"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ease—only there was no sorrow near it, nor in its motions and changes much of any other expression than mere life. Her hair was a dead brown, mistakable for black, with a burnt quality in it, and so curly, in parts so obstinately crinkly, as to suggest wool—and negro blood from some far fount of tropic ardor. Her figure was, if not essentially graceful yet thoroughly symmetrical, and her head, hands and feet were small and well-shaped. Almost brought up in her mother's shop, one much haunted by holiday-makers ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... its physical, if not of its physiological, being? But could he have solved the riddle of the orchid's persistent refusal to set a pod in the conservatory? Could he have divined why the orchid blossom continues in bloom for weeks and weeks in this artificial glazed tropic—perhaps weeks longer than its more fortunate fellows left behind in their native haunts—and then only to wither and perish without requital? Know the orchid?—without the faintest idea of the veritable divorce which its kidnapping ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... 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. ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... tropic day, when the last flicker of the far southeast trade was fading out and the seasonal change for the northwest monsoon was coming on, the Kittiwake lifted above the sea-rim the ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... densely packed quarters of the slave ships may be imagined by any who have sailed on tropic seas. With seasickness added it was wretched; when dysentery prevailed it became frightful; if water or food ran short the suffering was almost or quite beyond endurance; and in epidemics of scurvy, small-pox or ophthalmia the misery reached the limit of human experience. ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... dining-room table, and you had happened to be hanging up your hat in the hall at that moment, you would have been conscious of an aroma as delicate in flavor as that wafted across summer seas from far-off tropic isles; of pomegranates, if you will, ripening by crumbling walls; of purple grapes drinking in the sun; of pine and hemlock; of sweet spices and the scent of roses. or any other combination of delightful things which your excited ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... with streams of welcome rain, Such as the two preceding ones had brought. Rain, that in tropic climes means life and joy To man and beast as to the thirsty soil And though the sky hung like a sable pall Over the fair oasis, nestling calm Beneath the trusted shelter of the hills, And o'er the broad lake-outlet of the floods, What cause had they to fear? 'Twas often thus, And the long ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... had fallen and he traveled high along the upper terrace where the gorgeous tropic moon lighted the dizzy pathway through the gently undulating branches of the ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... small planet has many millions of square miles of surface, and a single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to find by random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting for sport would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. So if they found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperate zone. Cattle would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The mine would not be on a prairie. The settlement on Orede, then, would ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... 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
... quiet of the tropic nights she read the books and magazines and papers which friends sent her, and in this way kept abreast of world affairs. Her favourite journals were The British Weekly, The Christian, The Life of Faith, and The Westminster Gazette. Her Record she read from ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... There was also Hallinan's Hotel, that was very far from being a mere country hotel. The stately bow-windows of its coffee-room have already been mentioned, but its wide verandah must not be forgotten, stone-paven, glass-roofed, umbrageous with tropic vegetation, beneath whose shade, on the sunny days that are enjoyed by the lesser world of men, sad anglers, in ancient tweed suits, lolled, broken-heartedly, in basket-chairs. And, finally, on the town's highest level, was The Mall, reserved, dignified, with a double row ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... handkerchiefs round their throats, In from sea with the cotton boats. Portuguese and Brazilianos, Men from the mountains, men from the Llanos, Men from the Pampas, men from the Sierras, Men from the mines of the Cordilleras, Men from the flats of the tropic mud Where the butterfly glints his mail with blood; Men from the pass where day by day The sun's heat scales the rocks away; Men from the hills where night by night The sheep-bells give the heart delight; Indians, ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... see how quiet a pirate ship could be. The ruffians were bone-weary, for one thing, after the struggle to bring the vessel through the storm. And the scourge of tropic fever had left its marks. Moreover, the rum was running short because some of the casks had been staved in the heavy weather and Blackbeard was doling it out as grog with an ample dilution of water. There ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... that day of his departure for New York, when she had felt the last of his strong embraces, a life that fell into two hemispheres as distinct from each other as tropic night from day. One half of it had been lighted and made tolerable by the exactions of her new job. "What you feel like doing isn't important, and what I tell you to do is," John Galbraith had said to her on the day this strange divided life of hers had begun. And ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... strength you boast of seems a weakness; manhood leans into childish memories, and melts—as Autumn frosts yield to a soft south-wind coming from a Tropic spring. You feel in a desert, where you once felt at home,—in a bounded landscape, ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... he announced, "and God knows I shall miss her as a man misses the brilliance of tropic seas and the ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... to the turquoise-blue of the Bay; from the grey-white rush of the Irish Sea to the clear-cut emerald of the Clyde Estuary; from the colourless, oily swell of the Equatorial Atlantic to the paraffin-hued rollers of the Tropic of Cancer, the sea varies as human nature itself. To the artist, I imagine, no two square miles are alike, no two ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... 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 their places, and with starry fingerpoints ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... 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 night chilly before ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... 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 and birds and humble creatures ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... matins, wilfully gave Kate a push; and in return, Kate, who never left her debts in arrear, gave the servant for a keepsake a look which that servant carried with her in fearful remembrance to her grave. It seemed as if Kate had tropic blood in her veins, that continually called her away to the tropics. It was all the fault of that 'blue rejoicing sky,' of those purple Biscayan mountains, of that tumultuous ocean, which she beheld ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... with its diagonals passing through the Central Zion. The eye easily discerns in these a great M inscribed in the circle, with its middle angular point at Jerusalem. Gervasius of Tilbury (with some confusion in his mind between tropic and equinoxial, like that which Pliny makes in speaking of the Indian Mons Malleus) says that "some are of opinion that the Centre is in the place where the Lord spoke to the woman of Samaria at the well, for there, at the summer solstice, the noonday sun descends ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... glooms: and out of their black arches shall come tripping children, like white fairies, to laugh and talk with the girl who lies dreaming and reading in the hammock there, beneath the black velvet canopy of the great cedar- tree, like some fair Tropic flower hanging from its boughs. Then they shall wander down across the smooth-shorn lawn, where the purple rhododendrons hang double, bush and image, over the water's edge, and call to us across the stream, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... the tropic sun, his face was recognizable only by the assured glance of his eye. An Afghan bernous was thrown back from his head and shoulders, while his commanding figure was draped in a long chibuok. A pair of pistols and a curved ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... nature of his calling as a tamer of ferocious denizens of the tropic jungle, Mr. Riley, upon wakening, proved to be a person of a fairly amiable disposition. He made it snappy but not unduly burdensome as he initiated Red Hoss into the rudimentary phases of the new employment. As the forenoon wore on the conviction became fixed in Red ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... Truth, whate'er it be! World-wand'rer over this terrestrial frame; Twin-named with Darwin on the roll of fame; This day we render homage unto thee; For in thy steps o'er alien land and sea, Where life burns fast and tropic splendours flame. Oft have we follow'd with sincere acclaim To mark thee unfold Nature's mystery. For this we thank thee, yet one thing remains Shall shrine thee deeper in the heart of man, In ages yet to be ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... grand, forever wrapt in myth and mystery. Lo he laughs along the highlands, leaping o'er the granite walls: Lo he sleeps among the islands, where the loon her lover calls. Still like some huge monster winding downward through the prairie plains, Seeking rest but never finding, till the tropic gulf he gains. In his mighty arms he claspeth now an empire broad and grand; In his left hand lo he graspeth leagues of fen and forest land; In his right the mighty mountains, hoary with eternal snow. Where a thousand foaming fountains singing seek the plains ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... Not the prosaic commonplace shells usually found on a New England shore nor even the brighter colored, more intricately formed shells of tropic seas. These were shells he had never seen before, even in library collections. Alien and soft-hued and lovely shells that caused his collector's heart to jump wildly. He saw a delicate star-shaped thing that might have been fashioned of porcelain and enameled ...
— Made in Tanganyika • Carl Richard Jacobi
... marine ceremony called in later times "Crossing the Line," and administered only upon that occasion; but at first it was performed when vessels were passing the Raz de Fonteneau, on their way to and from the Channel, and originated before navigators crossed the Atlantic or passed the Tropic of Cancer. The Raz, or Tide-Race, was a dangerous passage off the coast of Brittany; some religious observance among the early sailors, dictated by anxiety, appears to have degenerated into the Neptunian frolic, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... 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
... park, within the pathless chase of ocean, where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, from the rising to the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved! And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers: young women how lovely, young men how noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting towards us amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous corymbi ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... white finger rapturously, noted that it was sweeping from the Arctic Circle to the Tropic Zone. "That's Love Harbor, reached through the thoroughfare of ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... flung back into Earth's history. Like this, ancient travelers of the surface of the sea were herded by pirates to walk the plank, or put ashore, marooned upon some fair desert island of the tropic Spanish main. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... shingle beach; and the fifty-ton schooner of war, that carries the flag and influence of France about the islands of the cannibal group, rolled at her moorings under Prison Hill. The clouds hung low and black on the surrounding amphitheatre of mountains; rain had fallen earlier in the day, real tropic rain, a waterspout for violence; and the green and gloomy brow of the mountain was still seamed with many silver ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... knows us From Fundy to the Keys; Every bend and every creek Of abundant Chesapeake; Ardise hills and Newport coves And the far-off orange groves, Where Floridian oceans break, Tropic tiger seas. ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... the Cumberland sailed south through and past the Tropic of Cancer, almost to the equator, without a sign of an enemy. It was in fact just a day's sail from the equator before the Cumberland ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... 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 Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the Northern dawns, Their pure, pale light is thine; Yet all the dreams of tropic nights Within thy blue eyes shine. Not statelier in their prisoning seas The icebergs grandly move, But in thy smile is youth and joy, And in thy voice ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... age and careless usage. The chairs were common kitchen chairs, and the table a plain deal one. But the driftwood burned with flames whose forked tongues sang silently but eloquently of wanderings under many skies, of rainbow isles in sunny seas, of vivid golden days and the black wonders of tropic nights, of storms and calms, and all the untold mysteries of ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... 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 point, conscious, in a sense, of it all, and ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he is at the forest's outmost edge. Before him stretches an expanse of plain altogether treeless, but clothed with tall grass, whose culms stirred by the night breeze, and silvered by the moonbeams, sway to and fro, like the soft tremulous wavelets of a tropic sea; myriads of fire-flies prinkling among the spikes, and emitting a gleam, as phosphorescent medusae, make ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... 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 ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... "In the Indian and China Seas, and in many other parts of the great tropical belt, the periodical winds called 'monsoons' are found. The south-west monsoon prevails from April to October, between the equator and the tropic of Cancer: and it reaches from the east coast of Africa to the coasts of India, China, and the Philippine Islands. Its influence extends sometimes into the Pacific Ocean, as far as the Marcian Isles, or to longitude about 145 east; and it reaches as ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... Land to which yon Ship must go? Festively she puts forth in trim array; As vigorous as a Lark at break of day: Is she for tropic suns, or polar snow? What boots the enquiry? Neither friend nor foe She cares for; let her travel where she may, She finds familiar names, a beaten way Ever before her, and a wind to blow. Yet still I ask, what Haven ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... Green Mountains with it, in every detail, from the dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and the white-painted, green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistressly waitresses in the dining-room, has a clump of palmettos beside it, swaying and sighing in the tropic breeze, and you know that when it migrates back to the New England hill-country, at the end of the season, you shall find it with the palmettos still before its veranda, and equally at home, somewhere in the Vermont or New Hampshire July. There will be the same American groups looking out over ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... late in the afternoon, and made ten or twelve miles to Gatun. The journey up the lazy tropical river was exciting and interesting. The boatmen sang, the tropic forests came down to the banks with their lilies, shrubs, mangoes, cocos, sycamores, palms; their crimson, purple, and yellow blossoms; their bananas with torn leaves; their butterflies and paroquets; ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... 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 ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... 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 draft The great throat of the ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... the type Whereby we shall be known in every land Is that vast gulf which lips our Southern strand, And through the cold, untempered ocean pours Its genial streams, that far off Arctic shores May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze Strange tropic warmth and ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... tempers the cold of our country, 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
... families, it is often noticed, mature earlier than their neighbours. Jewesses, for example, are always precocious, earlier by one or two years. So are colored girls, and those of creole lineage. We can guess the reasons here. No doubt these children still retain in their blood the tropic fire which, at comparatively recent periods, their forefathers felt under the vertical rays of the ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Chimborazo's base, Or Potosi's o'erhanging pines And thus for thee, O little child, Through many a danger and escape, The tall ships passed the stormy cape; For thee in foreign lands remote, Beneath a burning, tropic clime, The Indian peasant, chasing the wild goat, Himself as swift and wild, In falling, clutched the frail arbute, The fibres of whose shallow root, Uplifted from the soil, betrayed The silver veins beneath it laid, The buried ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... 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 Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... tear him to pieces. At night I become a satyr. While in this torment I at once hate and fear myself. One fair face is ever before me, gleaming through my hot dreams like a flying moon in the sultry midnight of a tropic storm. I dare not trust myself in the presence of those whom I love and respect, lest my wild thoughts should find vent in wilder words. I lose my humanity. I am a beast. Out of this depth there is but one way of ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... 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 romance ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... near to him sat Courvoisier, with a child upon his knee, a little lad with immense dark eyes, tumbled black hair, and flushed, just awakened face. He was clad in his night-dress and a little red dressing-gown, and looked like a spot of almost feverish, quite tropic brightness in contrast with the grave, pale face which bent over him. Courvoisier held the two delicate little hands in one of his own, and was looking down with love unutterable upon the beautiful, dazzling child-face. Despite the different complexion and a different ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... Her form was bright with beauty's hues, Which each propitious year renews; And, as within its bosom lay, Treasures which mocked the sun's bright ray; In her rich soul shone wealth to shame, That tropic sun's meridian flame. She stood a lovely being fraught, With that most dear to human thought, The power to love, to force the bliss Of heaven, to such a world as this. Iola, dearest maiden, threw A wondrous charm o'er all who knew Her loveliness; her menial train Adored ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... to the frontier of Italy along the finest coast-line in the world. Every shade of blue was on sky or sea or mountain, while the deep morning shadows were transparent and almost luminous. From the pinewoods a scent of resin swept seaward, mingled with the subtle odour of the tropic foliage near the shore. The sky was cloudless. This was indeed the smiling ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... 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
... stall had more flowers on it than any of the others, to make up for the poetry looking so dull outside. Of course, you could not see the sweet inside the packets till you opened them. Red azaleas are prettier than poetry, I think. I think the tropic lands in 'Westward Ho!' had great trees with flowers ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... a large, splendid room with wide windows and the deck on three sides. There were thick draperies, filmy laces, and many easy chairs. In the old days cabin passengers used to sit there and absorb the soft tropic breezes while digesting their breakfasts. An army quartermaster-captain surveyed it with our naval officer. "Swell," said the Q. M. C. "We'll haul down that plush and fluffy stuff, dump those chairs and rugs over the side, plant my desk here, my chief clerk's there, my other clerks' ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... of woods," Mercedes was crooning over the instrument. "The ukulele—that is what the Hawaiians call it, which means, my dear, the jumping flea. They are golden-fleshed, the Hawalians, a race of lovers, all in the warm cool of the tropic night where the ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... 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 quiet and peace brooding over ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the sultry sun their polished bayonets glance; We hear anear the throbbing drum, the bugle-challenge ring; Quick bursts and loud the flashing cloud, and rolls from wing to wing; But on the height our bulwark stands, tremendous in its gloom,— As sullen as a tropic sky, and silent as ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... 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 every corner ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the equatorial region below the tropic of Cancer. Six hundred miles from the northern frontier of the Sahara she crossed the route on which Major Laing met his, death in 1846, and crossed the road of the caravans from Morocco to the Sudan, and that part of the desert swept by the Tuaregs, where could be heard what ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... too!" She said It laughin'-like. She didn't understand, She couldn't know that we have dreams as grand, As any SHE could have. We wonder where Th' rivets that we make are goin' to, An' if th' engine wheels we turn, will go Through tropic heat, or if they'll plow through snow; An' as we watch, we sorter grow to care About th' steel. Why it's as shiny blue As j'ew'ls! An' every bit is, well, a part Of life to us. Sometimes my very heart Thanks God that I've a ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... son, my son, would God I had died for thee!' But weeping is in vain. The noble lad sleeps there under the palm-trees, beside the mighty tropic stream, while the fair Basset, 'his bride in the sight of God,' recks not of him as she wanders in the woods of Umberleigh, wife to the son of Raleigh's deadliest foe. Raleigh, Raleigh, surely God's blessing is not on ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... carried out from Providence were sure ultimately to provoke Spanish reprisals. It was moreover almost an accepted maxim that there was "No peace beyond the Line", i.e., west of the prime meridian and south of the Tropic of Cancer.] ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... on. Through the long hall, lighted to pleasant dusk by real Jack-o'-lanterns, stray couples strolled, with subdued murmurs and soft laughter. In the big white and gold parlour, in the dining-room, billiard-room, and in the tropic jungle of the immense palm-garden the party had bestowed itself in congenial groups, ever intersecting and forming anew. Little flutters of high laughter now and then told of tests that were being made with roasting chestnuts, apple-parings, the white of an egg ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... patiently guided generations of boys and girls through the mysteries of lands and seas, icebergs, trade winds, deserts, and plains. Still patiently they marked for the boy's bewildered brain latitude and longitude, the tropic of cancer, the arctic circle, and the poles. Were they hanging there still? the man wondered. Were they still patiently leading the way through a wilderness of islands and peninsulas, capes and continents, ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... adventures of the Rattlesnake party were less varied and exciting than might have been expected in a voyage of four years in the tropic seas and among barbarian tribes, the mental adventures through which Huxley passed in the time must have been of the most surprising kind. It was a four-years' course in the great university of nature, and when he had finished it he ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... down, victualled, and watered, for her return to England; and our captain, for some reason or other, not thinking it convenient for him to revisit his native country at this time, exchanged with a gentleman, who, on the other hand, wished for nothing so much as to be safe without the tropic: all his care and tenderness of himself being insufficient to preserve his complexion from the injuries of the sun ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... east by way of Portuguese India, each of them circumscribing the world by voyaging in opposite directions, until they meet at these islands, which are numerous and of varying size; they are properly called Filipinas, and are subject to the crown of Castilla. They lie within the tropic of Cancer, and extend from twenty-four degrees north latitude to the equinoctial line, which cuts the islands of Maluco. There are many others on the other side of the line, in the tropic of Capricorn, which extend for twelve degrees in south latitude. [211] The ancients affirmed that each ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... becomes a large tree which has the peculiar habit of dropping down from its branches "bush-ropes," as they are called. These take root and become stout trunks. There is literally a "rubber belt" around the world, for nearly all rubber comes from the countries lying between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. More than half of all that is brought to market is produced in the valley of the Amazon River; and some of this "Para rubber," as it is called, from the seaport whence it is shipped, is the best ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... 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 the equator to the poles without ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... the tropical line; but the island of Hainan, and 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 turn ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... isle in the sea, not very far northward from the tropic of Capricorn, nor very far westward from Pitcairn's island, where the mutineers of the Bounty settled. At Ravavai I had stepped ashore some few months previous; and now was embarked on a cruise for the whale, whose ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... Tuscarora Deep are fragments. If on a map of the world a broad inked brush be swept seawards round Africa, passing into the Mediterranean, round North and South America, round India, then continuously south of Java and round Australia south of Tasmania and northward to the tropic, this broad band will represent the encircling ribbon-like "deep," which gives strength to the suggestion that the continents in their main features are permanent forms and that their structural connexion with the oceans is not temporary and accidental. The great protruding or "squeezed" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... sun 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 ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... wild for song, Then rolled like tropic storms along, Where, through the garish lights that fly Dying along the troubled sky, Lay bare, through vistas thunder-riven, The blackness of the general Heaven, That very blackness yet doth Ring Light on ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the 10th April, 1591, and arrived at the Canary Islands on 25th of that month, whence we again took our departure on the 29th. The 2d May we were in the latitude of Cape Blanco, and passed the tropic of Cancer on the 5th. All this time we had a fair wind at north-east, sailing always before the wind, till the 13th May, when we came within eight degrees of the line, where we met a contrary wind. We lay off and on from that time till the 6th June, when we crossed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... 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 ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the zephyr at eventide's hour; It falls on the heart like the dew on the flower,— An infinite essence from tropic to pole, The promise, the home, and the heaven ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... 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, ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... on Saturday, the eighth of September, that they lost sight of Teneriffe. On the eleventh they saw a large piece of the mast of a ship afloat. On the fourteenth they saw a "tropic-bird," which the sailors thought was never seen more than twenty-five leagues from land; but it must be remembered, that, outside of the Mediterranean, few of the sailors had ever been farther ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... 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
... purpose in London and Bristol, took care to supply with yearly recruits of provisions, utensils, and new inhabitants. About 1609, Argal discovered a more direct and shorter passage to Virginia, and left the track of the ancient navigators, who had first directed their course southwards to the tropic, sailed westward by means of the trade winds, and then turned northward, till they reached the English settlements. The same year, five hundred persons, under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, were embarked for Virginia. Somers's ship, meeting ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... the pride 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 which my small knowledge ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Caribs and Arawaks showed a strictly tropical distribution from Hayti to the southern watershed of the Amazon. The Tupis, moving down the Parana-La Plata system, made a short excursion beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, though not beyond the hot belt, then turned equator-ward again along the coast.[195] In North America we find some exceptions to the rule. For instance, though the main area of the Athapascan stock is found in the frigid belt of Canada and Alaska, north of the annual isotherm ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... its fate. The Earl of Albemarle and Admiral Sir George Pococke sailed in early spring on a more important errand, landed in June near Havana with eleven thousand soldiers, and attacked Moro Castle, the key of the city. The pitiless sun of the tropic midsummer poured its fierce light and heat on the parched rocks where the men toiled at the trenches. Earth was so scarce that hardly enough could be had to keep the fascines in place. The siege works were little else than a mass of dry faggots; and when, after exhausting toil, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... the country from the crockery. I'll try her once more. Name the limits of the Tropic of Capricorn, and tell me where Asia ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... looking on the ground as meditative men are apt to do; his eyes WOULD fix themselves on the distant bend in the road round which a little figure must surely appear before long. Ah! There she comes. First a bright patch of colour, like a tropic bird among the boughs; then a tripping figure, with a round hat on, and a small basket under her arm; then a deep-blushing, almost frightened, but bright-smiling girl, making her curtsy with a fluttered yet happy glance, as Arthur came up to her. If Arthur had had time to think at all, ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... he murmured thoughtfully, "what's to become of these four million black children of the tropic jungles if we win now and set them free! Their fathers and mothers were but yesterday eating human flesh ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... and nice clothes, their newspapers and walking-sticks and gloves. What did they know? I'd been like that, just as ignorant, just as conceited and narrow-minded. And I thought of the Corydon and the blue tropic sea! ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... exception of A Tropic Garden which refers to the Botanical Gardens of Georgetown, all deal with the jungle immediately about the Tropical Research Station of the New York Zoological Society, situated at Kartabo, at the junction of the Cuyuni and Mazaruni Rivers, in ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... colour of the water if a cold or warm sea current sweeps along below them. If now our friend the albatross, travelling westwards over the islands of Polynesia, wishes to be carried along by the wind, he knows that he has only to keep between the Tropic of Capricorn and the equator in order to be in the belt of the south-east trade-wind. And no doubt he has also noticed that this wind gives rise to the equatorial current which, broad and strong, sets westwards across the Pacific Ocean. If he wishes to fly north of the equator, he receives ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... the douar of a tribe of Arabs inhabiting the eastern parts of the desert, from the latitude of about twenty degrees north to the tropic. They are a tribe of great extent and power, inhabiting detached fertile spots of land, where they find water and pasturage for their flocks, but are very ignorant of the commonest principles of agriculture. They are an extremely fine race of men, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... which treats of the geology of South America, and almost exclusively of the parts southward of the Tropic of Capricorn, I have arranged the chapters according to the age of the deposits, occasionally departing from this order, for ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... you want to know, first, where this wonder is. Get out the map of the Western Hemisphere, put your finger on any of the lines running north and south, through North America, and called meridians; follow it south until you come to the Tropic of Cancer, running east and west; then "left-about-face!" and, following the tropic, sail out into the calm Pacific. After a voyage of about two thousand miles, you'll run ashore on one of a group of islands marked Sandwich. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... than civil—barely that, perhaps—however he might flatter himself: but her heart and eyes were full of his fair contrast, the light seen brighter against darkness; Charles all the dearer for a Julian. Intensely did she love him, as only tropic blood can love; intently did she gaze on him, when any while he could not see her face, as only those dark eyes could gaze: and her mind, all too ignorant but greedy of instruction, no less than her heart, rich in sympathies ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... many marvels over sea, Where the new-raised tropic city sweats and roars, I have sailed with Young Ulysses from the quay Till the anchor rumbled down on stranger shores. He is blooded to the open and the sky, He is taken in a snare that shall not fail, He shall hear me singing strongly, till he die, Like the shouting ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... thousands for himself, and was therefore likely to be irritated by an interloper. The spiritual lion was that Brant was connected with Lysbeth van Goorl, once known as Lysbeth de Montalvo, a lady who had brought her reputed husband no luck. Often and often during dreary hours of reflection beneath tropic suns, for which the profession of galley-slave gave great leisure, the Senor Ramiro remembered that very energetic curse which his new affianced wife had bestowed upon him, a curse in which she prayed that through her he might live in heavy labour, that through her and hers ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... the captain quietly, "with the simple beauty of home; but you will have to see the grand sunrises and sunsets of tropic lands to fully understand the full beauty of God's ever-changing ocean. But even now, Mr Meadows, I think you can hardly say you don't ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... Darfur,'' but in no case was it to be drawn west of the 21st degree of east longitude, or east of the 23rd degree. From the 15th parallel the line was continued north and north-west to the intersection of the Tropic of Cancer with 16 deg. E. French influence was to prevail west of this line, British influence to the east. Wadai was thus definitely assigned ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... 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 ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... behind the point which our ancestors had reached even thirty generations ago. In dealing with the Philippine people we must show both patience and strength, forbearance and steadfast resolution. Our aim is high. We do not desire to do for the islanders merely what has elsewhere been done for tropic peoples by even the best foreign governments. We hope to do for them what has never before been done for any people of the tropics—to make them fit for self-government after the fashion ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... but night with all her stars, Or cavern sparkling with its native spars; With eyes that were a language and a spell, A form like Aphrodite's in her shell, With all her loves around her on the deep, Voluptuous as the first approach of sleep; Yet full of life—for through her tropic cheek The blush would make its way, and all but speak: The sun-born blood suffused her neck, and threw O'er her clear nut-brown skin a lucid hue, Like coral reddening through the darken'd wave, Which draws the diver to the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the sun's bright glare Fell sheer upon the Temple's beauteous wall Withered by tropic heat, the air Let, like a bird, its listless pinions fall. Behold a group, young men and gray, And women, kneeling; silence holds them all; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... the result, which we want, and we do not care from what material it is produced. The honey is the same, whether the bee stores it from the meadow-clover and the wild-flower of our own fields, or, loitering over city wharves, gathers it from ships laden with tropic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... name of our absent friend, I thank you." In spite of wistful looks from the beautiful youth as we rose from the table, and the allurement of a tropic moon, I remained constant to duty and Aunt Jane, and immured myself in her stateroom, where I passed an enlivening evening listening to her moans. She showed a faint returning spark of life when I mentioned Cuthbert Vane, and raised ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... Bright eyes, the violet waking, lifted up Where bent the lily her deep, fragrant cup; And folded buds, 'gainst many a leafy spray— The wild-woods' voiceless nuns—knelt down to pray. There roses, deep in greenest mosses swathed, Kept happy tryst with tropic blooms, sun-bathed. No sounds of sadness surged through listening trees: The waters babbled low; the errant bees Made answer, murmurous; nor paled the hue The jonquils wore; nor chill the wild breath grew Of daisies clustered white in dewy ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... according to custom, we Ducked those that had never passed the Tropic before. The manner of doing it was to reeve a Rope in the Mainyard, to hoist 'em about half-way up to the Yard, and let 'em fall at once into the Water; they being comfortably Trussed by having a Stick 'cross through their ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... 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. The A. and T. will miss it comin' ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... 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 ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... The ships should be fitted out with this aim in view. Accidents usually occur in crossing the equator. The Red Sea and the Indian Ocean are especially difficult to cross. This could be overcome by sending the transport by way of Cape Town, where a part of the trip could be made south through the Tropic of Cancer. It has been demonstrated that horses not older than from ten to sixteen years should be selected for service abroad. No fear need be felt as to the feeding of the horses, for our horses are accustomed to little ...
— Operations Upon the Sea - A Study • Franz Edelsheim
... flooded the other end of the parlor a minute after, and the chess board came into requisition. If Miss Morris found little skill necessary to discomfit her opponent, and wondered thereat, she could not see, as he saw, a dark face, bowed on tropic blooms, flushed with unwonted glad color, lips apart and aquiver, wide eyes lustrous with purple light, shining through the tears ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a tropic isle, In the bosom of the deep; Where the skies forever smile, And th' oppressed forever weep! O'er the negro's night of care Pour the living light of heaven; Chase away the fiend despair, Bid ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... apparent motions, indirectly of the mutual relations binding together the suns and systems of space. Thirteen observatories in Europe and America joined in the work, now virtually terminated. Its scope was, after its inception, widened to include southern zones as far as the Tropic of Capricorn; this having been rendered feasible by Schoenfeld's extension (1875-1885) of Argelander's survey. Thirty thousand additional stars thus taken in were allotted in zones to five observatories. Another important ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke |
