possible to formulate any fallacy ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... of death, but he had heard of it just as he had heard of the poisonous Upas-tree, growing on some distant ocean island, or of an evil star, under whose baleful influence he ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... grass, And carry down my current as I go Not common stones but precious gems to show; And tears (the holy water from sad eyes) Back to God's sea, from which all rivers rise, Let me convey, not blood from wounded hearts, Nor poison which the upas tree imparts. When over flowery vales I leap with joy, Let me not devastate them, nor destroy, But rather leave them fairer to the sight; Mine be the lot to comfort and delight. And if down awful chasms I needs must leap, Let me not murmur at my lot, but sweep On bravely ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... positive example. If, besides the coming of spring, any one external circumstance may be said to have struck his imagination, it was the despatch of FOURRIERS, while on a journey, to prepare the night's lodging. This seems to be his favourite image; it reappears like the upas-tree in the early work of Coleridge: we may judge with what childish eyes he looked upon the world, if one of the sights which most impressed him was that of a man going to ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only serious 'macula' in Fuller's mind is his uniform support of the right and duty of the civil magistrate to punish errors in belief. Fuller would, indeed, recommend moderation in the practice; but of 'upas', 'woorara', and persecution, there ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... one into the garden—in search of roses or dahlias or upas-trees or something of the sort, of course—and thereby causing one to encounter the most unlikely people, and really, quite the last person one would have thought of meeting, as all frequenters of house-party junketings will assure you. And thus ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... clime, where the traveller or settler could find good shooting, cheap labour, and cheap living. No enemy threatened its rest, and the natives were respectful and peaceful in their behaviour. But it was in those days that the native difficulty, that Upas tree that now overshadows and poisons the whole land, took root; for slowly, from all parts, all through that quiet time, by ones, by tens, by hundreds, refugees were flowing in, and asking and receiving land to settle on from ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... doctrine of supersedure is new. I have now proved that it is a plant of but ten days' growth. It was never seen or heard of until the 23d day of January, 1854. It was upon that day that this tree of Upas was planted; we already see its poison ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... no geographic line Can fix the boundary or the point define, Since each with each so closely interblends, Where Slavery rises, and where Freedom ends. Beneath your rocks the roots, far-reaching, hide Of the fell Upas on the Southern side; The tree whose branches in your northwinds wave Dropped its young blossoms on Mount Vernon's grave; The nursling growth of Monticello's crest Is now the glory of the free Northwest; To the wise maxims of her ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... crime-producing, soul-destroying evils of metropolitan life, rises the saloon, the deadly upas of the nineteenth century civilization, the black plague of moral life. In Chicago there are about 5,600 saloons. During the year ending March 1, 1891, observes the author of "Chicago's Dark Places," the expenditure for beer in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... reptile haunts the sweetest bower, The rose blooms on the thorn; There 's poison in the fairest flower That greets the opening morn. The hemlock and the night-shade spring In garden and in grove; But oh! the upas of the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the throne unsteady, and subverting God's law of order. Woman reigned by divine right only at home. If married, in the hearts of husband and children, and not in the gilded, bedizened palace of fashion, where thinly veiled vice and frivolity hold carnival, and social upas and social asps wave and trail. If single, in the affections of brothers and sisters and friends, as the golden sceptre in the hands of parents. If orphaned, she should find sympathy and gratitude and usefulness among the ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... solitary; and it was on these occasions I most enjoyed these forest paths, now as healthful as beautiful; yet, let only a few months pass away, and to sleep one night within their shade would be death as certain as though it were spent beneath the boughs of the poisonous Upas. ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... under the rich, glossy leaves of the orange groves; who look with disgust and loathing at the exaggerated proportions and venomous nature of all creeping things; who find the succulence of the fruit unpleasant to the taste, and the flowers, though fair to the eye, deadly as the upas tree to all other sense;—for whom it is no compensation to feel, with the first breath of morning air, the dull, leaden weight of life lifted, or no happiness to watch the sea heaving and palpitating with delight under the rays of the noon-day ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius's blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the 'winking virgin' to know why she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... there frowned a grove of blended banian boughs, thick- ranked manchineels, and many a upas; their summits gilded by the sun; but below, deep shadows, darkening night-shade ferns, and mandrakes. Buried in their midst, and dimly seen among large leaves, all halberd- shaped, were piles of stone, supporting falling temples of bamboo. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... UPAS TREE, a poison-yielding-tree, at one time fabled to exhale such poison that it was destructive to all animal and vegetable life for miles ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... by the older woman on account of the artist's daughter, who had been the source of so many incidents which had caused her pain, and Iras regretted that she had ever confided to her aunt her love for Dion. But, no matter what might happen, the upas-tree whence emanated all these tortures, anxieties, and vexations, must be rooted out—stricken from the ranks ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a fellow like Corver?" Mr. Enwright cried, with a special glance at George. "He's the upas-tree of decent architecture." ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... him and Lu, on that day, I didn't perceive half of this, only felt annoyed at their behavior, and let them feel that I was noticing them. There's nothing worse than that; it is a very upas-breath, it puts on the brakes, and of course a chill and a restraint overcame them till Mr. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... so far as satisfying her creditors, even out of the large allowance Mr. Ferrars made her; and still she had not the courage voluntarily to tell the truth, which yet she knew must burst upon him ere long. From what small beginnings had this Upas shadow come upon her! And what "falseness, mean deception, and mental ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... dangers of internal revolts,—it has likewise proven that our country possesses the means, the strength, the energy and stamina, to crush the hydra of disunion or rebellion, no matter where it may appear. For like the upas tree, if it is permitted to take root and grow, its proportions would soon become alarming, while its poisonous influence would pollute the atmosphere with ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney |
