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Tropic   /trˈɑpɪk/   Listen
Tropic

noun
1.
Either of two parallels of latitude about 23.5 degrees to the north and south of the equator representing the points farthest north and south at which the sun can shine directly overhead and constituting the boundaries of the Torrid Zone or tropics.



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"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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 crimson cave. Such was this daughter ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... happy and comfortable. I might remain in my chamber all winter, and keep it at an even temperature, and exercise by means of the portable gymnasium. I am sure the joy of your presence would be better than any tropic or equator without you. And I hate to be the means of your resigning from ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... alteration till noon next day; at which time we observed in latitude 23 deg. 18', longitude made from the Isle of Pines 1 deg. 54' E. In the afternoon we had little wind from the south, and a great swell from the same direction: And many boobies, tropic, and men-of-war birds were seen. At eleven o'clock a fresh breeze sprung up at W. by S., with which we stood to the south. At this time we were in the latitude of 23 deg. 18', longitude 169 deg. 49' E., and about forty-two leagues south of ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook

... sad and solitary. While all the others felt that their uttermost desire had been granted in acquiring the Moorish kingdom, he knew that he could present them with a far greater territory than Granada if only they would give him the chance. What were these olive and orange groves beside the tropic fertility of the shores he longed to reach, and which he would have reached long ere this, he told himself regretfully, if only they had helped him! What was the Christianizing of the few Moors who remained in ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley

... days of this kind they reached a smoother channel and could proceed more easily. But their work was still far from easy, for the inflowing tidal waters had left them and they had the swift current of the river to breast, while the tropic heat grew more oppressive day by day. It was hard work for the gentlemen rovers in that tropical climate, where the dense forest growth cut off every breath of air and their diminishing bread forced them to be put on short allowance. They began to complain bitterly, ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris

... richest blue, out of which the sun darted his flaming rays by day, and in which the stars blazed like jewels at night; of tranquil seas of sapphire in which creatures of strange forms and brilliant hues disported themselves; of tropic shores, coral fringed and clothed with graceful feathery palms backed by noble forest trees of precious woods, made glorious by flowers of every conceivable hue and shape, amid which hovered birds of such gorgeous plumage that they gleamed and shone in the sun like living gems; of rich ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... impair The heart that like the lib'ral air All Nature's self embraces; That in the cold Norwegian main, Or mid the tropic hurricane Her ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston

... little park high up above the city whose lights lay, shimmering and misty, below. The stillness was obtrusive here. Not a leaf stirred. There was no one about. They might have been alone upon some tropic peak. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... vineyards, and fig-trees never lost their leaves. We ourselves, and our big three-decked boat were alone in our modernity, if one forgot the line of gay buildings on the shore. Everything else might have been of the time when the world supposed Elephantine to be placed directly on the Tropic of Cancer, and believed in the magic lamp which lit the unfathomable well; the time when quarries of red and yellow clay gave riches to the island, and all Egypt thanked its gods when Elephantine's Nilemeter showed that the Two Lands would be ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... glad to get a chance to shoot at the Spaniards in the open. We lay on our arms that night and as we were drenched with sweat, and had no blankets save a few we took from the dead Spaniards, we found even the tropic ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, between the 106th and 107th degree of east longitude; the South-East trade then died away, and was succeeded by light baffling winds, between South-West and South, and from that to East, attended with very cloudy damp weather, and frequent squalls of heavy rain. This unwholesome ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King

... on the following day, when streets and country roads lay deserted under the tropic sun, the cavalcade was off. The wagon, drawn by two mules in charge of the stable-hand, led the way. It was laden with tent, baggage, and the women-folk, Ann, Natalie, and mammy. Behind followed Leighton on his favorite horse and Shenton and ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain

... cloud to veil the sun; you could see the ether shimmering over the land, and the fields of yellow grain looked like lakes of molten metal. Shaded by our wide straw hats, Penelope and I had no thought of the tropic heat. We were engrossed in the reaper as it cut its way through the wheat; we followed it, counting the sheaves as they dropped with mechanical precision; we stepped along untiringly in its wake, as though the rough stubble were the ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... theirs was a bliss more fair than this Which we taste in our colder clime; For they were rife in a tropic life— A brighter and ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various

... 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 ...
— "Colony,"—or "Free State"? "Dependence,"—or "Just Connection"? • Alpheus H. Snow

... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... represent Pizarro's conquerors of Peru. Many of the ladies wore quaint costumes and rich attire of the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, while a few were attired in grotesque costumes. Felicita was dressed as a princess of the court of the ancient Incas, with a head dress of the rich plumage of tropic birds. I was dressed in ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds

... mob which rose against aristocratic oppression; and in like manner, Sojourner, singing this hymn, seemed to impersonate the fervor of Ethiopia, wild, savage, hunted of all nations, but burning after God in her tropic heart, and stretching her scarred hands towards the glory ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... Here, in an atmosphere artificially heated and moistened to reproduce the steaming jungle, is massed a splendid exhibit of those island trees and flowers that most of us know only through pictures and stories of southern seas. Around the central source of light, which is hidden under tropic vines, stands a circle of royal palms; and planted thickly over the remaining space are jungle trees, vivid enough to our imagination, but many of which have never before been ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... described, and Jack gained rapidly in his chosen profession, as did his chum, Billy Raynor, who was third assistant engineer of the big vessel. The next volume, which was called "The Ocean Wireless Boys and the Lost Liner," told of the loss of the splendid ship "Tropic Queen," on a volcanic island after she had become disabled and had drifted helplessly for days. By wireless Jack managed to secure aid from U. S. vessels, and it came in the nick of time, for the ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton

... convoy as far as the tenth degree of north latitude, and then proceed to Bermuda. This was of itself a pleasant cruise, and gave us the chance of falling in either with an enemy or a recapture. Ships not intending to cross the line usually grant a saturnalia to the crew when they come to the tropic of Capricorn; it is thought to renovate their spirits, and to break the monotony of the cruise, or voyage, where time flows on in such a smooth, undeviating routine, that one day is not distinguishable from another. Our captain, a young man, and ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... years the fertile Western plains Were hid behind your sullen walls, Your cliffs and crags and waterfalls All weatherworn with tropic rains. ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson

... by the side of the hanging wood, and over my field. Did these small weak birds, some of which were nestling twelve days ago, shift their quarters at this late season of the year to the other side of the northern tropic? Or rather, is it not more probable that the next church, ruin, chalk-cliff, steep covert, or perhaps sandbank, lake, or pool (as a more northern naturalist would say), may become their hybernaculum, and afford them ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White

... 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 gave me ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... that same shore line, but the people had vanished. There was only the thick, steamy mist, the tropic jungle crowding down to the shore, and the waves rolling in monotonously from the waste of gray ocean beyond the curtain ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various

... you're my woman!" She loved his happy impudence. "Aren't you, Skipper?" They had passed the twist in the path—the path which was like a moist green tunnel through the tropic jungle—which hid them from the house and she halted and ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers, and the blue-eyed speedwell, and the ground-ivy at my feet—what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... stopped dead. You mustn't forget that I was a big, loose, rangy 180-pounder, and standin' there—I can see it now; I didn't then—but me standin' there, with the heat of warm exercise and three West Indian rum swizzles oozing out of me on that tropic afternoon, I c'n see now I wasn't any winged ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly

... satiate of her. But Katherine, he had thought, was so young and bright and beautiful; a child that had lived within the cloister and had grown to maidenhood in sweet innocence. 'Twas like finding in some tropic clime, embowered and shaded by thick, waxy leaves, a glorious, ripe pomegranate, which he would grasp and drink from its rich, red pulp, a portion that would cool and 'suage a burning thirst; while Constance, by the side of Katherine, was like a russet apple, into whose heart ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... 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, zone ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... Spillway, over which already some overflow from the lake was escaping to the Caribbean. My friends "Dusty" and H—— had carried their canoe to the Chagres below, and before nine we were off down the river. It was a day that all the world north of the Tropic of Cancer could not equal; just the weather for a perfect "day off." A plain-clothes man, it is true, is not supposed to have days off. Some one might run away with the Administration Building on the edge of the Pacific ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck

... that if Salome had not known from the family Bible that this man was almost thirty-five, her eager scrutiny of his features would have discovered little concerning his age, and still less concerning his character. Exposure to the winds and heat of tropic regions had darkened and sallowed the complexion, which his clear deep blue eyes and light brown hair declared was originally of Saxon fairness; in proof whereof, when he drew off one glove and lifted his hand it seemed as if the marble ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... course in which, according to the Ptolemaic system, the sun passes from the equator to the tropic of ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri

... ..and yet in likelihood it may be so, for without all question, it being extended from the tropic of Capricorn to the circle Antarctic, and lying as it doth in the temperate zone, cannot choose but yield in time some flourishing kingdoms to succeeding ages, as America ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... could not be mistaken in a country of established forms. She had abundant brown hair skillfully arranged under a smart French hat. Her eyes were blue; not the blue of any painted color; it was the blue of remote spaces in the tropic sky. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... her approach, as the iceberg thaws and dissolves beneath the rays of a tropic sky. He had floated into the old latitudes of love and warmth again, and his cold heart once more began to beat—his hardness to pass away; leaving the old, true, ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous

... seasons of Venus present the greatest anomaly, if its assigned inclination of axis (75 deg.) can be relied on as correct, which is doubtful. Its tropic zone extends nearly to the pole, and at the same time the winter at the other pole reaches the equator. The short period of this planet causes it to present the south pole to the sun only one hundred and twelve days after it has been scorching the one at the north. This gives two ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren

... north-eastmost island of Batta-China, or Gilolo, in the Moluccas, in latitude 2 deg. 35' N.[2] The variation here was 5 deg. 20' easterly. By noon of this day we were fourteen leagues N. by E. from the place where we had been at anchor for twenty days.[3] The 1st June, passed the tropic of Cancer. The 2d, being in lat 25 deg. 44' N. we laid our account with seeing the islands of Dos Reys Magos.[4] Accordingly, about four p.m. we had sight of a very low island, and soon afterwards of the high land over the low, there being ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr

... sea-birds, allured by the stillness of these retreats, resorted here to pass the night. At the hour of sunset we could perceive the curlew and the stint skimming along the seashore; the frigate-bird poised high in air; and the white bird of the tropic, which abandons, with the star of day, the solitudes of the Indian ocean. Virginia took pleasure in resting herself upon the border of this fountain, decorated with wild and sublime magnificence. She often went thither to wash the linen of the family beneath the shade of the ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre

... 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 that gathered ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... morning a week later. The Southern Cross was now in sub-tropic waters, steaming steadily along under blue skies and through smooth azure water flecked here and there with ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... spare a crew to man the prize, determined to set her on fire. It was about sunset when the first boat put off from the "Sumter" to visit the captured ship. The two vessels were lying a hundred yards apart, rising and falling in unison on the slow rolling swells of the tropic seas. The day was bright and warm, and in the west the sun was slowly sinking to the meeting line of sky and ocean. All was quiet and peaceful, as only a summer afternoon in Southern seas can be. Yet in the midst of all that peace and quiet, a scene in the great drama ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... it in the creaking lock. He was stripping himself even before the two sailors were out in the sun, and by the time that Crothers and Joe Byng had realized that there was an audience of something like a thousand, including children, he was standing posed like a gladiator, with the straight-down tropic sun streaming off his ebony hide. As Crothers, not quite sure even yet that the whole affair was not a joke, began to doff his blouse it dawned on him that if the thing were true it would not ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy

... in evil wise and spent in evil fashion. But it was not so much the particulars as the generalities of their talk that delighted me. I loved to hear of islands where the cocoa trees grew, and where parrots of every hue under heaven squealed and screamed in the tropic heat; where girls as graceful as goddesses and as yellow as guineas wore robes of flaming feathers and sang lullabies in soft, impossible tongues; lands of coral and ivory and all the glories of the earth, where life was full of golden possibilities and a ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... 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, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... lands—boundaries that vanished day by day, as the lands widened, with now a whole farm added, and now a single field. Could he leave Arden, and the kingdom that he had created for himself, to roam in sandy deserts, and hob-and-nob with Kaffir chiefs under the tropic stars? ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... me have sailed the seas, Known tropic suns, and braved the Artic breeze. We've heard on Popocatepetl's peak The savage Tom-Tom sharpenin' of his beak. We've served the dreadful Jim-Jam up on toast, When shipwrecked off the Coromandel coast, And when we heard the frightful Bim-Bam ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay

... lands of song; Fabled fountains pouring spray; Where our anchors dropped among Corals of some tropic bay, With its ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... a lovely Youth! I guess The panther in the wilderness Was not so fair as he; And, when he chose to sport and play, 40 No dolphin ever was so gay Upon the tropic sea. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... men who court thee under tropic skies, and who, like me, are turned from thee bodily shattered and whimpering like a child, how much, how very much hast thou laid up for ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... upturn'd faces—pale brows and quivering lips, All flickering like the tropic sea in the green light of eclipse; And the multitude waves to and fro, as in the tropic sea, After a tempest, heaves and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various

... world,—in peace and in war, in storm and in battle,—for heroism and prowess unsurpassed. He shrinks from no danger, he dreads no foe, he yields to no superior. No shoals are too dangerous, no seas too boisterous, no climate too rigorous for him. The burning sun of the tropic cannot make him effeminate, nor can the eternal winter of the polar seas paralyze his energies. R. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... would have long since intimated gently to such dog in the manger: 'Dog, will you be so obliging as rise! I am grieved to say, we shall have to do unpleasant things otherwise. Dogs have doors for their hutches: but to pretend barring the Tropic of Cancer,—that is too big a door for any dog. Can nobody but you have business here, then, which is not displeasing to the gods? We bid you rise!' And in this mode there is no doubt the dog, bark and bite as he might, would have ended by rising; not ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... her glory, only to be submerged the next moment and blotted out. About two o'clock single raindrops began to splash so loudly on the veranda roof just outside my window that the noise waked me; after that I only slept fitfully, and my ears were never free from the loud roaring of the tropic rain that began presently to fall upon Aiken. I dreamed that somebody had stolen the Great Lakes and while being hotly pursued had dropped them. All day it rained like that, and all the following night, and only let up a little the afternoon of the second day. I ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris

... strange and subtle way, stands near to God. His work is done hand-in-hand with God. He takes the forces of nature and the laws of the material world, and bends them to the needs and use of man. Sky and sea or desert may be about him. He knows the arctic cold, the tropic heat; the forest and the plain; the mountain and the marsh; the brook and river; the peak and the precipice; the glacier and the tempest in their course. Out of the very elements he is daily building new paths for man to tread. ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... and gladly got rid of coatee, rifle, and belt, to have a lounge in the cool of the evening; the dinner was ready in the captain's cabin, where lights already appeared; and, soon after, the tropic night came on, as if with a bound. The sky was of a purple black, studded with its myriads of stars, which were reflected with dazzling lustre from the smooth surface of the sea. But not only were the bright star shapes there to give splendour to the wave, for as far down ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn

... 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, rivers, lakes, and sounds? Or had they, in the years ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright

... fallen and he traveled high along the upper terrace where the gorgeous tropic moon lighted the dizzy pathway through the gently undulating branches ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... confess,' he says, 'an affection for my veteran uniform overcoat, inspired by its persistent utility. I find that it is twenty-three years of age and can testify to its strenuous existence. It has been spared neither rain, wind, nor salt sea spray, tropic heat nor Arctic cold; it has outlived many sets of buttons, from their glittering gilded youth to green old age, and it supports its four-stripe shoulder straps as gaily as the single lace ring of the ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley

... southward, else why do many small birds pass the winter in northern latitudes where severe climatic conditions prevail? Should we assume the failing food supply to be the sole cause of migration, we would find ourselves at fault when we came to consider that birds leave the tropic regions in spring, when food is still exceedingly abundant, and journey northward thousands of miles to their former ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson

... type Whereby we shall be known in every land Is that vast gulf which laves 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 ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... blossoms that enrich the equatorial woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks, we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. We almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box, artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with the great convulsion of Nature ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... greatest contrast with this, festooned by the lavish clusters of odorous yellow jasmine and many-hued morning-glory,—the latter making a pillar heavy with triumphal wreaths of every old stump along the plashy brink,—the former swinging from tree-top to tree-top to knit the whole tropic wilderness into a tangle of emerald chains, drooping lamps of golden fire, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... the mother steals into that of the father, which holds it closely, while his arm creeps noiselessly around her waist. Their hearts float far away upon that music. His eyes droop as when he was speaking of the tropic islands—as if he were hearing the soft language of those shores. As his wife looks at him she sees on his face, beneath the weariness of its expression, the light which shone there in the days when they sang "Bonnie Doon" together. He draws her closer to him, and his ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis

... mighty Jove, Had not to me prohibited the crown Which wreathes of wont the gifted poet's brow, I were a friend of these your idols too, Whom our vile age so shamelessly ignores: But that sore insult keeps me now aloof From the first patron of the olive bough: For Ethiop earth beneath its tropic sun Ne'er burn'd with such fierce heat, as I with rage At losing thing so comely and beloved. Resort then to some calmer fuller fount, For of all moisture mine is drain'd and dry, Save that which falleth from ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... We have not fallen so. We are our fathers' sons: let those who lead us know! 'T was only yesterday sick Cuba's cry Came up the tropic wind, "Now help us, for we die!" Then Alabama heard, And rising, pale, to Maine and Idaho Shouted a burning word. Proud state with proud impassioned state conferred, And at the lifting of a hand sprang forth, East, west, and south, and ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... Arrillian led Tyndall the length of the corridor, back to the patio he had stepped onto by mistake earlier in the day. Bheel stepped respectfully aside. Tyndall looked out into the garden: the sun was beginning to set, the long shadows stretched across the dim recesses of tropic greenery. The huge insect-like thing was still there, stretched out in a narrow strip of sunlight, catching the last failing waves of warmth from the ...
— Grove of the Unborn • Lyn Venable

... treasury of the caliphs. [133] Our reason must be startled by these extravagant assertions; and they will become more palpable, if we assume the compass and measure the extent of habitable ground: a valley from the tropic to Memphis seldom broader than twelve miles, and the triangle of the Delta, a flat surface of two thousand one hundred square leagues, compose a twelfth part of the magnitude of France. [134] A more accurate ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... accordingly the most readable of all the purely technical parts of the work. The account of the tropics, with which the book closes, is singularly inaccurate, but contains some rather elegant descriptions: [81] at the tropic of Cancer summer always reigns, at Capricorn there is perpetual winter. The book here breaks off quite abruptly; apparently he intended to compose the epilogue at some future time, but had no opportunity of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... its open, smiling valleys, its broad fields, its air of expectant fertility, inviting one to come scratch its surface, if no more, in order to reap abundant harvests. In fact, it seemed to me that we were riding through typical farming land at home, instead of through a Malay valley under the tropic. And if anything more were needed to strengthen the illusion, it was a college yell, given by a gang of Ifugaos (the people we were now immediately on our way to visit) repairing a bridge we had to cross! They did it in style, and naturally had no cheer-leader; ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... poop I saw Miss West, with her sewing basket, emerging from the port door of the chart-house. The deck-chairs were on that side, so I stole around on the starboard side of the chart-house in order to fling overboard unobserved the dreadful thing I carried. But, drying on the surface in the tropic heat and still pulsing inside, it stuck to my hand, so that it was a bad cast. Instead of clearing the railing, it struck on the pin-rail and stuck there in the shade, and as I opened the door to go below and wash ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... geographical distribution of the coffee tree shows that it is grown in well-defined tropical limits. The coffee belt of the world lies between the tropic of cancer and the tropic of capricorn. The principal coffee consuming countries are nearly all to be found in the north temperate zone, between the tropic of cancer and the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... each pipe was black and old, They were not wiser for their many years, Nor knew thy sorcery though set in gold, Nor had thy tropic taste,—these proud compeers! ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various

... goral and a roebuck during the first two days, for a violent gale made hunting well-nigh impossible. On the third morning the sun rose in a sky as blue as the waters of a tropic sea, and not a breath of air stirred the silver poplar leaves as we crossed the rocky stream bed to the base of the mountains north of camp. Fifteen hundred feet above us towered a ragged granite ridge which ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews

... from whom, Esrno assured me, I might obtain the fullest information regarding the various objects of interest, to visit which we had adopted an unusual and circuitous course. We embarked on a gulf running generally from east to west, about midway between the northern tropic and the arctic circle. As this was the summer of the northern hemisphere, we should thus enjoy a longer day, and should not suffer from the change of climate. After taking leave of our friends, we went down below to take possession of the fore part of the vessel, which was assigned as ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... "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, ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... journey, 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

... a greater number of tropic birds than of any others. They would not got out of our way as we walked along, allowing us to shove them over rather than move. We literally also took their eggs from under them, without their attempting to make any defence. This apathy, as we called it, we thought ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... tournays and went errant upon quests, and met Ulysses and the heroes and the fairies. Or late in the evening, just before the lamps in the nursery were put out, he would suddenly mount me, and we would gallop through Africa. There we would pass by night through tropic forests, and come upon dark rivers sweeping by, all gleaming with the eyes of crocodiles, where the hippopotamus floated down with the stream, and mysterious craft loomed suddenly out of the dark and furtively passed away. And when we had passed through ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

... lives—they may revive: but were it not so, I would still say Give. Let them go, even if every soul in that ship were doomed. Let them go. Let them drink the fresh sea breeze before they die; let them see the green tropic world; let them forget their sorrow for a while; let them feel springing up afresh in them the celestial fount of hope. We let the guilty criminal eat and drink well the morn ere he is led forth to die—shall we not do as much by ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... came to me in the blazing heat of tropic day, in the cool of eve, in the calm serenity of night, a voice calling, calling infinite pitiful and sweet, yet mocking ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol

... years before Columbus it was reported that tropic islands had been discovered and ruled by Archbishop Oppas, of Spain, who was fain to leave his country because he had betrayed his king to the Moors. He found a race friendly and gentle, sharing with one another whatever was given to them, as not knowing selfishness. ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner

... Natives of tropic islands pass a large part of their lives in water, and seem as much at home in the sea as on the land; swim and dive, pursue fishes, play in the waves like surf-ducks and seals, and explore the coral gardens and groves ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir

... 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 ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... of 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

... from its moorings and drifted off on seas that soon grew tropic: should it be Bermuda, after all? Oleanders and a turquoise bay—what ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... the king 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

... 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 her head to murmur that he was Honorable ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon

... a blinding sunshine; underneath that immense roof-foliage was a solemn twilight. The trees shed continual showers of tropic dew. As we struggled on through the mud, the perspiration exuded from every pore; our clothes were soon wet and heavy. Every man had to crawl and scramble as he best could. Sometimes prostrate forest-giants barred the road with a mountain of twigs and branches. For ten days we endured it; then the ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... the tropic seas, Where fathom long the blood-red dulses grow, Droop from the rock and waver in the breeze, Lashing the tide to foam; while calm below The muddy mandrakes throng those waters warm, And purple, gold, and ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow

... Tacoma commands the best view of the Sound and of Mt. Tacoma, with its fifteen thousand perpendicular feet looming rose-pink in the heavens, and all its fifteen glaciers seeming to glow with an inner tropic warmth. There are eighteen hundred miles of shore-line embroidering this marvellous Sound. We are continually rounding abrupt points, as in a river,—points so much alike that an untutored eye can not tell one ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard

... tradition, knowest thou any corner of the world where at least FORCE is not? The drop which thou shakest from thy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but to-morrow thou findest it swept away; already on the wings of the North-wind, it is nearing the Tropic of Cancer. How came it to evaporate, and not lie motionless? Thinkest thou there is aught motionless; without ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... senses and deaden his brain. (The devil keeps always good chefs in his train.) It was ten when he rose for departure. The room Seemed a garden of midsummer fragrance and bloom. The lights with their soft rosy coverings made A glow like late sunsets, in some tropic glade. The world seemed afar, with its dullness and duty, And life was a rapture of love ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... 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 ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin

... leaves, but slid with a rustling sound fully exposed above them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond spots down his back, his flat head with deadly tooth, did not harmonise as the green snake does with leaf and grass. He was too marked, too prominent—a venomous foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or native to our wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had escaped from the glass case ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... spellbound by the weird savagery of the spectacle-the great licking fire, the dancing, barbaric figures, the rise and fall of the rhythm, the dust and shuffle, the ebb and flow of the dance, the dim, half-guessed groups swaying in the darkness-and overhead the calm tropic night. ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... with, a light breeze from the south-west, and the little vessel sped through the water at an average speed of about eight knots an hour. All that day not a sail appeared in sight. Night settled down in all the calm splendour of the tropic seas, and nothing disturbed its serenity save the monotonous beating of the Sumter's propeller as she steered a south-easterly course down the Gulf of Mexico. The following day brought her safely to Cape Antonio, which she ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes

... his eternal throne,— The city-gemmed Peruvian peak,— The sunset portals landsmen seek, Whose train, to reach the Golden Land, Crawls slow and pathless through the sand,— Or that, whose ice-lit beacon guides The mariner on tropic tides, And flames across the Gulf afar, A torch by day, by night a star,— Not thus, to cleave the outer skies, Does my serener mountain rise, Nor aye forget its gentle birth Upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... on the purple plain Of Polynesian main, Where never yet adventurer's prore Lay rocking near its coral shore: A tropic mystery, which the enamored deep Folds, as a beauty in a charmed sleep. There lofty palms, of some imperial line, That never bled their nimble wine, Crowd all the hills, and out the headlands go To watch on distant reefs the lazy ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... Surely the gods hid their own special treasure from the grasp of man. Surely that Water of Life was to be sought for far away, amid trackless mountain-peaks, guarded by dragons and demons. That Fount of Youth must be hidden in the rich glades of some tropic forest. That Cup of Immortality must be earned by years, by ages, of superhuman penance and self torture. Certain of the old Jews, it is true, had had deeper and truer thoughts. Here and there a psalmist had said, 'With God is the well of Life;' ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... so as to cut our hemisphere three hundred and seventy leagues from the island of Sancto Anton, the last of the Cabo Verde islands. It also cuts the coast of Brasil about two degrees from the equinoctial line through the land of Humos, the tropic of Capricorn, the Cape of Dospermitas, and the river of Sant Salvador. According to these charts, the line of demarcation of the king of Portogal includes three hundred and ninety leagues through which the line of demarcation passes inland, and for a distance of six hundred leagues ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 - Volume III, 1569-1576 • E.H. Blair

... indicate Ceylon, is undeniable; since, amongst other imaginary characteristics of Taprobane, they make it extend considerably to the south of the line. Now, with respect to Ceylon, this is notoriously false; that island lies entirely in the northern tropic, and does not come within five (hardly more than six) degrees of the equator. Plain it is, therefore, that Taprobane, it construed very strictly, is an ens rationis, made up by fanciful composition from various ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... whole extent of the South Seas, from one tropic to another, we find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when the resources of even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the improvident Polynesian trembled for the future. We may accept some of the ideas of Mr. Darwin's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... unworthy the doctrine that we lose our own liberties by securing the enduring foundations of liberty to others. Our institutions will not deteriorate by extension, and our sense of justice will not abate under tropic suns in distant seas. As heretofore, so hereafter will the nation demonstrate its fitness to administer any new estate which events devolve upon it, and in the fear of God will "take occasion by the hand and make the bounds of ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... those tropic lands avenge themselves on each new savage horde of invaders from the hardy North. It is not done in a generation, not in a century, perhaps. But drop by drop the vigorous, tingling, Arctic blood is sapped away. Year after year the lazy comfort, the loose pleasure, of the south land fastens its curse ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... pathless chase where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, and which stretches 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 ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... 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 ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... love rest upon me, O my parents, who have thrust me forth, Who have left me in the cavernous cliff, Who have heartlessly placed me in the Cliff frequented by the tropic bird! O Waiaalaia, my mother! O Waimanu, my father! ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various

... With her, it looks at the vast mirror, and surveys her form at length in the Psyche-glass. It gives the final shake to the skirt, the last flirt to the embroidered handkerchief, carefully held, and adjusts the bouquet, complete as a tropic nestling in orange leaves. It descends with her, and marks the faint blush upon her cheek at the thought of her exceeding beauty; the consciousness of the most beautiful woman, that the most beautiful woman ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis

... Evangeline Noble went to the same tarven, which made me glad, for I like 'em both as stars differin'. Elder Wessel I regarded more as one of the little stars in the Milky Way, but Evangeline as one of the big radiant orbs that flashed over our heads in them tropic nights. ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... vampire-bats before the glare Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening, 485 Strange night ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... 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 ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... And like that land so rich in bloom, Its branches wrought at noon a gloom; 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; ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley

... been living, since 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 this lesson, taken to heart, had ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... equipped for every climate from the tropic to the pole, and armed against every malady from Ague to Zoster. He carried also the paternal watch, a solid silver bull's-eye, and a large pocketbook, tied round with a long tape, and, by way of precaution, pinned ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... journey from the Tropics towards the Pole. As it rushes back across the ocean, thrilled and expanded by the heat, it opens its dry and thirsty lips to suck in the damp from below, till, saturated once more with steam, it will reach the tropic as a gray rain-laden sky ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... it, swayed by it. He began to wander about; and there grew upon his senses strange delights and reeling agonies. He heard church bells, he caught at butterflies, he tumbled in new-mown hay, he wandered in a tropic garden. But in the hay a wasp stung him, and the butterfly changed to a curling black snake that struck at him and glided to a dark-flowing river full of floating ice, and up from the river a white hand was thrust, and it beckoned him—beckoned him. He shut his eyes and moved towards it, but a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Mediterranean, I can enter better than you can into the childish delight that our friend Caius Plinius expresses. It is a joy which is not to be found in the nature of the American to sleep in the tropic heats of a July sun. Winter is abhorrent to the nature of every Levanter. To bask upon the shore of the Mediterranean, with the calm lazy sea at your feet and the winds cut off from your back, is the only decent way of hibernating. But ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... crowned With rings of melting amethyst; Mute, patient Martyrs, cruelly bound To blazing fagots; here and there, Some bold, serene Evangelist, Or Mary in her sunny hair: And here and there from out the words A brilliant tropic bird took flight; And through the margins many a vine Went wandering—roses, red and white, Tulip, wind-flower, and columbine Blossomed. To his believing mind These things were real, and the soft wind, Blown through the mullioned window, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... was a loneliness in the desert. That was part of the big feeling of it, the still, stealing sense of immensity reaching out its shadowy hands for you.... Loneliness and restlessness.... These tropic nights, when the stars burned low and bright, and the hot sands seemed breathing.... Loneliness and restlessness—but they gave a man dreams.... And were those dreams ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... insects seem to be pin-points of vibrant vitality which we can scarcely believe to be unaccompanied by pleasurable sensation. The mosquito which I squash on the back of my hand, and which dies in a bath of my own blood, has had a short life but doubtless a merry one. The moths which, in a tropic night, lie in calcined heaps around the lamp, have probably perished in pursuit of some ecstatic illusion. It does not seem, on the whole, that we need expend much pity on the brute creation, or make its destinies a ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... water, The water steaming hot! A spoonful for each man of us, Another for the pot! We shall not drink from amber, Nor Capuan slave shall mix For us the snows of Athos With port at thirty-six; Whiter than snow the crystals, Grown sweet 'neath tropic fires, More rich the herbs of China's field, The pasture-lands more fragrance yield; For ever let Britannia wield The tea-pot of ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... go back to the Empress, which we left somewhere about the Tropic of Capricorn, in a heavy gale of wind, approaching to a hurricane. The weather having come on very thick, she soon lost sight of her consort, when the heavy sea which got up compelled Captain Adair either to heave the ship to or to run before the ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston

... sacred vessels on the altar, and the brazen-winged eagle of the lectern. Strange-shaped patterns of wine-colour and violet were cast from the stained glass windows upon the walls and pillars, enriching the grey fabric of the church, like tropic flowers. The window nearest me was a favourite of ours. It was dedicated, so saith the bronze tablet beneath, to the memory of Cosmo John, fifth son of an Earl of Aberfalden. He had died at the age of fifteen, not a tender age to me, but the age toward ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche

... every village, and where every man has at one time or another been his monk, is quite a different thing to reading of him in far countries, under other skies and swayed by other thoughts. To sit in the monastery garden in the dusk, in just such a tropic dusk as he taught in so many years ago, and hear the yellow-robed monk tell of that life, and repeat his teaching of love, and charity, and compassion—eternal love, perfect charity, endless compassion—until the stars come out in the purple sky, and the silver-voiced gongs ring for evening ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... "sea-green" of the shallow North Sea 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 sunsets, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... 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 nesters of the ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... nor a rose. He had his enemies during his life and his detractors ever since, and we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. He was a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed, even to excess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He lived in a perpetual alternation of thunderstorm and blazing sunshine. He admitted himself that his "reason," by which he meant his judgment, "was exceeding weak," and his tactlessness ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... tracks, found a bog of oozing, icy mud. Therefore, as the town doubled daily in size, it grew endwise like a string of dominoes, till the shore from Cape Nome to Penny River was a long reach of white, glinting in the low rays of the arctic sunset like foamy breakers on a tropic island. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... askance The poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more From the Sun's axle; they with labour pushed Oblique the centric globe: some say the Sun Was bid turn reins from the equinoctial road Like distant breadth—to Taurus with the seven Atlantic Sisters, and the Spartan Twins, Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amain By Leo, and the Virgin, and the Scales, As deep as Capricorn; to bring in change Of seasons to each clime. Else had the spring Perpetual smiled on ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... the sea shells, and of the mermaids who brought them to the shore, that some one who loved her might take them to her, and that the soft sound of the sea might always come to her ears, with visions of blue skies and tropic islands, ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed

... shape, seems to have existed on all the continental lands except Australia, and to have been in a state of singular prosperity. As is often the case with other vigorous genera of mammals, the species were adapted to a very great variety of climates, and were fitted to endure tropic heat ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... 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

... 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 ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton

... 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, ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster

... In tropic gorgeousness, the Lord of Day To the bright chambers of the west retired, And with the glory of his parting ray The hundred domes of Mexico he fired, When I, with vague and solemn awe inspired, Entered the Incarnation's sacred fane. The ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... balmier than the south wind, when it brings The scent of aromatic shrub and tree, And tropic flower on ifs glowing wings, Thine odorous breath is wafted over me; How to thy dewy lips mine own lip clings, And my whole being is absorbed in thee; And in my breast thine eyes have lit a fire That ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands

... of the vernal equinox; it was most extraordinary. Everywhere the gutters ran streaming with water, the snow melting under the unexampled heat of the solar rays like wax in a candle flame. The trees growing in the square were leafless, and the tropic sun's rays blazed mercilessly through their naked branches. Constans found ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen



Words linked to "Tropic" :   parallel of latitude, parallel, hot, equatorial, line of latitude, latitude



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