"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... the—thing—these lights held firm and steady. They were seven—like seven little moons. One was of a pearly pink, one of a delicate nacreous blue, one of lambent saffron, one of the emerald you see in the shallow waters of tropic isles; a deathly white; a ghostly amethyst; and one of the silver that is seen only when the flying ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... see how low man can fall, you must go to the tropic jungle, where geniality of climate, plenty and variety of food, are in themselves a cause of degradation to the soul, as long as the Spirit of Christ is absent from it. Not in the barren desert, but in the rich forest, wanders the true savage, eating and eating all day long, like the ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... early 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 of Germany ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... 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
... tropic seas, 'Neath alien clusters of the nights, Looked, in the past, such eyes as ...
— A Father of Women - and other poems • Alice Meynell
... 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 |
