"El Dorado" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one thought of venturing in search of them. Columbus alone, regarded merely as a brave and intelligent seaman and pilot, conceived the idea that the earth was spherical, and that the East Indies, the great El Dorado of the century, might be reached by circumnavigating the globe. If we picture to ourselves the mental condition of the age and the state of science, we shall find no difficulty in conceiving the scorn and incredulity with which ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... three years and came back empty handed, but more convinced than ever that the treasure existed. Many of the Spaniards who swooped down upon the Chibcas did not return empty handed, although they failed to find the source of the El Dorado. They saw many strange customs which proved that gold in abundance was located somewhere within this small area. They saw the chiefs of the tribes cover themselves each morning with resin and then sprinkle powdered gold over their bodies until they looked as though in golden armor. ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... flower of any educational work is the occasional disclosure of the real bent of a student. That is always like the discovery of el dorado. The most important fact to be considered in any educational ideal is that the soul of every one has its own especial treasures and bestowals; and when one succeeds in touching with fresh fire ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... My father came to Emporia in 1859 and my mother in 1855. She was a pioneer school teacher and he a pioneer doctor. She was pure bred Irish, and he of Yankee lineage since 1639. When I was a year old, Emporia became too effete for my parents, and they moved to El Dorado, Kansas. There I grew up. El Dorado was a town of a dozen houses, located on the banks of the Walnut, a sluggish, but a clear and beautiful prairie stream, rock bottom, and spring fed. I grew up in El Dorado, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... was the Bibb family, long distinguished for wealth and influence in the State. The Watkinses, the Sheroos, and Dearings followed: some to north, some to south Alabama. W.W. Bibb was appointed, by Mr. Madison, Territorial Governor of Alabama, and was followed to the new El Dorado by his brothers, Thomas, John Dandridge, and Benajah, all ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... and we were constantly stumbling over squeaking pigs and venomous reptiles of many kinds. Little brown animals of the bear family were especially ubiquitous, so that our time was kept rather fully employed on our long trail towards the supposed land of El Dorado. ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... will inform you that he is a dealer in the materials for 'make-up,' theatrical or otherwise, and will leave you to consider the bearing of this bottle on our present investigation. There doesn't seem to be anything else of interest in this El Dorado excepting that screw, which you notice is about the size of those with which the bolts were fastened on the doors. I don't think it is worth while to unstop any of the holes to try it; ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... consist, whether in mere physical differences or in different mental laws, in the lack of certain of the great passional motors of men or the possession of quite others, were weird themes of never-failing attractions for my mind. The El Dorado visions with which the virgin mystery of the New World inspired the early Spanish explorers were tame and prosaic compared with the speculations which it was perfectly legitimate to indulge, when the problem was the conditions of ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... from European occupation, as well as reputed to be rich. Camden describes it as 'aurifera Guiana ab Hispanis decantata.' Many Spanish expeditions, from the year 1531 onwards, had been fitted out to find the King el Dorado, who loved to anoint his body with turpentine, and then roll in gold dust. Neither he nor his city, called by the same name, had been discovered. Attempts to penetrate into the interior had all failed. The Indians were warlike and united; the country was a jungle, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... wonderland—the great country discovered by adventurous mariners, and thought of, dreamed of, seen through a golden mist raised by the imagination—a mist which gave to everything its own peculiar hue; and hence the far-off land was whispered of as "El Dorado," the gilded, "the Golden Americas," and the country whose rivers ran over golden sand, whose rocks were veined with the coveted ore; and nations vied with each other in seeking to humble the haughty Spaniard, ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... of limb and trunk, to an erect, free carriage; and the beauty of his women is not a myth. The pioneers were all men of good body; they had to be to live and leave descendants. The bones of the weaklings who started for El Dorado in 1849 lie on the plains or in the hill cemeteries of the mining camps. Heredity began it; ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... look at them, look at them, Dad! Priest and prioress, abbot and friar, Soldier and seaman, knight and squire! How many countries have they seen? Is there a king there, is there a queen Dad, one day, Thou and I must ride like this, All along the Pilgrim's Way, By Glastonbury and Samarcand, El Dorado and Cathay, London and Persepolis, All ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Puerisque Crabbed Age and Youth An Apology For Idlers Ordered South Aes Triplex El Dorado The English Admirals Some Portraits by Raeburn Child's Play Walking Tours Pan's Pipes A ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Spaniards got the notion that the Moquis loved gold and possessed vast stores of that precious metal is not apparent unless it be, as Bandelier suggests, that it originated in the myth of the El Dorado, or Gilded Man.[2] The story started at Lake Guatanita in Bogota, and traveled north to Quivera, but the wealth that the Spaniards sought they never found. Their journey led them over deserts that gave them but little food and only a meager ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... come to Wall Street; all the world comes here, incorporates its idioms into its dialect and is infected with its spirit. It is a lounge for men of pleasure, a study for men of learning, an El Dorado for men of adventure, and a market for men of business. It has a habitat and a manner, a character and a vernacular. It bristles with incongruity and contradiction, yet it is ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... Halicarnassus, when we were fairly beyond ear-shot of the city next morning, "I don't approve of sumptuary laws, and I like America to be the El Dorado of the poor man, and I go for the largest liberty of the individual; but I do think there ought to be a clause in the Constitution providing that servants shall not be dressed and educated and accomplished up to the point of making ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... intoxicating an effect on the imaginations of literary antiquaries, as the adventures of the heroes of the Round Table on all true knights; or the tales of the early American voyagers on the ardent spirits of the age, filling them with dreams of Mexican and Peruvian mines, and of the golden realm of El Dorado. ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... may not go there, though I long for it. Those who attain to its borders never come back again—and why should they leave it? Yet there are tales told, and I have heard that this Arcady is the veritable El Dorado, and that in it is the true Fountain of Youth, gushing forth unfailingly for the refreshment of all who may reach it. But no one may find the entrance who cannot see it by the light that never was ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... the fancy to excited nerves or a too hearty dinner. Had he dreamed, further, that the grotesque mounted corps was to be employed in regions two thousand miles beyond the frontier of the Anglo-Saxon pioneer of 1789, to guard travel to an actual El Dorado, the vision would have appeared still more extraordinary. And its absurdity would have seemed complete, if he had fancied the high road of this travel as leading through a community essentially Oriental in its social ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... crime, as might naturally have been expected in a country where, while there were undoubtedly many honest men, there were also thousands of scoundrels of all nations who had been attracted thither by the dazzling accounts given of the new El Dorado in the West. Rows, more or less severe, in reference to claims and boundaries, had become frequent. Cold-blooded murders were on the increase; and thefts became so common that a general sense of insecurity began ...
— Digging for Gold - Adventures in California • R.M. Ballantyne
... opened the great chest, and drew out the ivory box. It was locked, but the key was in it. He turned it and threw open the lid. There was a white slip of paper with his own name written upon it. With trembling fingers he unfolded it. Was he the heir to the riches of El Dorado, or was he destined to be a poor struggling artist? The note was dated that very evening, and ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... memory marvellous, his reading immense, his mind discursive and agile, his style pellucid as water and often vigorous, while his subordinate conceptions are always ingenious and frequently valuable. Besides this, he is a genuine enthusiast, and sees before him that El Dorado of the understanding where golden knowledge shall lie yellow on all the hills and yellow under every footfall,—where the very peasant shall have princely wealth, and no man shall need say to another, "Give me of thy wisdom." It is this same element of romantic expectation which stretches a broad ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the light of far Cathay, Beyond all mortal dreams, Beyond the reach of night and day Our El Dorado gleams, ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... Lakes. They, accordingly, in the year 1686, fitted out an expedition, and through the interposition of the Fox Indians, whose friendship they secured by valuable presents; the expedition reached Old Mackinaw, the "Queen of the Lakes," and found the El Dorado they had so ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... mining city must go through with a certain amount of unadulterated cussedness before it can settle down and behave itself in a conservative and seemly manner. Virginia has grown up in the heart of the richest silver regions in the world, the El Dorado of the hour; and of the immense numbers who are swarming thither not more than half carry their mother's Bible or any settled religion with them. The gambler and the strange woman as naturally seek the new sensational town as ducks take to that ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... but he had quite slept off his dread. The shadow had dropped away and nothing was left but the beauty of his love, which seemed to shine in the freshness of the early day. He felt absurdly happy—as if he had discovered El Dorado; quite apart from consequences—he was not thinking of consequences, which of course were another affair—the feeling was intrinsically the finest one he had ever had, and—as a mere feeling—he had not done with it yet. ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... Ohio, and at Princeton. Served as assistant librarian at the Astor and Lenox Libraries in New York City from 1897 to 1903. His volumes of poetry and poetic drama include: "The House of a Hundred Lights", 1900; "El Dorado, A Tragedy", 1903; "Abelard and Heloise: A Drama", 1907. Since Mr. Torrence published his last collection, he has done some of his finest work in lyric and narrative poetry, work that has appeared in the magazines and which will probably be collected soon into book form. He is a poet of vision, ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... who participated in the fun and had their full share of the crumbs—and the times when a grand seigneur paid a hundred pounds a week in wages alone seem something like glimpses into a railed and fenced off El Dorado, which the Plan of Campaign has closed for ever. So that the sunshine has its shadow, for all the good to be had ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... hours, not