"Upas" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Sybil Berners, the young bride, did not dream that the bitter, bitter seed of JEALOUSY was germinating in her heart, to grow and spread perhaps into a deadly upas of the soul, destroying all moral life ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the venerable Lokman passed by, and he saw that the tree was a upas tree and the sleepers were dead. And he understood it all, and he passed his hand through his beard and fell on his face, and gave glory to God. And then he buried the three covetous ones in separate ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... her first, her eye flashed so, I heard—as I fancied—the spark whiz From her eyelid—I said so next day to that jealous old fool of a Marquis. She reminded me, Bill, of a lovely volcano, whose entrails are lava— Or (you know my penchant for original types) of the upas in Java. In the curve of her sensitive nose was a singular species of dimple, Where the flush was the mark of an angel's creased kiss—if it wasn't a pimple. Now I'm none of your bashful John Bulls who don't know a pilau from a puggaree Nor a chili, by George, ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... disarmed the savage tiger, could have won wretches so much more pitiless than the most ferocious beasts of the wilderness, or saved him from their slow but sure poison, whose breath was worse than the upas tree to all who came ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... hemp, the mulberry, the fig, and the dorstenia are all nearly allied, the first two belonging to the order Cannabinaceae, the last three to the Moraceae. The bread-fruit of the South-Sea Islands belongs to the same order (Artocarpaceae) as does the deadly upas-tree of Java. Garments made of the inner bark of this plant are like the shirt of Nessus, and will produce intolerable irritation; and even climbing the tree to obtain its flowers is said to have produced severe effects on the ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Some of the elder ones, I noticed, looked mournfully on, and were evidently not in a gay humour, seeming a prey to bitter reflections. Notwithstanding the curse of slavery, which, like a poisonous upas, taints the very air they breathe with the murdered remains of its victims, the white citizens of the south are extremely sensitive of their civil and political rights, and seem to regard the palladium of independence secured by their progenitors ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... question of the drunkard, for the drink difficulty lies at the root of everything. Nine-tenths of our poverty, squalor, vice, and crime spring from this poisonous tap-root. Many of our social evils, which overshadow the land like so many upas trees, would dwindle away and die if they were not constantly watered with strong drink. There is universal agreement on that point; in fact, the agreement as to the evils of intemperance is almost as universal as the ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... She had been harshly reproved by the older woman on account of the artist's daughter, who had been the source of so many incidents which had caused her pain, and Iras regretted that she had ever confided to her aunt her love for Dion. But, no matter what might happen, the upas-tree whence emanated all these tortures, anxieties, and vexations, must be rooted out—stricken from the ranks of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the Dutch ship was a commonplace. The only novelty was that it was the first shipload of Africans brought to English-America. Here, by the same waters, were the beginnings of popular government and the young upas-tree of slavery. A contradiction in terms was set to resolve itself, a riddle ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... enacted which promise to do much toward checking this extensive evil, or at least causing it to make itself less prominent. Our newspapers still abound with advertisements of various so-called medical works, "Marriage Guides," etc., which are fruits of the same "upas-tree" that Mr. Comstock has labored so ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Copper head sleeps, Where the waters are stagnant, the white vapor creeps, Where the musk of Magnolia hangs thick in the air, And the lilies' phylacteries broaden in prayer; There is peace in the swamp, though the quiet is Death, Though the mist is miasm, the Upas tree's breath, Though no echo awakes to the cooing of doves,— There is peace: yes, the peace that ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... noticed several blow-pipes, a hollow tube eight feet long called by the Poonans "sumpitan," the chief weapon of this tribe, and in the manufacture of which they greatly excel. The darts used are about five inches long, and are dipped in upas juice. The slightest scratch from one of these, drawing blood, proves fatal in less than half an hour unless at once attended to; the only remedy being to keep the patient awake by walking him up and ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... Mrs. Simmons. As Dr. Harvey had not heard her spoken of before, as connected with the report of his intemperance, he knew very well that Mr. Query's "friendly investigations" had been the sole cause of his loss of practice. However, to go to the roots of this Upas tree of scandal, he resolved to pay an ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... then upon the eve of falling. The cause was one of those financial crises that were symptomatic of a mischief which has been growing from then till now, when some critics think they see in it the fatal upas tree of Italy. The process of transforming a country where everything was wanting—roads, railways, lines of navigation, schools, water, lighting, sanitary provisions, and the other hundred thousand requirements of modern life—into the Italy of to-day, ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... many physiologists have insisted,[909] an affinity for special organic substances, whether natural or foreign to the body. We see this in the cells of the kidneys attracting urea from the blood; in the worrara poison affecting the nerves; upas and digitalis the muscles; the Lytta vesicatoria the kidneys; and in the poisonous matter of many diseases, as small-pox, scarlet-fever, hooping-cough, glanders, cancer, and hydrophobia, affecting certain definite parts of the body ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... from its taper stem. Few contrivances more umbrageous than the combination of its long, feathery foliations into its perfection of a parasol. But there are times in the dank, hot nights of midsummer, when the ailantus is but a diluted upas-antiar of Macassar, tainting, albeit with no deadly essence, the muggy air that rocks its slumbering branches and rolls away thence along the parapets and in at the windows of the sleepers. Dead-horse chestnut it might reasonably be called, because of its heavy, carrion smell, which, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... governess, "belongs to the bread-fruit family, but the other members of this remarkable family, except the Osage orange, are found only in foreign countries. The bread-fruit tree itself, the fig, the Indian fig, or banyan tree, and the deadly upas tree, are all relations ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... for myself or for others. Our life is a false nature; it is not in the harmony of things; it is an all-blasting upas, whose root is earth, and whose leaves are the skies which rain their poison-dews upon mankind. We wither from our youth; we gasp with unslaked thirst for unattainable good; lured from the first to the last by phantoms—love, ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... in The harmony of things—this hard decree, This ineradicable taint of sin, This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree Whose root is earth. [Footnote: ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Caddy. Cassowary. Cockatoo. Dugong. Gamboge. Gong. Gutta-percha. Mandarin. Mango. Orang-outang. Rattan. Sago. Upas. ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... sadly spoken words fell upon his hearer's ears like so many snowflakes. Instinctively they shrank back from the beautiful bush as though it had been the fabled Upas. They had begun to fear now for the first time. But there was one among them, a young fellow of twenty-two, named Martin Caine, who was already known as one of the most daring and far-sighted of the rising generation of chemical investigators, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... from a fellow like Corver?" Mr. Enwright cried, with a special glance at George. "He's the upas-tree ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... tell marvellous stories about a certain poison valley of Java in the centre of which stood an upas-tree. The tree itself was famed for the deadly effects of its poisonous exhalations, which killed man, beast, or bird that came near it. These stories proved to be mere fabrications. They grew out of the fact that near by was a valley ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... momentous question turns on the place that we assign to desire in our system of thought. Is it the Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden of the Soul? or is it the Upas Tree creating a wilderness of death all around? This is the issue on which we have to form a judgment, and this judgment must colour all our conception of life and determine the entire range of our possibilities. Let us, then, ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... about those barnacles that clog the wheels of society by poisoning the springs of rectitude with their upas-like eye. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... contending sections, excited to the highest point upon this question, each to send forth its army, Kansas became the battle-field, and Kansas the cry, which wellnigh led to civil war. This was the first fruit. More deadly than the fatal upas, its effect was not limited to the mere spot of ground on which the dew fell from its leaves, but it spread throughout the United States; it kindled all which had been collected for years of inflammable material. It ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... of the breast, it destroys the health and spirits: the streams which gladden the heart become corrupted, and productive of rage and melancholy. Jealousy is like the snake which insidiously entwines itself around its victim; or like the bohun upas of Java, which diffuses death. The bright beams of hope, which cheered the possessor, and carried his vision to distant days and distant scenes of enjoyment, are all eclipsed by this pillar of darkness. Moliere the poet was endowed with an eminent genius—he was esteemed as the first ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... have proudly worn the name that I utterly detest; and I, the outcast, the wanderer, the tireless, friendless waif, drifting despairingly down the tide of time,—even I, the unloved, might have been, not a solitary cumberer, not a household upas,—but why taunt the hideous Actual with a blessed and beautiful Impossible? Ah, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... generally due to the presence of some acid or alkali contained in the plant from which they are derived. Oil of bitter almonds and cherry laurel water are poisonous in consequence of containing prussic acid. Opium owes its activity to the alkaloid morphia. The Upas-tiente derives its energetic powers from the alkaloid strychnia; conia is the active principle of hemlock; veratria of hellebore; aconita of monk's hood; and although there are several poisonous plants in which the active principle has not yet been detected, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Europe—a blot upon our civilisation. The gambling is productive of the greatest possible misery. It is an institution that should be held up to the execration of mankind. All the riffraff of the globe are attracted to this hideous spot. The place is like an upas-tree, under which everything noble and good languishes and dies! The form of Government is absolutely immoral. It is a scandal that rates, and taxes, and public improvements should be paid for out of the private ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... without rendering the throne unsteady, and subverting God's law of order. Woman reigned by divine right only at home. If married, in the hearts of husband and children, and not in the gilded, bedizened palace of fashion, where thinly veiled vice and frivolity hold carnival, and social upas and social asps wave and trail. If single, in the affections of brothers and sisters and friends, as the golden sceptre in the hands of parents. If orphaned, she should find sympathy and gratitude and usefulness among the ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... odor of onions is a little strong, isn't it?" laughed the other. "Rather strange, by the by, some of nature's best restoratives should be rank and noisome, while her poisons, like the Upas tree, are ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... in the swamp where the Copperhead sleeps, Where the waters are stagnant, the white vapor creeps, Where the musk of Magnolia hangs thick in the air, And the lilies' phylacteries broaden in prayer. There is peace in the swamp, though the quiet is death, Though the mist is miasma, the upas-tree's breath, Though no echo awakes to the cooing of doves,— There is peace: yes, the peace ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... as, at the time when they were delivered the Establishment took a violent part against the Catholic Church, on the basis of the Protestant tradition. Moreover, I had never as an Anglican been a lover of the actual Establishment; Hurrell Froude's Remains, in which it is called an "incubus" and "Upas Tree," will stand in evidence, as for him, so for me; for I was one of the editors. What I said even as an Anglican, it is not strange that I said when I was not. Indeed I have been milder in my thoughts of the Establishment ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... and lives? Mind, Tom, I don't defend slavery, I sincerely wish we could do without it, but am I to be the only one to pay the piper in compassing its extinction? If, however, it really be that Upas—tree, under whose baleful shade every kindly feeling in the human bosom, whether of master or servant, withers and dies, I ask, who planted it? If it possess the magical, and incredible, and most pestilential quality, that the ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott |
