"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... him, haply, from the false shame of that eager demand for one, which she saw ready to leap to words in his eyes. He read it, sitting in the Richford library alone, while the great rhododendron bloomed outside, above the shaven sunny sward, looking like a monstrous tropic bird alighted to brood ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the countries he visited; time and again he moves his readers in describing the wonders of the great waste places, the melancholy deserts and wildernesses, the deadly fascination of the jungle, and the awful glory of the tropic dawns and sunsets. When something awakened his imagination he could write passages full of the magic of poetry. Witness this, it is not a description of scenery, but a vision of the true historian of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... wood for the unpeopled quarter of the island and the long, desert beach, where he might rage to and fro unseen, and froth out the vials of his wrath, fear, and humiliation. Doubtless in the curses that he there uttered to the bursting surf and the tropic birds, the name of the Kaupoi—the rich man—was frequently repeated. I had made him the laughing-stock of the village in the affair of the king's dumplings; I had brought him by my machinations ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fight the Huns- No coward thought could bind me, I sizzled n the tropic suns, I faced the bayonets and the guns. And when in daring deeds I shone One little woman spurred me on- The girl ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... well, to stimulus, Dr. Bose proceeded to study the nature of responses evoked in plants by the stimuli of the natural forces. He found that plants respond visibly, by movements, to environmental stimuli. But the movements induced—'tropic' movements—are extremely diverse. Light, for example, induces sometimes positive curvature, sometimes negative. Gravitation, again, induces one movement in the root, and the opposition in the shoot. Dr. Bose applied himself to find out ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... 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, are away fighting ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... lovely Youth! I guess The panther in the wilderness Was not so fair as he; And, when he chose to sport and play, 40 No dolphin ever was so gay Upon the tropic sea. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... in about the latitude of 48 deg. south, and from 16 deg. to 30 deg. of longitude east of the Cape of Good Hope, discovered six islands, which were high and barren. These, together with some islands lying between the Line and the southern tropic in the Pacific Ocean, were the principal discoveries made in this voyage, the account of which, we were ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... emotion. From long residence near the equator he diagnosed the outbreak as a case of tropic choler, aggravated by nostalgia ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... full of excitement, they began to advance through the low bushes toward the long line of white vapour slowly curling like a bank of clouds, for the one desire now among all was to stand face to face with the mountain which had partially burned up the face of the beautiful tropic land. ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... thaw frozen flesh with snow, So Spring will not her time forerun, Mix polar night with tropic glow, Nor cloy us with unshaded sun, Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance, But she has the temperance Of the gods, whereof she is one,— Masks her treasury of heat Under east winds crossed with sleet. Plants ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... enough to do honours to the fashionable gamblers of New York, but there was never the slightest sign of excitement. At first I used to expect that surely the card table would bring forth all sorts of flashes of tropic temperament—even a shooting or stabbing affair. But the composure was always perfect. I have seen a loser pay, without so much as a regretful remark, the sum of three million and a half reis, which, though only $1050 in our money, is still a considerable ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... stereographic projection on the plane of the equinoctial; the eye is supposed in one of the poles, so that the tropic, ecliptic, and horizon form the arches of the circles, but the hour-circles are all curves, drawn by means of several altitudes of the sun, for some particular latitude, for every day in the year. The use of this instrument is to find the hour of the day, the sun's azimuth, and other common problems ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... dry times it was a desert, lacking wholly, however, in the beauty, the mystery, and the spell of a desert; in wet times it was a gehenna of mud and slush and stickiness, and entirely minus that beauty and freshness that attends the rainy seasons in a tropic clime. It was a land peopled by a hard-bitten race of nesters—come from God knows where and for God knows why—starved in mind and body, slaves of a hideous environment from which they lacked means ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... great tracts of meadow verdure. See how Kingsley grows contented,—how he becomes wise. "Have you eyes to see? Then lie down on the grass, and look near enough to see something more of what is to be seen; and you will find tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; mountain cliffs and debacles at the mouth of every rabbit burrow; dark strids, tremendous cataracts, 'deep glooms and sudden glories' in every foot-broad rill which wanders through the turf.... ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... buccaneers, of fortunes made in evil wise and spent in evil fashion. But it was not so much the particulars as the generalities of their talk that delighted me. I loved to hear of islands where the cocoa trees grew, and where parrots of every hue under heaven squealed and screamed in the tropic heat; where girls as graceful as goddesses and as yellow as guineas wore robes of flaming feathers and sang lullabies in soft, impossible tongues; lands of coral and ivory and all the glories of the earth, where life was full of golden possibilities and a world away ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... oars and headed for the northwest. It is hardly necessary to say that we had lost our reckoning; but, after a manner, we made out that we were nearly in longitude 136.30 west, and about upon the Tropic of Capricorn. This would have made our situation about a hundred and seventy miles from a number of small islands lying to the eastward of the one hundred and fortieth meridian. The prospect was discouraging, as there was hardly a sound ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... lines of wagons had conveyed to Erfurt costly furniture, covered with velvet and gilt ornaments, from the imperial garde-meubles of Paris, magnificent porcelain from Sevres, precious gobelins and silks from Lyons and Rouen, rare wines from Bordeaux, tropic fruits from Marseilles, and truffles from Perigord. Not only the castle, but also the prominent private residences, had been decorated in the most sumptuous style. An army of cooks and kitchen-boys had garrisoned the basements and kitchens filled with ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... change, and then, to her strained and sensitive mind, this dead calm and cessation of events would seem to resemble that ominous moment when, in tropic seas, the fierce outrider of the tempest has passed howling away clothed in flying foam. Then comes a calm, and for a space there is blue sky, and the sails flap drearily against the mast, and the vessel only ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... in a journey 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 over ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... the limit of perpetual snow we see the whole great procession in a glance. We have come across no African, nor South American, nor Australian plants, so we have not seen anything like the whole of plant life. But the range from the tropic to the arctic has been complete and continuous. In no other region could we in so short a space as a hundred miles—the distance from Bath to London—see the ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... of the same intense color and adorned with a bird of paradise. I can see it now and can recall the images it suggested to my mind at the time. These were of cardinals and kings, of sealing-wax and wafers, of tropic noons and tangled marshes, of hell and judgment and the conventional Zamiel. It looked fit to be worn by a Mrs. Zamiel, if there be such a person. I looked so long and earnestly that I evidently attracted the notice of the mistress of the shop, for I saw a hand push ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... observed that in their cups commonplace people, and not geniuses, do the most unusual things. So with all other intoxications. Noble Dill was indeed no genius, and some friend should have kept an eye upon him to-day; he was not himself. All afternoon in a mood of tropic sunrise he collected rents, or with glad vagueness consented instantly to their postponement. "I've come about the rent again," he said beamingly to one delinquent tenant of his father's best client; and turned and walked away, humming ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... other fruit trees; others, again, were planted with ornamental trees only: the tamarisk, the cassia, the acacia, the myrtle, the mimosa, and some still rarer gum-trees found beyond the cataracts of the Nile, under the Tropic of Cancer, in the oases of the Libyan Desert, and upon the shores of the Erythrean Gulf; for the Egyptians are very fond of cultivating shrubs and flowers, and they exact new species as a tribute from the ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... They lay one upon the other, these ledges of lime and sandstone, some red, some yellow, some white; and, heaped upon the top like a rich coating of chocolate, was the brownish-black cap of the lava. In ages long past each layer had been a mud bank at the bottom of a tropic sea, until the weight of waters had pressed them down and time had changed them to stone. Then Mother Earth had breathed and in a slow, century-long heave, they had emerged from the bottom of the sea, there to be broken and shattered by the pent-up forces of the fire ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... and westward to the Pacific. It had been nibbled at, for a hundred years, by Spaniards, French and English, but no permanent hold had been got upon it. Here were thousands upon thousands of square miles in which nature rioted unrestrained, with semi-tropic fervor; the topography of which was unknown, and whose character in any respect was a matter of pure conjecture. This wilderness was on one side; on the other were a worthless king, a handful of courtiers, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... follow that flying zone of light, as swiftly as the air, one could pursue the same sunset all the world over, and see the fiery face of the sun ever sinking to his setting, over the broad furrows of moving seas, over tangled tropic forests, out to the shapeless wintry land of the south. Day by day has the same pageant enacted itself, for who can tell what millions of years. And in that vast perspective of weltering aeons has come the day when God has set me here, a tiny sentient ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rest upon me, O my parents, who have thrust me forth, Who have left me in the cavernous cliff, Who have heartlessly placed me in the Cliff frequented by the tropic bird! O Waiaalaia, my mother! O Waimanu, my father! Come and ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... are the sword and shield which this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth—if she is not to stand merely as the China of the western hemisphere. Our proper conduct toward the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain is merely the form which our duty has taken at the moment. Of course, we are bound to handle the affairs of our own household well. We must see that there is civic good sense in our ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... of the Goodspeed, had sailed with thirty others, five years before, from Dartmouth in a bark named the Concord. He had not made the usual long sweep southward into tropic waters, there to turn and come northward, but had gone, arrow-straight, across the north Atlantic—one of the first English sailors to make the direct passage and save many a weary sea league. Gosnold and his men had seen Cape Ann and Cape Cod, and had built upon ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... of this sequestered nook; but it is in fact a crowded thoroughfare. No tropic jungle more swarms with busy existence than these midsummer waters and their bushy banks. The warm and humming air is filled with insect sounds, ranging from the murmur of invisible gnats and midges, to the impetuous whirring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... tropic isles probably owe their present isolation, if not their actual existence, to mighty earthquake throes in remote ages of terrestrial history beyond the memory of man. But man's memory is not a very extensive affair, and at best probes the past to the extent of a mere rind of a few thousand ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... horrid shriek last night? It must have disturbed every one. I think it must have been one of the South American birds which Captain Tropic gave the Marchioness. Do not they sometimes favour the world with these nocturnal shriekings? Is not there a passage in ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... 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 ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... 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, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... At the end of the garden ran a slow stream of muddy water in a channel with crumbling banks trodden by many naked feet. Beyond it was yet another lower wall of earth, yet another maze of palms. Heat and silence brooded here like reptiles on the warm mud of a tropic river in a jungle. Lizards ran in and out of the innumerable holes in the walls, and flies buzzed beneath the ragged leaves of the fig trees and crawled in the ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... heavy equipment on a very empty stomach. He learnt to eke out his meagre supplies by living on the wild game of the country, the native flour, bananas and mangoes. He knew what it meant to have dysentery and malaria. He had marched under a broiling sun by day and shivered in the tropic dews at night. He knew what it was to sleep upon the ground; to hunt for shade from the vertical sun. These and many other things did he know, and herein lies the chief interest of this or ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... on the zephyr at eventide's hour; It falls on the heart like the dew on the flower,— An infinite essence from tropic to pole, The promise, the home, and the ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... and touches the equator; at 40 deg. E. Long., it crosses the Red Sea about 16 deg. north of the equator, and at 120 deg. it falls at Borneo, several degrees below it;—and the points of the greatest heat, in this line, are in Abyssinia, nearer the tropic of Cancer than to the equator. On the other hand, the greatest mean cold points, according to the opinions of Humboldt, Sir David Brewster, and others, do not coincide, as would seem natural, with the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... of one pitiful little Banana Republic between them. On one hand the Grass, funneled and constricted to a strip of land absurdly inadequate to support its gargantuan might, on the other the combined resources of man, desperately determined to destroy the bridge before the invader. In tropic heat the work was kept up at superhuman pace. Gangs of native laborers fainting under their loads were blown skyhigh by impatient technicians unwilling to waste the time necessary to revive them. In selfdefense the South American states doubled their contributions. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like .. Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... good mem'ry, but tryin' to guess what she is goin' to do has got the weather man backed off inter a corner an' squealin' for help. They ain't all like Kansas. My first resembled it, the second was sorter tropic—she run off with a rainmaker an' I hear she's been divorced three times since then. Mebbe that's an exaggeration. My third must have been born someways nigh the no'th pole. W'en she got mad she'd freeze the blood ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... Grand, and pleasing, and inspiring. On a bark we will convey us Through the peering rocks and islands, Where the Summer brings its sunshine, And the Winter frost and snow-storms, For a season to the lone isles. Then unto the tropic regions, Where the proud sun pours its glory On the burning sandy deserts; Streams of brightness everlasting, Like ten thousand mountains blazing; And the khamsheens wild and fiercely Sweep in burning flakes along them, And torment the weary traveller Who is slowly wading ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... stretching across the sea. Following them out it will be made plain why "Shorty" O'Day, of the Columbia Detective Agency, resigned his position. And, for a lighter pastime, it shall be a duty and a pleasing sport to wander with Momus beneath the tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere. Now to cause laughter to echo from those lavish jungles and frowning crags where formerly rang the cries of pirates' victims; to lay aside pike and cutlass ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... observation, under his own eye; and he taught us how to work our reckoning; so that in the course of the voyage some of us got to know a good deal about navigation. And, Jack, I had good evidence of the value of religion also, particularly when we encountered the equinoctial gale in the southern tropic, and were near going down. Then it was, Jack, when we had lost our foretopmast, and our maintopsail and most of our other sails had been blown into ribbons; when the sea had carried away nearly all our bulwarks, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... 