ever to be lived again. They were the hours that all youth enjoys and delights in once—when, like gold-diggers arrived in sight of El Dorado, they halt and peer at the chimera that ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... between railroad expansion and the general development and prosperity of the country is nowhere brought more distinctly into relief than in connection with the construction of the Pacific railroads. With the opening of a transcontinental line the vast El Dorado of the West was laid practically at the doorstep of Eastern capital. Not only did American pioneers turn definitely toward the West, but foreign emigrants bent their steps in vast numbers in that direction, and capital in steadily ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... after Crusade, companies of adventure, lonely hermits drunken with silence, immense armies of dreamers, the chivalry of Europe, a host of little children. On her ramparts Columbus dreamed, and in her seas he fought with the Tunisian galleys before he set sail westward for El Dorado. And here Andrea Doria beat the Turks and blockaded his own city and set her free; and S. Catherine Adorni, weary of the ways of the world, watched the galleons come out of the west, and prayed to God, and saw the wind over the ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... well for Amyas had he never seen. For it was none other than a sort of rough journal which Don Guzman had kept as a lad, when he went down with the Adelantado Gonzales Ximenes de Casada, from Peru to the River of Amazons, to look for the golden country of El Dorado, and the city of Manoa, which stands in the midst of the White Lake, and equals or surpasses in glory even the palace of the Inca Huaynacapac; "all the vessels of whose house and kitchen are of gold and silver, and in his wardrobe statues of gold ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... history of countries and in the lives of individuals. The first scene of discovery and of conquest in the New World, these twin sheets of water, with their islands and their mainlands, became for many generations, and nearly to our own time, a veritable El Dorado,—a land where the least of labor, on the part of its new possessors, rendered the largest and richest returns. The bounty of nature, and the ease with which climatic conditions, aided by the unwarlike character of most ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... news of this discovery reached the Atlantic states and those farther west, men simply calculated by what route they could most quickly reach the new El Dorado, and the first companies of miners who travelled across the plains sacrificed everything for speed. The first rush passed through Salt Lake Valley in August, 1849. Some of the Mormons who had reached California ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... story: Think of it, oh, think of it— That immortal dream when El Dorado flushed the skies! Fill the beaker full and drink to Drake's undying glory, Yours and hers (Oh, drink of it!) ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... 20c per hour; night watchman, 20c per hour; laborers, 17c and 20c per hour; team (including driver), 40c per hour. The prices quoted for lumber, cement, limestone and sand are prices f. o. b., Louisiana, Iola, Kan., El Dorado, ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... BUSHY, or FRAGRANT GOLDENROD (Euthamia graminifolia; formerly S. lanceolata) lifts its flat-topped, tansy-like, fragrant clusters of flower-heads from two to four feet above moist ground. From July to September it transforms whole riverbanks, low fields, and roadsides into a veritable El Dorado. Its numerous leaves are very narrow, lance-shaped, triple or five nerved, uncut, sometimes with a few resinous dots. Range, from New Brunswick to the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... and search of the steamer El Dorado has not yet been accorded, but there is reason to believe that it will be; and that case, with others, continues to be urged on the attention of the Spanish Government. I do not abandon the hope of concluding with Spain some general arrangement which, if it do not wholly ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and ate lunch in the shade of the live-oaks at El Dorado Springs, which used to be a much-frequented watering-hole in the days when Camp Grant thrived and mule-skinners freighted supplies in to feed Uncle Sam's pets. Two hours later they stopped again at the edge of the Santa Cruz wash, two miles ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... twenty years hence 'El Dorado' will be regarded as by far the best of Bayard Taylor's works—certain it is that in it he is among the pioneer describers of a land the early accounts of which will be carefully investigated and duly honored. In picturing lands, where others have been noting and sketching ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... if I were boasting, but this is something for a young Englishman to be able to say in a country which, though it is the veritable El Dorado of poor Drake's dreams, and has possibly a future of wealth and prosperity before it when it comes under the rule of the Anglo-Saxon race—whether of ourselves, or of our cousins in Yankee land it does not much matter, for ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... to meet him. In fact, he could hardly believe in his good fortune. Mohammed-Ben-Omar belonged to that class of Algerians who, listening to the counsel of French financiers, always cherished the project of making Algeria into a veritable El Dorado, and had now come to France to lend the support of his name and authority to some one of the speculations built on the sands of the desert, of which the Tuileries people were ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... fluttering in the air, the ships dashing through the briny deep, the foliage upon the hills in the dim distance, the glittering steeples of the great city of El Dorado,—and one of GEORGE LAW'S old man-traps in the foreground, with a high-pressure boiler (you see there is an excursion party on board, with a band of music), and an open bay,—all combine to lend to this wonderful triumph of art an airy and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 39., Saturday, December 24, 1870. • Various
... the idea of going down so far, for I always like to be able to depend upon myself in an emergency, and I was now as helpless as a log. They put me in a swinging cot, which was a great idea to prevent seasickness. We went slowly out the harbor to sea with our prow pointing toward "Blighty," the El Dorado of the wounded Tommy. 'Twas little I saw of river, harbor, or sea from my berth in the nethermost depths of that vessel's hold. I was told we went across with all lights out. The days had passed when, in our folly, we painted our hospital-ships white with a ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... brother of the great Pizarro had returned to Peru with a legend of a prince of Guiana whose body was smeared with turpentine and then blown upon with gold dust, so that he strode naked among his people like a majestic golden statue. This prince was El Dorado, the Gilded One. But as time went on this title was transferred from the monarch to his kingdom, or rather to a central lake hemmed in by golden mountains in the heart of Guiana. Spanish and German adventurers made effort after effort to reach ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... had a fuller life. Of all travellers he was surely the most enthusiastic. What had he not seen? The plains of the Indus, the slopes of the Blue Mountains, the classic cities of Italy, the mephitic swamps of Eastern Africa, the Nilotic cataracts, Brazil, Abeokuta, Iceland, El Dorado—all knew well—him, his star-sapphire, and his congested church service: lands fertile, barren, savage, civilized, utilitarian, dithyrambic. He had worshipped at Mecca and at Salt Lake City. He had looked into the face of Memnon, and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... puns and conundrums that the social life of Brook Farm was rich. It was rich in cheerful buzz. The bumble-bees had no more melodious hum than the Brook Farmers. They had thrown aside the forms that bind outside humanity. They were sailing on a voyage of discovery, seeking a modern El Dorado, but they did not carry with them the lust for gold. They were seeking something which, had they found the realization of, would have carried peace to troubled hearts, contentment and joy to all conditions and classes. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... El Dorado in every sense, had a different settlement, and by a different people. They were, for the most part, Germans, of the same class with those that settled in the great valleys of Pennsylvania, and who have made so large a portion of that State into a rich ingrain-carpet of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... conditions on which the loan was made? The man who leaves his country for its (and his) good has an especial fondness for the distant. The further off the nearer he feels like home. Australia is an El Dorado—the antipodes a celestial region. The intervening sea is one over which the most penetrating of argus-eyed policemen or sheriffs, can not see. Australia—is it not the land of gold? Who that has poached a pile ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... of the earth where the cacao tree originally grew, and still grows wild to-day, is the country watered by the mighty Amazon and the Orinoco. This is the very region in which Orellano, the Spanish adventurer, said that he had truly seen El Dorado, which he described as a City of Gold, roofed with gold, and standing by a lake with golden sands. In reality, El Dorado was nothing but a vision, a vision that for a hundred years fascinated all manner of dreamers ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... statesman, courtier, schemer, patriot, soldier, freebooter, discoverer, colonist, castle-builder, historian, philosopher, chemist, prisoner, and visionary," is, of course, from the romantic point of view, principally associated with El Dorado, and his quest of the magic and imaginary land of gold. It was for this reason that Raleigh's dealings with the Spaniards in South America were more circumscribed than those of many of his colleagues. Led to the belief, both by his own fanciful convictions and by the legends brought ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... 75,000 sesterces (750 pounds), and Lucius Lucullus, consul in 680, thirty-three times that price. The villas and the luxurious rural and sea- bathing life rendered Baiae and generally the district around the Bay of Naples the El Dorado of noble idleness. Games of hazard, in which the stake was no longer as in the Italian dice-playing a trifle, became common, and as early as 639 a censorial edict was issued against them. Gauze fabrics, which displayed rather than concealed the figure, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... followers respecting the rich Cathay and the Spice Islands of the Indies have had so permanent a hold upon the imagination, that even the best educated amongst us have, in their youth, galloped over Pampas, in search of visionary Uspallatas. Nor is it yet quite clear that the golden city of El Dorado is wholly fabulous, the region in which it was said to exist not having yet been penetrated by Science; but it soon will be, for a steamboat is to ply up the Maranon, and Peru and Europe are to be brought in contact, although the voyage down ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... El Dorado, no alloy Mixed with the coinage of their wedded life; The workmen in the mint an honest throng. No wonder, then, that with go fine a bliss Informing every fibre of his brain, His thoughts begat impressions such as this; Linking ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... at St. John's for the purpose of coaling we got under way for that haven of blockade-runners, El Dorado of adventurers, and paradise of wreckers and darkies—filthy Nassau. In making our way to this port we had a foretaste of some of the risks and dangers to be subsequently encountered. In order to economize coal and to lessen the risk of capture I determined to approach Nassau by the "Tongue ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... warm with admiration, and here, in view of the forest-land which was their El Dorado, tingled ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook |
