"Thule" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... come in later years when the Ocean will unloose the bands of things, when the immeasurable earth will lie open, when seafarers will discover new countries, and Thule will no longer be the ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... ago I was in the Orkneys; the day before I was in the Shetland Isles, the "farthest Thule" of the Romans, where I climbed the Noup of the Noss, as the famous headland of the island of Noss is called, from which you look out upon the sea that lies ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... relations of different regions to the solar source of heat; but before the great Portuguese voyages and the epoch-making third voyage of Vespucius, to be described hereafter, a discouraging doctrine was entertained with regard to these zones. Ancient travellers in Scythia and voyagers to "Thule"—which in Ptolemy's scheme perhaps meant the Shetland isles[360]—had learned something of Arctic phenomena. The long winter nights,[361] the snow and ice, and the bitter winds, made a deep impression upon visitors ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... "Peter Pan" and the "Little Minister." "Jane Eyre" will supply the demand for melodrama in its best form, while "Villette," and possibly "Shirley," may carry some girls far enough with Charlotte Bronte to incline them to read her life by Mrs. Gaskell. William Black's "Princess of Thule" and "Judith Shakespeare" will find occasional readers. "Lorna Doone" will be more popular, although there are girls who find it very tedious. There should be a full set of Dickens in an edition attractive to boys and girls. A complete set of the Waverly novels in a new large print ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... inspiration, and not guess: As dark a truth that author did unfold, As oracles or prophets e'er foretold: 'At last the ocean shall unlock the bound Of things, and a new world by Tiphys found, Then ages far remote shall understand The Isle of Thule is not the farthest land.' Sure God, by these discov'ries, did design That his clear light through all the world should shine, But the obstruction from that discord springs The prince of darkness made 'twixt Christian kings; 90 That peaceful age with happiness ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... The account of this voyage to the north of Europe, as commonly quoted, furnishes a singular instance of the inaccuracy of translators in the matter of figures. Columbus is there made to say, that at the Ultima Thule, which be reached, "the tides were so great as to rise and fall twenty-six fathoms," i.e. 156 feet. Of course this an absurdity; for no tides in Europe rise much above 50 feet. We have no record of the exact words ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... for centuries and are still accepted. We have the Gauls of Galatia, Galatz, Galicia, Gallia proper and Gaeldoch (or Caledonia), forming a continuous chain of Gallic settlements from the Himaliya to the Ultima Thule. And now the circuit is complete. The current sets back from the West. The slogan, heard so tellingly at Lucknow, is swelling up the glaciers of the Asiatic fatherland to save it from the Scythians! Monkbarns lived ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... the quartette had always somehow conjured up in his mind the image of a bleak, inaccessible rock set in a stormy sea, where no one lived if he could possibly find shelter elsewhere,—an Ultima Thule, difficult of access and still more difficult of exit, a weather-bound little spot into which you scrambled precariously by means of boats and ladders, and out of which you might not be able to get for weeks ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... shrike, the chickadee has been seen to take refuge in a squirrel-hole in a tree. Hark! Is that the hound, or doth expectation mock the eager ear? With open mouths and bated breaths we listen. Yes, it is old "Singer;" he is bringing the fox over the top of the range toward Butt End, the ULTIMA THULE of the hunters' tramps in this section. In a moment or two the dog is lost to hearing again. We wait for his second turn; then for ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... warning of the approach of Marguerite, and places a casket of jewels beside the modest bouquet left by Siebel. Marguerite, seated at her spinning-wheel, alternately sings a stanza of a ballad ("Il etait un Roi de Thule") and speaks her amazed curiosity concerning the handsome stranger who had addressed her in the marketplace. She finds the jewels, ornaments herself with them, carolling her delight the while, and admiring the regal appearance which the gems ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... description. The Presidio, with its voiceless, dismounted cannon and empty embrasures hidden in a hollow, and the Mission Dolores, with its crumbling walls and belfry tower lost in another, made the ultima thule of all San Francisco wandering. The Cliff house and Fort Point did not then exist; from Black Point the curving line of shore of "Yerba Buena"—or San Francisco—showed only a stretch of glittering ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the pains of the men of Thule be blotted in oblivion; for though they lack all that can foster luxury (so naturally barren is the soil), yet they make up for their neediness by their wit, by keeping continually every observance of soberness, and devoting every instant of their lives to perfecting our ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... with a negative, concluding most of the sea within the land, and making an end of the world northward, near the 63rd degree. The same opinion, when learning chiefly flourished, was received in the Romans' time, as by their poets' writings it may appear. "Et te colet ultima Thule," said Virgil, being of opinion that Iceland was the extreme part of the world habitable toward the north. Joseph Moletius, an Italian, and Mercator, a German, for knowledge men able to be compared with the best geographers of our time, the one in his half spheres ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... in one of his letters, "in the month of February, I sailed more than a hundred leagues beyond Tile." By this he means Thule, or Iceland. "Of this island the southern part is seventy-three degrees from the equator, not sixty-three degrees, as some geographers pretend." But here he was wrong. The Southern part of Iceland is in the latitude of sixty-three and a half degrees. "The English, chiefly those of Bristol, carry ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... John in silence modestly expires; No merit now the dear Nonjuror claims; Moliere's old stubble in a moment flames. Tears gush'd again, as from pale Priam's eyes, When the last blaze sent Ilion to the skies. Roused by the light, old Dulness heav'd the head Then snatch'd a sheet of Thule from her bed; Sudden she flies, and whelms it o'er the pyre, Down sink the flames, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... years in Spain and ten in Portugal, and a good while in Porto Santo that belongs to Portugal, a little in England and in Ultima Thule or Iceland, and long, long years upon ships decked and undecked in all the seas that are known—fourteen years, childhood and boyhood, in Genoa and at Pavia where I went to school, and all my years of hope in Christ's Kingdom, and in the uplands of great doers-and your ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... rode and sang, Then met he by chance Sir Thule Vang; Sir Thule Vang, with his twelve sons bold, All cas'd in iron, the bright and cold. Look out, ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... in one passage of Pliny (iv. 12); for in another passage from his multifarious note book, where Thule is spoken of, the Arctic day and night are much ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... appetising a dainty to be lightly resigned. On the 23rd, they obtained a full confession from Thomas Winter, and the actual name of White Webbs. From this moment White Webbs became their Ultima Thule ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... weird names (so different from poor Titania!), and from the three-thousand "Unities!" What "poetry" we do get is so vague and dim and wistful and forlorn that it makes us want to go out and "buy clothes" for someone. We veer between the abomination of city-reform and the desolation of Ultima Thule. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... as it appeared from this despatch of Captain McClure's, had been frozen up in the Bay of Mercy of Banks Land: Banks Land having been for thirty years at once an Ultima Thule and Terra Incognita, put down on the maps where Captain Parry saw it across thirty miles of ice and water in 1819. Perhaps she was still in that same bay: these old friends wintering there, while the "Resolute" and "Intrepid" were lying under Dealy Island, and only one hundred and seventy miles ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... England,—which he reckoned as 40,000 stadia (4000 miles) in circumference,—and he appears also to have coasted along Belgium and Holland, as far as the mouth of the Elbe. Pytheas is, however, chiefly known in the history of geography as having referred to the island of Thule, which he described as the most northerly point of the inhabited earth, beyond which the sea became thickened, and of a jelly-like consistency. He does not profess to have visited Thule, and his account probably refers to the existence of drift ice ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... upon the world with a pall of lead. Thou must fain despise even those who pay thee worship. Dost thou remember the Caledonian who half a century ago broke up thy temple with a hammer to carry it away with him to Thule? He is no worse than the rest.... I wrote in accordance with some of the rules which thou lovest, O Theonoe, the life of the young god whom I served in my childhood, and for this they beat me like a Euhemerus and wonder what my motives can be, believing ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... to that Ultima Thule where Mr. Bratley resides. His house already, at that early hour of two, smelt vigorously of dinner. Nothing but the urgency of my business could have induced me to brave these odors of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... and he were helpless as an infant abandoned in mid-ocean. He could not so much as distinguish between peas and beans, between dogs and wolves, by the descriptions furnished by naturalists. That man who has lived to learn wisely and well has reached the Ultima Thule of terrestrial knowledge, the ne plus ultra of human understanding. More can no college professor or 'varsity president impart. If he know not this he is uneducated, though he be graduate of every university from Salamanca to the Sorbonne, and from ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... industry; and he thus soon quickened the whole frame of society within reach of his influence, and infused an entirely new spirit into the cultivators of the soil. From being one of the most inaccessible districts of the north—the very ultima Thule of civilization—Caithness became a pattern county for its roads, its agriculture, and its fisheries. In Sinclair's youth, the post was carried by a runner only once a week, and the young baronet then declared that he would never rest till a coach ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... phases of an industry which, in spite of differences of climate and condition, retain a similarity in all essential features. When the last steer of the first herd was driven into the corral at the Ultima Thule of the range, it was the pony of the American cowboy which squatted and wheeled under the spur and burst down the straggling street of the little frontier town. Before that time, and since that time, it was and has been the same pony and the same man ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... the other side of the mountain, and having seen cities and camps and courts,—for indeed he was not always shepherd. And now, because his thoughts left the plain to hover over the place where danger is, to visit strange coasts and Ultima Thule, to strain ever towards those islands of the blest where goes the man who has endured to the end, his notes when he sang or when he played became warlike, resolved, speaking of death and fame and stern ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... stream and think about it. There was a Scotchman once who discovered the sources of the Nile, to the lasting advantage of mankind and the permanent glory of his native land. He thought the source of the Nile looked rather like the sources of the Till or the Tweed or some such river of Thule. He has been ridiculed for saying this, but he was mystically very right. The source of the greatest of rivers, since it was sacred to him, reminded him of the sacred things ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... the stuff of which crusaders and dynasty founders had been made, at a somewhat earlier epoch. Who could have conquered the holy sepulchre, or wrested a crown from its lawful wearer, whether in Italy, Muscovy, the Orient, or in the British Ultima Thule, more bravely than this imperial bastard, this valiant and romantic adventurer? Unfortunately, he came a few centuries too late. The days when dynasties were founded, and European thrones appropriated by a few ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a tolerably faithful portrait of Scottish manners."[422] He interrupts the story of The Pirate to describe the charm of the leaden heart, and offers this excuse: "As this simple and original remedy is peculiar to the isles of Thule, it were unpardonable not to preserve it at length, in a narrative connected with Scottish antiquities."[423] His comment on Ivanhoe was as follows: "I am convinced that however I myself may fail in the ensuing attempt, yet, with ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Saecula seris, quibus Oceanus Vincula rerum laxet, et ingens Pateat Tellus, Tiphysque novos Detegat orbes; nec sit terris Ultima Thule: ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... trembling Caledonians to the northern angle of the island; and perpetuated, by the name and settlement of the new province of Valentia, the glories of the reign of Valentinian. The voice of poetry and panegyric may add, perhaps with some degree of truth, that the unknown regions of Thule were stained with the blood of the Picts; that the oars of Theodosius dashed the waves of the Hyperborean ocean; and that the distant Orkneys were the scene of his naval victory over the Saxon pirates. He left the province with a fair, as well as splendid, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... [She opens the window.] Yet it isn't so very warm out there, I feel—I know not how—oh dear! I wish my mother 'ld come home, I declare! I feel a shudder all over me crawl— I'm a silly, timid thing, that's all! [She begins to sing, while undressing.] There was a king in Thule, To whom, when near her grave, The mistress he loved so truly A golden ...
— Faust • Goethe
... in the garden come the song of the "King of Thule" and Marguerites delight at finding the jewels, which conjoined express the artless vanity of the child in a manner alike full of grace and pathos. The quartet that follows is one of great beauty, the music of each character being thoroughly in keeping, while the admirable ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... she went to her spinning-wheel, and, with her back to the audience, arranged the spindle and the flax. Then stopping in her work and standing in thought, she half hummed, half sang the song "Le Roi de Thule." Not till she had nearly finished did she sit down and spin, and then only for a moment, as though too restless and ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... dogmas, the limitations of a definite creed. In her eyes, it seemed a step backward. Belief in a personal God, above and beyond the Universe, was reckoned by her own faith a primitive conception; a stage on the way to that ultima Thule where the soul of man perceives its own inherent divinity, and the knower becomes the Known, as notes become music, as the river becomes the sea. It was this that troubled her ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... Georgia, Cook penetrated further to the south-east, amidst floating ice. The continual dangers of the voyage overcame the crew. Southern Thule, Saunder's Island, and Chandeleur Islands, and finally Sandwich Land were discovered. These sterile and deserted archipelagoes have no value for the merchant or geographer. Once certain of their ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Providence has made for their food and fuel. The sea and fjords are alive with fish, which are not only a means of existence but of profit to them, while the wonderful Gulf Stream, which crosses 5000 miles of the Atlantic to die upon this Ultima Thule in a last struggle with the Polar Sea, casts up the spoils of tropical forests to feed their fires. Think of arctic fishers burning upon their hearths the palms of Hayti, the mahogany of Honduras, and the precious woods of the Amazon ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon,[6] nam'd Night, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule, From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime. Out of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... August; and then you need not hurry away so. I am glad to get somebody decent to talk to, or at, in this outlandish ultima Thule. But, by the bye, I have something to say—you won't ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... of a region, hard, iron-bound and cold, Nor seas of pearl abounded, nor mines of shining gold; Where the wind from Thule freezes the word upon the lip, And the ice in spring comes sailing athwart the early ship; He told them of the frozen scene, until they thrilled with fear, And piled fresh fuel on the hearth to make ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Thule, utmost isle, Here in thy harbors for a while, We lower our sails; awhile we rest ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... the base of their social prosperity and happiness; who have been accustomed from forum, hustings, pulpit, and press, to hear an institution that appeals to so many selfish instincts and principles in the human heart, lauded and defended, and made to be the Ultima Thule of Southern hope, pride, and ambition; that they should view with displeasure and anger such an influence as the institutions of New England must always wield, is not so surprising. But that men can be found here in the free North, yea, more, in New England ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is to daunt or confound. Skinner, in his "Etymologicon," explains it thus: "Perterrefacere, Attonitum reddere, Obstupefacere, mente consternare, Consilii inopem reddere." So in "Thule or Vertue's Historic," by Francis Rous, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... said Haw, passing his fingers through it. "The chemist of the future may resolve it into further constituents, but to me it is the Ultima Thule." ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... quid frigora prosunt? Ignotumq; fretum? maduerunt Saxone fuso Orcades, incaluit Pictonum sanguine Thule, Scotorum cumulos ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (4 of 8) - The Fovrth Booke Of The Historie Of England • Raphael Holinshed
... unhappiness, Mr. Gleason, as the only alternative, resolved to send his daughter to a boarding-school, before his mansion received its new mistress. Mittie exulted in this arrangement, for a boarding-school was the Ultima Thule of her ambition, and she boasted to her classmates that her father was afraid of her, and that he dared not marry while she was at home. Amiable boast of a ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz |
