"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the length of time that we were kept in the damp inter-island region of the Tropic of Capricorn. Early breakfasts, cold plunge baths, and the perfect ventilation of our cabins, only just kept us alive. We read, wrote, and talked like automatons, and our voices sounded thin and far away. We decided that heat was ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... as if he were dining at his own table in Chatham County. He was a gallant trencherman, and the strange tropic viands tickled his palate. Heavy, commonplace, almost slothful in his movements, he appeared to be devoid of all the cunning and watchfulness of the sleuth. He even ceased to observe, with any sharpness or attempted discrimination, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... hell, the clouds of horror, fear, sorrow, despair; and preserves the region of the mind in serenity: whosoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel his pulse) I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to me there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwelt in the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... drizzly, bedraggled Paris into a land of sunshine and gentle breezes; from the bare sullen lands of the Champagne, into a country where flowers grew by the side of the railway, and that in February; to a semi-tropic land, fragrant with flowers, to white beaches by a blue, lazy sea and a sky over ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... small main-cabin, climbed a steep companion ladder, and emerged on deck. The sun was setting, and the promise was for a clear tropic night. The Samoset, with fore- and main-sail winged out on either side, was slipping a lazy four-knots through the smooth sea. Through the engine-room skylight came a sound of hammering. They strolled aft to where Captain ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... do nothing to help my friend. But I felt I must do something. The cabin skylights were open, for it was tropic weather, and a murmur of voices ascended through the opening. I could not distinguish words, but I felt I must know what they were saying to Newman, or about him. So I took a chance. I slipped the wheel into the becket, and crept to the edge ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... Sam, I wouldn't stay in this country. I'd go back to the land of my black fathers, to its tropic suns and rich soil. You can never be a full-grown man here. The North won't have you as such. The hotel wouldn't let you sleep under its roof, in spite of my protest that you were my body-servant. In the ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... pieces. Above all men, he longs for sympathy, recognition, applause. He respects his fellow-creatures, because he beholds in him a possible reader. To write a book, to send it forth to the world and the critics, is to a sensitive person like plunging mother-naked into tropic waters where sharks abound. It is true that, like death, the terror of criticism lives most in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criticised, and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man's life. ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... 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 Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... 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 north to ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... eighty-odd 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 he could ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... incommunicable peace. Yet if one could take the wings of the morning, and 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 point, conscious, in a sense, of it all, and ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 Almighty ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... 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 of the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... down here too long yourself," he said. "You'll be having tropic choler next. I tell you, you must think of them as children: ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... traversing every part of the land. Vast herds of llamas were domesticated, from the hair of which the exquisitely woven cloth was made. Agriculture flourished. The country, upraised from the sea by the great range of mountains, afforded every variety of {70} climate from temperate to tropic, and the diversified products of the soil corresponded with the opportunities presented. And every foot of space was utilized for a population of millions of industrious workers, with an economy and resourcefulness only emulated by the Chinese in the working of their ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... a loneliness in the desert. That was part of the big feeling of it, the still, stealing sense of immensity reaching out its shadowy hands for you.... Loneliness and restlessness.... These tropic nights, when the stars burned low and bright, and the hot sands seemed breathing.... Loneliness and restlessness—but they gave a man dreams.... And were those dreams ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... felt strong enough to take her back single-handed, and what would he not have given to be on the bridge again, with Jo and the rest of the old crew on deck, and the Sea Eagle pushing her nose out through the Golden Gate, heading for the enchanted regions of the tropic seas. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... voyage, a tropic isle, The hush of the forest, the ocean blue, A lament for all that is false and vile, A paean for all that is good and true. Pompadour's fan, or Louis's queue, Mournful or merry, right or wrong. Subjects, you'll find, are not so few, But love is excluded ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... grove. The woodlands wide their sturdy honors bend, The pines, the liveoaks to the shores descend, There couch the keels, the crooked ribs arise, Hulls heave aloft and mastheads mount the skies; Launcht on the deep o'er every wave they Feed tropic ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... side are the two tropics, at the distance of 23 deg. 30 min., and described by the sun when in his greatest declination north and south, or at the summer and winter solstices. That on the north side of the equinoctial is called the tropic of Cancer, because the sun describes it when in that sign of the ecliptic; and that on the south side is, for a similar reason, called the tropic of Capricorn. Again, at the distance of 231/2 degrees from the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... us to-day." She made no remark; she respected her uncle's preference; besides—the pony! Of these trios Mr. Fountain was the true soul. He had to blow the coals of conversation right and left. It is very good of me not to compare him to the Tropic between two frigid zones. At first he took his nap as usual; for he said to himself: "Now I have started them they can go on." Besides, he had seen pictures in the shop windows of an old fellow dozing and then the ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... children with them, and where white-aproned stewardesses took care of the galley and the cleaning of the floating hearthside, sharing the dangers of the ruddy and tranquil sailors exempt from the temptation that contact with women provokes. On Sundays, under the tropic sun or in the ash-colored light of the northern heavens, the boatswain would read the Bible. The men would listen thoughtfully with uncovered heads. The women had dressed themselves in black with lace headdress ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and among others a play-actor; called himself Gaston Maundeville, and was clean daft on his knowledge of Shakespeare and his own power of interpretin' the hidden meanin' of the lines. I ain't never going to forgit the day he gave us Portia's speech. We were just under the tropic, and the day was a scorcher. There was mostly men folk aboard, and we lay around the deck in our pajamas, while Billy—Gaston Maundeville, dressed in striped red and white pajamas—clum up in that bally ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... from the Tube itself, and it was a warm, damp smell that could only be imagined as coming from a jungle in the tropics. There were the rich odors of feverishly growing things; the heavy fragrance of unknown tropic blossoms, and a background of some curious blend of scents and smells which was alien and luring, and exotic. The whole was like the smell of another planet of the jungles of a strange world which men had never trod. ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... stretched along the ship, from stem to stern, and wrapped loosely in its shrouds. It did us good service later, though not by defying the winds of heaven, nor spreading forth its snowy sails to catch the tropic breezes. ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... breeding places. Until 1909, the inhabitants consisted of the Laysan albatross, black-footed albatross, sooty tern, gray-backed tern, noddy tern, Hawaiian tern, white tern, Bonin petrel, two shearwaters, the red-tailed tropic bird, two ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... became strictly hereditary. It hinged, as perhaps no other equally developed system ever hinged, upon the personality of the emperor, who incarnated the administrative bureaucracy which gave effect to the Pax Romana and the Romana lex from the Euphrates to the Atlantic and from Scotland to the Tropic of Cancer. Of all men Marcus Aurelius was the most conscientious and the most sincere, and he understood, as perhaps no other man in like position ever understood, the responsibility which impinged on him, to allow no private prevention to impose an unfit emperor upon the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... 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 ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... entered strange ports of sun-washed lands, and trod market-places among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen. The scent of the spice islands was in his nostrils as he had known it on warm, breathless nights at sea, or he beat up against the southeast trades through long tropic days, sinking palm-tufted coral islets in the turquoise sea behind and lifting palm-tufted coral islets in the turquoise sea ahead. Swift as thought the pictures came and went. One instant he was astride a broncho and flying through the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... my uncle, putting some more wood on the fire, not for the sake of the light—for away across the sea the dawn was brightening fast, after the way of sunrise and sunset in tropic lands; and even as I looked there, far on high, was a faint fleck of orange light on a tiny cloud. A few minutes later there were scores, and the birds were singing and chirping in all directions, even the sea furnishing the screams and peculiar cries ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... of the Leman, but spend two or three hours every day in the 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 current enough to carry us the whole ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... look forward to the time when I may go to a more accustomed place. Either from long association with other scenes or because of some inexpressible deficiency in this tropic splendor, I am not satisfied even though I am exuberantly entertained. Something I miss. For weeks I wondered what single element I missed most. Out of the numberless associations of childhood and youth ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... I could not but marvel at the almost magical growth in these far northern latitudes. Barely a month had passed since snow enveloped the earth in a winding sheet, and I have heard old residents say that the winter's frost penetrated the ground for a depth of four feet. Yet here we were in a very tropic of growth run riot and the frost, which still lay beneath the upper soil, was thawing and moistening the succulent roots of a wilderness of green. The meadow grass, swaying off to the forest margin in billowy ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... together upon the sofa; and as the song proceeds the hand of the mother steals into that of the father, which holds it closely, while his arm creeps noiselessly around her waist. Their hearts float far away upon that music. His eyes droop as when he was speaking of the tropic islands—as if he were hearing the soft language of those shores. As his wife looks at him she sees on his face, beneath the weariness of its expression, the light which shone there in the days when they sang "Bonnie Doon" together. He draws her closer to ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... at the hulk of the Alcazar,—the blanched, wave-worn messenger sent by the tropic seas into the far North with a tale that the living had never dared to tell, and that had perished on the lips of the dead. Its shadow, spreading broad upon the beach, made the gathering twilight deeper. Out on the harbor the pale saffron light lingered, long after the red had ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... myself the second time the clouds had all cleared away, except a few that sailed there, white as cotton. The moon was up—a tropic moon. The moon at home turns a wood black, but even this old butt-end of a one showed up that forest, as green as by day. The night birds—or, rather, they’re a kind of early morning bird—sang out with their long, ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... arrested them. For in the middle of this wider piece of water, fringed on every side with rushes, lay a long, low islet, along which ran a long, low house or bungalow built of bamboo or some kind of tough tropic cane. The upstanding rods of bamboo which made the walls were pale yellow, the sloping rods that made the roof were of darker red or brown, otherwise the long house was a thing of repetition and ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... hand be not a European one, then may it come, bronzed, keen, and supple from the tropic calm! The birds of the forest are on ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... cold-rife man by my nature; I have a cold blood, sir. There's neither fur, nor flannel—no, sir, nor hot rum, will warm up what they call the temperature. Sir, it's the same with most men that have been carbonadoed, as they call it, in the tropic seas." ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... happiest in the world, the country called Van Diemen's Land resembling in all respects the south of France. As there are in all countries some parts more pleasant than others, so there seems good reason to believe that within two or three degrees of the tropic of Capricorn, which passes through the midst of New Holland, is the most unwholesome and disagreeable part of this country; the reason of which is very plain, for in those parts it must be excessively hot, much more so than under ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... outside rough rock, because the 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 ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and warms the lower half of the great African continent, the current of heated air ascending from the equatorial belt leaves a comparative vacuum, towards which the less rarefied atmospheric fluid is drawn down from the regions north, of the tropic, bringing with it the cold and dry winds from the Himalayan Alps, and the lofty ranges of Assam. The great change is heralded as before by oppressive calms, lurid skies, vivid lightning, bursts of thunder, and tumultuous rain. But at this change of the monsoon the atmospheric disturbance ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... depicting a pathetic incident in a seafarer's career, of much simple idyllic beauty. The poem has some fine descriptive passages, and many examples of the poet's rich word-painting in treating of the splendid tropic scenery among which the mariner is for the time cast. The volume contained also some minor pieces, including the dialect poem, 'The Northern Farmer,' with its humorous rendering of yokel speech. This was followed (1875-84) by three dramas on English historical themes, which, as the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... gave way a little on the swells, and streams of water began to trickle down under the huge banks of snow, filling the ravines; and then at last came a day when a strange, warm wind blew from the northwest. Soft and sweet and sensuous it was, as if it swept some tropic bay filled with a thousand isles—a wind like a vast warm breath blown upon the land. Under its touch the snow did not melt; it vanished. It fled in a single day from the plain to the gullies. Another day, and ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... 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, ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... his native Kerry; and from a bay sheltered by the lofty mountain that is now known by his name, he set sail for the Atlantic land; and, directing his course towards the south-west, in order to meet the summer solstice, or what we should call the tropic, after a long and rough voyage, his little bark being well provisioned, he came to summer seas, where he was carried along, without the aid of sail or oar, for many a long day. This, which it is to be presumed was the great gulf-stream, brought his vessel to shore somewhere about the ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... delicate ears with scarlet jewels, Green silk 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, Lascars and Bengalese. Greeks from the mainland, Greeks from the seas; ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... Height, in within 1 French foot Temperature English Tropic [1.006 of the of the feet, above Zones. English foot] air. the level below the of the sea. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... me, who would have given a year of my life to kiss her but might not. It did thus endear her, however, and so I know what hot, foolish hope flooded Roger off his footholds of conventions and convictions and floated him away in a warm, alluring sea, where the tropic palm-isles of Fata Morgana were the only shores. I, too, caught a glimpse of those shores; the warmth of that sea was only the blood pounding through my veins, and I knew it, but I shut my eyes and let the waves lap at me a moment. Roger, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... compassion to see how miserably the passengers were tumbled to and fro, on all sides of the ship; insomuch, that the mariners, in the performance of their duty, were compelled to tread upon them. This boisterous weather being over, we had very favourable gales again, till we came to the tropic of Cancer. This tropic is an imaginary circle, which astronomers have invented in the heavens, limiting the progress of the sun towards the north pole. It is placed in the latitude of 23 deg. 30 min. Here we were baptized a second time, as before. The French always perform this ceremony ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... establishment for making jellies, comfits, pickles, and all the varieties of tropic preserves. In each of them thirty or more persons are constantly employed, and a capital of some thousands of dollars invested. Several large rooms were occupied by boxes, jars, and canisters, with the apparatus necessary to the process, through which the fruit passes. We saw every species ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... thoughts 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 be put ashore, marooned upon some fair desert island of the tropic Spanish main. ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... energies. Oftentimes a single speech has effected great reforms. Oft one man's act has deflected the stream of the centuries. Full oft a single word has been like a switch that turns a train from the route running toward the frozen North, to a track leading into the tropic South. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... burning gaze was fixed upon her, and his face, in beautiful fury, was more perfect than any exquisite picture of her dreams, his voice was as the voice of the sea as it calls to the shore in the moonlit hours, as the bird that sings in the darkness of a tropic night ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... towards what might be called the limit of the northern tropic of Saturn, the spectacle presented by the rings became every minute more and more marvellous—purple and silver, black and gold, dotted with myriads of brilliant points of many-coloured light, they stretched upwards like ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... surface. Probably there were early attempts to accomplish this object, the results of which have been lost. But Eratosthenes executed one between Syene and Alexandria, in Egypt, Syene being supposed to be exactly under the tropic of Cancer. The two places are, however, not on the same meridian, and the distance between them was estimated, not measured. Two centuries later, Posidonius made another attempt between Alexandria and Rhodes; ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... of the good wet earth" came to him it came "with a kind of Highland tone." A tropic shower found him in a "frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland." And when he turned to write the chronicle of his grandfather's life and work, the beautiful words in which he described the old gentleman's farewell to "Sumbraugh and the wild ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... to Beethoven quite as much as any living musician. Quite as much as that of any other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, his magistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio of the scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeys and birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in the finale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... is a gorgeous tropic land, and, with its bounteous rainfall and sunshine, brings forth many of the most highly prized productions of the tropics, with some that are peculiar to itself. Its botany is as yet very imperfectly known. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... 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 Haven is her mark? And, almost as ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... upon the soul, As from these heights the Giant Stream we trace, And wander with its waters as they roll From hence, to their far ocean dwelling-place— Marking its birth in this bleak frigid zone, Its conquering march to yonder tropic shore, The boundless valley which it makes its own, With thousand tribute rivers as they pour! No classic page its story to reveal; No nymph, or naad, sporting in its glades; No banks encrimsoned with heroic steel; And haunted yet by dim poetic shades— Its annals linger in the eternal ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... and shedding their chorus-girls on every outward breeze; the tables d'hote express a relaxed enterprise in the nonchalance of the management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow rooms; the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of their windows in a show of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with their retarded displays of ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... is like the moonlight Where tropic Summers glow, And love is like the twilight When dreams ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... side of the Mambookei chain of mountains, and in the central portion of Africa, below the tropic, are the Bechuanas, who inhabit an extent of country as yet imperfectly known to us. These may be termed ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... Athens, but was invited by Ptolemy Euergetes to Alexandria, and placed at the head of the library. His great achievement was the determination of the circumference of the earth. This was done by measuring on the ground the distance between Syene, a city exactly under the tropic, and Alexandria, situated on the same meridian. The distance was found to be five thousand stadia. The meridional distance of the sun from the zenith of Alexandria he estimated to be 7 deg. 12', or a fiftieth part of the circumference of the meridian. Hence the circumference of the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... 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
... 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 ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... east winds made Captain Hull anxious. He did not succeed in getting the vessel into the right course. Later, near the Tropic of Capricorn, he feared finding calms which would delay him again, without speaking of the equatorial current, which would irresistibly throw him back to the west. He was troubled then, above all, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... spot sailed the galleon; Where, for a twelvemonth, off and on The hundred and eightieth degree She rose and fell on a tropic sea. But lo! when it came to the ninth of May, All of a sudden becalmed she lay One degree from that fatal spot, Without the power to move a knot; And of course the moment she lost her way, Gone was her chance ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... a tropic island, fighting together for the flag of the nation, both Blue and Gray gained a new and happier viewpoint; and looking back across the warm and shining waters of the Gulf Stream, each knew that all was ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... of September they passed the Tropic of Capricorn, and by the middle of October they were almost opposite the Straits of Magellan. On this voyage they had kept most of the time far away from the coast, and had landed only when necessary to re-stock their ship ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... even avoided the subject, which I one day thought it my duty to press upon him. One magnificent evening, the 30th July (that is to say, three weeks after our departure), the frigate was abreast of Cape Blanc, thirty miles to leeward of the coast of Patagonia. We had crossed the tropic of Capricorn, and the Straits of Magellan opened less than seven hundred miles to the south. Before eight days were over the Abraham Lincoln would be ploughing ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... recoiled from either of these alternatives; and then suddenly, as he racked his brains, a wild idea flashed over him. For years he had talked and dreamed of escaping from civilization. He had pictured himself upon some tropic island, where bananas and cocoanuts grew; or again in some Northern wilderness, where he might hunt and fish, and live like the pioneers. And now—why not do it? He had an axe and a rifle and a fishing-rod; ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... from good San Antonio, my Lady Bird—when the sea-breeze makes—then the old brig will reel off the knots! But see! just now not a breath to keep a tropic bird's wings out. There, look ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... more delightful—is a season when continued cold weather and chilly rains hold back all but the hardiest birds, until—like the dammed-up piles of logs trembling with the spring freshets—the tropic winds carry all before them, and all at once winter birds which have sojourned only a few miles south of us, summer residents which should have appeared weeks ago, together with the great host of Canadian and other ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... the South that now through orient mist At nightfall off Tampico or Belize Greetest the sailor, rising from those seas Where first in me, a fond romanticist, The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles. . ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... sunshiny morning a week later. The Southern Cross was now in sub-tropic waters, steaming steadily along under blue skies and through smooth azure water flecked here and there with masses of ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... a sun-toasted pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; 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 forth in one array, contrasting climates, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the criticism which you are too kind to utter. These scenes, you think, are all too sombre. So, indeed, they are; but the blame must rest on the sombre spirit of our forefathers, who wove their web of life with hardly a single thread of rose-color or gold, and not on me, who have a tropic-love of sunshine, and would gladly gild all the world with it, if I knew where to find so much. That you may believe me, I will exhibit one of the only class of scenes, so far as my investigation has taught me, in which ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... infer. I need them in business, that is all." And he pointed his finger at the wall. Then I saw what I had not noticed before. The walls were hung with at least five score Of swords and daggers of every size Which nations of militant men could devise. Poisoned spears from tropic seas, That natives, under banana trees, Smear with the juice of some deadly snake. Blood-dipped arrows, which savages make And tip with feathers, orange and green, A quivering death, in harlequin sheen. High up, a fan ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... supplied with rivers, and of a larger magnitude, than any out of the tropics, the Murray alone excepted; and doubtless a journey across the island within the tropic would present fewer difficulties than one direct from Perth to Sydney, or Adelaide; but, excepting for the advancement of geographical knowledge, there is no object to be gained by such a journey. The best way is along the valley of the lakes, guided as the ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... cloud pageant—a vast canopy of shell pink, a sun-fired surface like an opal sea, rippled and webbed, with the exquisite texture of an Oriental fabric, pure, delicate, lovely—as no work of human hands could be. It mirrored all the warm, pearly tints of the inside whorl of the tropic nautilus. And it ended abruptly, a rounded depth of bank, on a broad stream of clear sky, intensely blue, transparently blue, as if through the lambent depths shone the infinite firmament. The lower edge of this stream took the golden lightning of the sunset and was ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... been assaulting breastworks, or lying still under artillery fire, and they were glad to get a chance to shoot at the Spaniards in the open. We lay on our arms that night and as we were drenched with sweat, and had no blankets save a few we took from the dead Spaniards, we found even the tropic night chilly before ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... 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. ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... now occupied or claimed by the American Union, spreads from the shores of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific ocean. On the east and west its limits are those of the continent itself. On the south it advances nearly to the tropic, and it extends upward to the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... die, for we must press on to the sea, but he cured himself by eating a magic sweet-fern leaf and came running after us, tripping over his sash. The trekking took a long time, and when we reached the end of the point we were quite exhausted and flung our weary frames down on the tropic sand to rest. All at once Jerry ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... was understood to extend from the French settlements in Newfoundland or Acadia, along the American coast to the Straits of Magellan, and so around to the South Sea, including the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, besides all of Africa lying between the tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope. At least, within those limits the West India Company was to have monopoly of trade, all other Netherlanders being warned off the precincts. Nothing could be more magnificent, nor ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... driftwood logs upon the smouldering fire. Around them sharp tongues of flame—rose and saffron, amber, sea- green, and heliotrope, glories as of a tropic sunset—leaped upward. She stood watching these, her left hand resting on the edge of the mantelpiece, her right holding up the front of her black skirt. Her right foot rested on the fender curb, thereby displaying a discreet interval of openwork ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... sheet of paper with a few strokes of his master hand. He is about eleven stone in weight, and, roughly, five feet eight, clean cut and strong, with a face which tells you he was born in Cork, and had knocked about a lot in tropic lands; eight-and-thirty if he is a day, though he swears at night around the camp fire that the pretty Dutch girls have guessed his age as twenty-seven. He wears a slouch hat, around which a green puggaree coils ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... guard with shoulder-shield; Bounds the dread tiger o'er the affrighted heath Arm'd with sharp talons, and resistless teeth; The pouncing eagle bears in clinched claws The struggling lamb, and rends with ivory jaws; 110 The tropic eel, electric in his ire, Alarms the waves with unextinguish'd fire; The fly of night illumes his airy way, And seeks with lucid lamp his sleeping prey; Fierce on his foe the poisoning serpent springs, And insect armies dart ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... and on Sunday made the first tropic, nearly twenty-three and a half degrees above the line. No rough weather or unkindly wind had disturbed us from the hour we had left the "too nyked" man upon the wharf, and Sunday, when I went to take my bath before ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... towns: and forts from Spaniards reft As his last legacy to Britain left. The ocean, which so long our hopes confined, Could give no limits to his vaster mind; Our bounds' enlargement was his latest toil, Nor hath he left us pris'ners to our isle; 20 Under the tropic is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath received our yoke. From civil broils he did us disengage, Found nobler objects for our martial rage; And, with wise conduct, to his country show'd The ancient way of conquering abroad. Ungrateful then! if we no tears allow To him, that gave us peace ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... discreetly hidden behind dingy shutters; the rare officials, undisguisedly somnambulant; and the customary loiterers, even to the middle-aged woman with the ulster and the handbag, fled to more congenial scenes. As in the inmost dells of some small tropic island the throbbing of the ocean lingers, so here a faint pervading hum and trepidation told in every ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... peculiarities by facts of ancestry,—of finding hints of the Powwow or the Grand Custom in each grotesque development. We were conscious of something warmer in this old soul than in ourselves, and something wilder, and we chose to think it the tropic and the untracked forest. She had scarcely any being apart from her affection; she had no morality, but was good because she neither hated nor envied; and she might have been a saint far more easily than ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... shades with faint, thin voices powerless to pierce the distance. The margins of Cocytus doubtless knew them: mine were dedicated to the more attractive flesh and blood of animal life, the varied phases of the tropic forest. Or, in more practical mood, I would stoop to render certain facts recorded in the text. To these digressions I probably owe what little education I possess. For example, there was one sentence in ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... more logically. The start had been all wrong. It would be better now to wait and prepare her mind gradually for the only proposition which his exalted estate would permit him to offer her. He would go slow. He glanced down at the girl's profile. It was bathed in the silvery light of the great tropic moon. The Hon. Morison Baynes wondered if it were to be so easy a matter to "go slow." She was ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... earlier day, when California was still a province of Mexico; those who had been lured by the glowing stories of the Land of the Sun Down Sea, where orange and lemon, vine and fig flourished and indicated the semi-tropic luxuriance and fruitfulness of ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... 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
... is broken by this warning from the primitive powers that counterbalance each other behind the peace of the tropic night. By and by, one grows accustomed to the uncanny neighbourhood of the volcano, and only the more formidable eruptions attract notice. Sometimes, while at work, I hear one of the boys exclaim, "Huh, huh!" to call my attention to the fact that a particularly violent outbreak ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... 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 ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various |