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, ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... trip is the "loop" beyond San Bernardino. The town of San Bernardino is a thriving business centre. Perhaps it is on this account that its appearance from the car window is not as attractive as that of Riverside or Pasadena, which from all points of view seem peacefully embowered in half-tropic foliage. But away from the railroads San Bernardino also has its charming residence district, with the same general characteristics as ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... to Imlac, "for five years the regulation of the weather, and the distribution of the seasons: the sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I have restrained the rage of the Dog-star, and mitigated the fervor of the Crab. The winds alone ... have hitherto refused my authority.... ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... 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 never, ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... boat. Sometimes we row in front of the town, which literally stands in the water, in some places, musing on the quaint old walls, and listening to the lore of honest John, who moves two crooked oars as leisurely as a lady of the tropic utters, but who has seen great events in his time. Sometimes even this lazy action is too much for the humour of the moment, and we are satisfied with drifting along the shore, for there is generally ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... gained rapidly in his chosen profession, as did his chum, Billy Raynor, who was third assistant engineer of the big vessel. The next volume, which was called "The Ocean Wireless Boys and the Lost Liner," told of the loss of the splendid ship "Tropic Queen," on a volcanic island after she had become disabled and had drifted helplessly for days. By wireless Jack managed to secure aid from U. S. vessels, and it came in the nick of time, for the island was destroyed by an eruption just after the last of the rescued passengers ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... 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
... bottoms of some of the gorges, which descend to the coast, are filled up to the depth of about a hundred feet, by rudely divided layers of sand, muddy clay, and fragmentary masses; in these beds, Mr. Seale has found the bones of the tropic-bird and of the albatross; the former now rarely, and the latter never visiting the island. From the difference between these layers, and the sloping piles of detritus which rest on them, I suspect that they were deposited, when the gorges ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... comments, that I was doomed so soon to repent; a hundred visions of her start to my eyes; and there is the trade-wind singing in the rigging, and loosening a tress of my darling's hair, till it flies like a tiny golden streamer in the tropic sun. There, it is out! I have called her what she was to be in my heart ever after. Yet at the time I must argue with her—with her! When all my courage should have gone to love-making, I was plucking ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... mumbling incantations with doubt and disfavour. Indeed Bakahenzie seemed to them the symbol of the fallen god and a past regime; impotent and as mistaken as they were. In each and every one of them were suspicions and fears growing like weeds in tropic rain that he had made an error in not propitiating the new god in time, an impulse which required but a few hours' growth to propel them out to the north-east after Sakamata and ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... inclination that produces the seasons. Now it is not the same for Jupiter. His axis of rotation remains almost vertical throughout the course of his year, and results in the complete absence of climates and seasons. There is neither glacial zone, nor tropic zone; the position of Jupiter is eternally that of the Earth at the season of the equinox, and the vast world enjoys, as it were, perpetual spring. It knows neither the hoar-frost nor the snows of winter. The heat received from the Sun diminishes gradually from ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... did not see it to be heavy sables. But when, one day, I did raise my glasses and glanced at her, I did not see the old maid whom we all pitied for a secret sorrow, but a woman whose nature was a tropic, in which the sun shone, and birds sang, and flowers bloomed forever. There were no regrets, no doubts and half wishes, but a calm sweetness, a transparent peace. I saw her blush when that old lover passed by, or ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... 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 green, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... disappeared from our ken; but we heard that he had written a letter or letters to Heyst, saying that London was cold and gloomy; that he did not like either the men or things, that he was "as lonely as a crow in a strange country." In truth, he pined after the Capricorn—I don't mean only the tropic; I mean the ship too. Finally he went into Dorsetshire to see his people, caught a bad cold, and died with extraordinary precipitation in the bosom of his appalled family. Whether his exertions ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... men and some thirty carriers stood under the tropic blaze for forty-five minutes while the commander checked over their equipment with minute precision. Nothing faulty or sloppy was going into that jungle with him if ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the most natural 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, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... rocks in it had been smoothed by mountain torrents during thousands of wet seasons, and the walls protected one from the biting wind, a wind that went through me, for I had been stewing for nine months and more in tropic and equatorial swamps. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... raised by the fires of the very Inferno out of the depths of the ocean centuries ago, to become in recent years a smiling land of tropic beauty and an American island possession! Hawaii is the land of great volcanoes, sometimes slumbering and again pouring forth floods of molten fire to overwhelm the peaceful villages and arouse the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... to greet the glory of June sunlight over the shoulder of Storm King. A perfect morning, if ever any one was perfect since the world began—soft airs stirring in the forest, golden robins' full-throated song, the melody of the scarlet tropic birds they had named "fire-birds" for want of any more descriptive title, the chatter of gray squirrels on the branches overhead, all blent, under a sky of wondrous azure, to tell them of life, full and abundant, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Loraine and Flanders, Castile and Aragon, Naples and Milan, Mexico and Peru. Lewis might wear the imperial crown, might place a prince of his family on the throne of Poland, might be sole master of Europe from the Scythian deserts to the Atlantic Ocean, and of America from regions north of the Tropic of Cancer to regions south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Such was the prospect which lay before William when first he entered on public life, and which never ceased to haunt him till his latest day. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... battened down the engine-room hatch, and the sea rose to it and over it and climbed perilously near to the cabin companion-way and skylight. We were all sick with fever, but we turned out in the blazing tropic sun and toiled madly for several hours. We carried our heaviest lines ashore from our mast-heads and heaved with our heaviest purchase until everything crackled including ourselves. We would spell off and lie down like dead men, then get up and heave and crackle ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... undivided use the best, the airiest and by far the largest room on the steamer—a cabine de luxe indeed, that for a week's voyage on an Atlantic liner would have cost a small fortune, while here for a sea sojourn of more than double the time, under tropic skies, and while other and worthier women were sweltering three in a stuffy box below, it had cost but a smile. The captain had repented him of his magnanimity before the lights of Honolulu faded out astern. The General began to realize that he had been made a cat's-paw of and, his ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... opposite to each other, and the trade-wind always blowing, the state of affairs after daylight was much like that which prevailed in England when King Alfred invented lanterns, while in the latter end of June the days were, of course, as short as they could be on the tropic of Capricorn, so that Patteson got up in the dark at 5-30 in ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stretches upon three sides a vast level prairie, a meadow larger than the area of England and Wales, and as fertile as the luxuriant vegetation of thousands of years decaying under a semi-tropic sun could make it. Illinois is in round numbers 400 miles from north to south, its greatest breadth being about 200 miles. The Mississippi, running in vast curves along the entire length of its western frontier for 700 miles, bears away to southern ports the rich burden of wheat and Indian ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost-line back with tropic heat; And ever, when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed. The house dog on his paws outspread Laid to the fire his drowsy head, The cat's dark silhouette on the wall ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... only to be submerged the next moment and blotted out. About two o'clock single raindrops began to splash so loudly on the veranda roof just outside my window that the noise waked me; after that I only slept fitfully, and my ears were never free from the loud roaring of the tropic rain that began presently to fall upon Aiken. I dreamed that somebody had stolen the Great Lakes and while being hotly pursued had dropped them. All day it rained like that, and all the following night, and only let up a little the afternoon of the second day. I got into an oilskin then ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... China, are scarcely distinguishable from the Chinese. The same colour, except in a few instances as I have elsewhere observed, the same eyes, and general turn of the countenance prevail, on the continent of Asia, from the tropic of Cancer to the Frozen Ocean[36]. The peninsula of Malacca, and the vast multitude of islands spread over the eastern seas, and inhabited by the Malays, as well as those of Japan and Lieou-kieou, have clearly been peopled from the same common ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... shape, seems to have existed on all the continental lands except Australia, and to have been in a state of singular prosperity. As is often the case with other vigorous genera of mammals, the species were adapted to a very great variety of climates, and were fitted to endure tropic heat as well as ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... 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 with the mean truckling ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... shattered star Set in the silver crescent of the sand. The palm trees' plume uplifted dauntlessly To call the morning. At the forest's brim The day was made alive by human flowers, Sweet maidens who against the emerald Showed warm and brown in purest harmony. The fierce bright flame that is the tropic sea Burned on their eyes and called them to its heart. Like eager sea birds they forgot the land, And, happy as the amorous waves, they gave Their slim brown bodies to the sea's embrace. They found them driftwood and astride they leapt The feathered ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... green grass; the whole having the appearance of a well-kept lawn that had been artificially sodded or strewn with seed, which flourished with the luxuriance of every species of vegetation in that tropic country. ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... less news nowadays from our next-door neighbor, Mexico, than from Europe and Asia, therefore a 'Call' reporter, meeting a Comrade who has recently returned from the tropic peninsula, fell upon him and demanded news of the Socialist, labor ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... banks were crocodiles and hippopotami, while the river itself swarmed with fish and water-snakes. And over all rose the mist caused by heat and moisture, the death-dealing miasma of that tropic world. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... having drawn for the letters, the urns are prepared accordingly by one of the commissioners and the two censors. The preparation of the urns is After this manner. If the Senate be to elect, for example, the list called the tropic of magistrates, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... son, whose sad fate we have chronicled, had been given the control of Southern Spain, with his head-quarters in Seville. Here, after subduing the Comarca, he decided on an invasion of far-off Murcia, the garden-land of the south, a realm of tropic heat, yet richly fertile and productive. There ruled a valiant Goth named Theodomir, who had resisted Tarik on his landing, had fought in the fatal battle in which Roderic fell, and had afterwards, with a bare remnant of his followers, sought his own territory, which after him was called ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... abroad, our land to represent; The earth, from pole to tropic, is his range; He fills the bill for use and ornament, Greases the world, ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... they were anticipating grand carousals in port. Sharp words were interchanged, and the quarrel became more bitter. On the 24th they reached the influence of the trade winds, which blow continually from east to west. On the 6th of September they reached the Tropic of Cancer. In crossing this line a custom had long prevailed of performing a rite called baptism upon all on shipboard who then crossed for the first time. The indignity was inflicted upon all alike, without any regard to character or rank. But, by giving the sailors a rich ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... and not a single sound Breathes on the eternal stillness all around; 'Tis tropic noon! and yet the sultry time Seems like the twilight of some fairy clime. Spreading in lone luxuriance round is seen The mangrove's tangled maze of sombre green; Thro' mists that dwell those baneful fens upon Large orbed and pale peers out the shrouded Sun, And struggling ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the water chambers or altering in any way the weight of the ship. There is a nice clear space just ahead, with ample room in which to show ourselves and to make a downward plunge again beneath that large ship, the barnacle-covered bottom of which seems to tell of a long voyage through tropic seas. Now take up your stations of observation, gentlemen, and note the consternation which ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost-line back with tropic heat. And ever when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed. The house-dog on his paws outspread, Laid to the fire his drowsy ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... who, at the head of his adventurous party, has lately succeeded in passing the Tropic of Capricorn, informs me that, taking into consideration the whole of the southern part of Africa, there can be no doubt of its being a sterile country. On the southern and south-eastern coasts there are some fine forests, but with these ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... forth equipped for every climate from the tropic to the pole, and armed against every malady from Ague to Zoster. He carried also the paternal watch, a solid silver bull's-eye, and a large pocketbook, tied round with a long tape, and, by way of precaution, pinned into his breast-pocket. He talked about having ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Barganaza, d'Ancut, Dargaly, Ambiacatina, Caracogly, Amara, Maon (sic), Guegiera, Bally, Dobora, and Macheda. All of these provinces are situated directly under the equinoctial line between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer; but they are two hundred fifty leagues nearer our tropic than the other. The name of Prester John signifies Great Lord, and is not Priest [Presbyter] as many think. He has always been a Christian, but often schismatic. At the present time he is a Catholic and recognizes the Pope ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Now, conceive such an idea taking hold, however slowly, of a people of rare physical beauty, of acutest eye for proportion and grace, with opportunities of studying the human figure such as exist nowhere now, save among tropic savages, and gifted, moreover, in that as in all other matters, with that inmate diligence, of which Mr. Carlyle has said, "that genius is only an infinite capacity of taking pains," and we can understand ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... an artificial flower and everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and most men will swear they've seen a quill pen. So you saw that map among tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific Islands. It was the map of ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... have not fallen so. We are our fathers' sons: let those who lead us know! 'T was only yesterday sick Cuba's cry Came up the tropic wind, "Now help us, for we die!" Then Alabama heard, And rising, pale, to Maine and Idaho Shouted a burning word. Proud state with proud impassioned state conferred, And at the lifting of a hand sprang forth, East, west, and south, and ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... insect manufacture of islands. They are of all sizes. We give the description of a small one of this order in the Capricorn Group, an assemblage of islands and reefs on the north-east coast of Australia, so called from the parallel of the Tropic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... just before nightfall. Dark had come with the suddenness of the tropic seas. There was a puff of wind, followed by a steady breeze, and the schooner once more sped southward. Robert, anxious to breathe the invigorating air, came upon deck, and standing near the mainmast watched the sea rushing by. The captain paused ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... coral floors of ocean. And God said:—"Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men through seventeen centuries; this city I will bury, but not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my mysterious anger, set in azure light through generations to come; for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas." This city therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating along the noiseless depths of ocean; and oftentimes in glassy calms, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... obstacle and never breaking through after the brutal manner of civilization. The fire-flies gleamed in the brushwood on either hand, and from every side rose that all-pervading hum of busy insects through which the tropic forest ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... 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 ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... us, made all sail towards us. We tacked and stood again for Falmouth, where we anchored that evening and remained three days to complete our stores. We once more made sail for our destination, which I now found was the West Indies, without meeting further obstacle. As we neared the tropic those who had crossed it were anticipating the fun; others were kept in ignorance until Neptune came on board, which he did with one of his wives. It was my morning watch, when the frigate was hailed and desired to heave to, which was done. ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... impair The heart that like the lib'ral air All Nature's self embraces; That in the cold Norwegian main, Or mid the tropic ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... portly lady's hair had been black. But now, as suddenly as darkness vanishes in a tropic dawn, it was become light. No gradual approach of the grey, for the black had been equally artificial. The wig is the region without twilight. Only in the swart moustache had the grey crept on, so that perhaps the growing incongruity had necessitated ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... and Optics are defied by the sounds which you hear within yourselves in sleep, and by the light of an electric sun whose rays often overcome you. You know no more how light makes itself seen within you, than you know the simple and natural process which changes it on the throats of tropic birds to rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and opals, or keeps it gray and brown on the breasts of the same birds under the cloudy skies of Europe, or whitens it here in the bosom of our polar Nature. You know not how to decide whether color is a faculty with which all substances are endowed, ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... the comfort as an orchid to cloying tropic airs, she drew on her sheerest chemise, her most frivolous silk stockings. In a dreaming enervated joy she saw how smooth were her arms and legs; she sleepily resented the redness of her wrists and the callouses of the texture of ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... lies the Land to which yon Ship must go? Festively she puts forth in trim array; As vigorous as a Lark at break of day: Is she for tropic suns, or polar snow? What boots the enquiry? Neither friend nor foe She cares for; let her travel where she may, She finds familiar names, a beaten way Ever before her, and a wind to blow. Yet still I ask, what ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... 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 Malabar Hill, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... the Indian Ocean within so very recent a period, and not in the line of the Laccadive Archipelago. If you suppose the cold to travel from the southern pole northwards, it will not help us, unless we suppose that the countries immediately north of the northern tropic were at the same time warmer, so as to allow free passage from India to Africa, which seems to me too complex and unsupported an hypothesis to admit. Therefore I cannot see that the supposition of different longitudinal ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... dog, black and woolly gray, a dog rich in leisure and in meditation, scratched and grunted and slept. The thick sunlight was lavish on the bright water, on the rim of gold-green balsam boughs, the silver birches and tropic ferns, and across the lake it burned on the sturdy shoulders of the mountains. Over everything was ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis |
