"Northern lights" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... He is now so old and grey He's nigh lost his wits. With a bridge of white mist Columbkill he crosses, On his stately journeys From Slieveleague to Rosses; Or going up with music On cold starry nights, To sup with the queen Of the gay Northern Lights. ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... the cheerless north, in bark lodges. We are often cold and hungry. Father, what we ask is to you as nothing, while to us it is comfort and happiness. Give it to us, and when you stand upon your grand portico some bright winter night, and see the northern lights dancing in the heavens, it will be the thanks of your red children ascending to the Great Spirit ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... learned, were about sixteen hours long on this dying planet. It was toward midnight when they started out from the ship toward the violet dome. The strange half-light still hovered over the ground. In the sky, splinters of mauve tore at curtains of purplish flame. Something like northern lights, they glinted and gleamed, wrestled and writhed. There was no peace up there in that abandoned sky. But there was enough of that unearthly light glimmering below for him ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... system was first adopted under the direction of Borda, at the Corduan Lighthouse, probably about the year 1780. The system was soon introduced into England; and one of the first acts of the Northern Lights' Board, so early as 1786, was to substitute reflectors in place of coast-lights, which till then had been the only beacons on ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... leaders of the free States are dead or in the gloomy retirement of age. Webster and Clay are no more. There are yet men of might to fight under the banners streaming with the northern lights of freedom. Douglas, Bell, Sumner, Seward, and Wade are drawing together. Grave-faced Abraham Lincoln moves out of the background of Western woods into the sunrise glow of Liberty's ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... Like Northern Lights on autumn evenings, the maiden's eyes pierced Narcissus through and through with many-coloured spears. There was thunder, too; the earth shook—just a little: but soon Narcissus saw the white dove of peace flying to him through the glancing showers. For all her sorrow, his was the ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... For magnetic observations, for taking the declination, inclination, and intensity (both horizontal and total intensity) we had a complete set of instruments. Among others may be mentioned a spectroscope especially adapted for the northern lights, an electroscope for determining the amount of electricity in the air, photographic apparatuses, of which we had seven, large and small, and a photographometer for making charts. I considered a pendulum apparatus with its adjuncts to be of ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... He is now so old and gray He's nigh lost his wits. With a bridge of white mist Columbkill he crosses, On his stately journeys From Slieveleague to Rosses; Or going up with music On cold starry nights To sup with the Queen Of the gay Northern Lights. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... it presents different appearances. In one place it seems uniformly luminous, shining feebly with a pale and sickly light; in another it exhibits bright flashes; again, it appears composed of brilliants of different sizes and shades, and sometimes, like a grand exhibition of the "northern lights," all these appearances are combined. The most phosphorescent sea seldom exhibits peculiarities by daylight. Nevertheless, sometimes, though rarely, luminous patches and even large tracts of water ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... have the stars to light them, and bright flashing colors in the sky, such as we call the 'Northern Lights.' When the sun comes back, he makes them a long visit; but never gets so high in the sky as he does with us, and ...
— The Nursery, March 1878, Vol. XXIII. No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... Ha—yonder! are they Northern Lights? Or signals flashed to warn or ward? Yea, signals lanced in breakers high; But doom on warning follows hard: While yet they veer in hope to shun, They strike! and thumps of hull ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... closing numbers, and they were always rendered by what seemed to be some mighty veteran, the patriarch of the pack, for his effort was so thrilling and awe-inspiring that it always sent the gooseflesh rushing up and down my back. Many a time, night after night, beneath the Northern Lights, I have gone out to the edge of a lake ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... So she took the blue line, and by great tact and management actually established herself as a leader of literary fashion. Soon after, she visited Edinburgh for a season or two, and studied the Northern Lights. One of the best of them, poor Jack Playfair,[153] was disposed "to shoot madly from his sphere,"[154] and, I believe, asked her, but he was a little too old. She found a fitter husband in every respect in Sir Humphry Davy, to whom she gave a handsome fortune, and whose splendid ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... had a wider field than we for speculation, that truth being all unknown it was easier to take the first step in its paths. But is the region of truth limited? Is it not infinite?... We know a few things which were once hidden, and being known they seem easy; but there are the flashings of the Northern Lights—'Across the lift they start and shift;' there is the conical zodiacal beam seen so beautifully in the early evenings of spring and the early mornings of autumn; there are the startling comets, whose use ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... piazza upon the white wall of the cottage. In a low tone, full of awe, Genifrede told the boy such stories as she had heard from her father of the mysteries of the heavens. He felt that she trembled as she told of the northern lights, which had been actually seen by some travelled persons now in Cap Francais. It took some time and argument to give him an idea of cold countries; but his uncle Paul, the fisherman, had seen hail on the coast, only thirty miles from hence; and this was a great step in the evidence. Denis listened ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... shoaly places were met with in the afternoon, the banks being low, sandy and uniform, with open woods to the south. The current was stately, but so slow that oars had often to be used. A chilly sunset was followed by an exceedingly brilliant display of Northern Lights, called by the Crees Pahkugh ka Neematchik—"The Dance of the Spirits." This generally presages change; but the day was fine, and next morning we passed what are called the Lower Rapids, below which the banks are lined by precipitous ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... pearl, illimitable levels of shore waiting for the tide to turn again. To eastward, black night among the valleys, and on the rounded hill slopes a hard glaze that is not so much light as snail-slime from the moon. Once or twice perhaps in the winter the Northern Lights come out between the moon and the sun, so that to the two unearthly lights is added the leap and flare ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... stand in the hall below, and look up—and up—and up —and see all the colors of the rainbow, and see what kinder curious and strange pictures there wuz way up there in the sky above me (as it were). Why, it seemed curiouser than any Northern lights I ever see in my life, and they stream up dretful ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... Eden, whether located in a remote past, or in the interstellar spaces, or in the near future, have certain characteristics in common. From far behind to far in front the dream has shifted, as if the Northern Lights had moved from horizon to horizon, but it remains one dream. The earthly Paradise of the social reformer, a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, of a world free from war and devoted to agriculture and commerce, or of the philosophic evolutionist, of a world peopled ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... are you afraid of, I should like to know! every blade of grass, every flower is rejoicing now, while we try to get away and are as frightened as if it were a disaster! The storm kill us indeed! It's not a storm to be dreaded, it's a blessing! Yes, a blessing! Everything's dreadful to you. If the Northern Lights shine in the heavens—you ought to admire and marvel at "the dawn breaking in the land of midnight!" But you are in terror, and imagine it means war or flood. If a comet comes—I can't take my eyes from it! a thing ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... the land was illuminated for a while every night by the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights. Sometimes the aurora seemed to imitate the waves of the sea and moved like big heavy swells, changing colors, bluish, white, violet, green, orange. These colors seemed to blend together. Then the heaving mass would become gradually intensely ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... so!" exclaimed Tommy. "We don't, know at the present moment whether we're here to trap brown bears, or to box and ship Northern Lights to the eastern markets." ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman
... talked, Ingolf looked up at the sky. The northern lights were quivering there. They were like great flames of yellow and green ...
— Viking Tales • Jennie Hall
... the spirit of the hour. On thy pleasant valleys rest, like sweet dews of morning, the gentle recollections of our early life; around thy hills and mountains cling, like gathering mists, the mighty memories of the Revolution; and, far away in the horizon of thy past, gleam, like thy own bright northern lights, the awful ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... walk home was as silent as that going to Moss Brow had been. The only change seemed to be that now they faced the brilliant northern lights flashing up the sky, and that either this appearance or some of the whaling narrations of Kinraid had stirred up Daniel Robson's recollections of a sea ditty, which he kept singing to himself in a low, unmusical voice, the burden ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... favor; who begged the capricious sea to give them food, and who spent most of their lives working for the comfort of the dead—the Restless Ones—who sweep the winter skies when the day is done, beckoning, whispering. The Northern Lights the white man calls them, as they leap and play above the frozen peaks, but the Thlinget knows them to be the spirits of the dead, homeless in space but hovering confidently overhead until their relatives on earth can give a Potlatch ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... so entranced in admiration as to give no thought to the consequences. We derived pleasure from everything, study or contemplation, fair weather or foul; a twilight ramble on the island by the magnificent northern lights, or a quiet sail on the solitary lake perfumed with the fragrance of the honeysuckle or of the blue hyacinths growing so profusely on Inishail and ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... song of the parson's son, as he squats in his shack alone, On the wild, weird nights when the Northern Lights shoot up from the frozen zone, And it's sixty below, and couched in the snow ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... from Nebuchadnezzar to the Swaffham tinker, ever dreamt a more remarkable one. Such an elaborately developed, perplexing, exciting dream was certainly never dreamed by a girl in Eustacia's situation before. It had as many ramifications as the Cretan labyrinth, as many fluctuations as the Northern Lights, as much colour as a parterre in June, and was as crowded with figures as a coronation. To Queen Scheherazade the dream might have seemed not far removed from commonplace; and to a girl just returned ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the "fire-flags" "hurried about" was probably suggested to Coleridge by the description of the Northern Lights (aurora borealis) in Hearne's "Journey ... to the Northern Ocean," a book printed in 1795 and known to both Wordsworth and Coleridge before 1798. Hearne says: "I can positively affirm that in still nights I have frequently heard them make a rustling and crackling noise, ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the fog that dims the Ice-sea, Darkness of the months of winter Lays its weight on sea and mountain. Like our lands are too our peoples. Their beginnings prehistoric Stretch afar in fog and darkness. But as through the fog a lighthouse, Or as Northern Lights o'er darkness, Gleamed his thought with light and guidance. When with filial fond remembrance Tenderly he sought and questioned, Searching for his people's pathways— Names and graves and rusty weapons, Stones ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... in perfect harmony. A gentle breeze from the south urged them on their way. The sun soon set and a long night began, but what of that? The moon and snow lighted the earth as if by day, and with a silvery glory. And now the Northern Lights began to flicker, flash ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... her glance to the heights, half fearing, half wishing, that the black horses, with the fiery eyes and the red-hot bridlebits, might make their appearance. But she only saw bright stars look down upon her, now and then dimmed by the Northern lights, which waved their shining, fleeting veils ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... the results of the observations of Lottin, Bravais, and Siljerstrom, who spent a winter at Bosekop, on the coast of Lapland (70 degrees N. lat.), and in 210 nights saw the northern lights 160 times, see the 'Comptes Rendus de l'Acad. des Sciences', t. x., p. 289, and Martins's 'Meteorologie', 1843, p. 453. See also, Argelander in the 'Vortragen geh. in der Konigsberg Gessellschaft', ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... this lovely creature, whose name was Gerda, and who is considered as a personification of the flashing Northern lights, vanished within her father's house, and Frey pensively wended his way back to Alfheim, his heart oppressed with longing to make this fair maiden his wife. Being deeply in love, he was melancholy and absent-minded ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... afterglow, but I had observed a remarkably yellow bow in the south, about 10 deg. above the horizon. In about ten minutes more this arc rose pretty quickly, extended itself all over the east and up to and beyond the zenith. The sailors declared, 'Sir, that is the Northern Lights.' I thought I had never seen Northern Lights in greater splendour. After five minutes more the-light had faded, though not vanished, in the east and south, and the finest purple-red rose up in the south-west; one could imagine one's-self ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Northern Lights, in regions haunted Of twilight, where the world is glacier planted, And pale as Loki in his cavern when The serpent's slaver burns him to the bones, I saw the phantasms of gigantic men, The prototypes of vastness, quarrying stones; Great blocks of winter, glittering ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... the snow, covering everything, and even at the darkest time of year there is sufficient light, if the sky be clear, to see to read for an hour before and an hour after midday. Then there is the light given by the moon and stars, and lastly the cheering glow of the aurora borealis,or northern lights. It is not, therefore, always dark, though when snow falls or the clouds block out the sky the darkness becomes intense. At such times the picture ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... Stevenson, his grandfather, received his appointment on the Board of Northern Lights the art of lighthouse building in Scotland had just begun. Its bleak, rocky shores were world-famous for their danger, and few mariners cared to venture around them. At that time the coast "was lighted at a single point, the Isle ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... Heve the same light flashes across the sea. These are Faraday's sparks, exalted by suitable machinery to sunlight splendor. At the present moment (1868), the Board of Trade and the Brethren of the Trinity House, as well as the Commissioners of Northern Lights, are contemplating the introduction of the magneto-electric light at numerous points upon our coast; and future generations will be able to point to those guiding stars in answer to the question, what has been the practical use ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... in direct opposition to it. The history of all ages—tumults after tumults, wars foreign or civil, with short or with no breathing-places from generation to generation; the senseless weaving and interweaving of factions, vanishing, and reviving, and piercing each other like the Northern Lights; public commotions, and those in the breast of the individual; the long calenture to which the Lover is subject; the blast, like the blast of the desert, which sweeps perennially through a frightful solitude of its own making in the mind of the Gamester; the slowly quickening, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... or "northern lights," and know that electricity causes it, but the twins' mother couldn't know that. She told them just what had been told her when ...
— The Eskimo Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... shooting through space from the sun. It is believed that as they come near the earth, the magnetism of the north and south polar regions attracts them toward the poles, and that as they rush through the thin, dry upper air, they make it glow. And this is probably what causes the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis. ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... with this theatrical trick. But I have had many experiences like it, before and since; and we must be content to be pleased without too curiously analyzing the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is not just what it seems. The cloud-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and northern lights are not quite so spheral as our childhood thought them; and the part our organization plays in them is too large. The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of. Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... inspiring, but to be contradicted by a solid phalanx of silent nations, trooping up behind one another, unanimous, impervious, is enough to make any radiant, long-accumulated genius pause in full career, question himself, question his vision as a chimera, as some faintly lighted Northern Lights upon the world, that would never mean anything, that was an illusion, that would just flicker in the great dark once ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... guided as the thunderbolt is now: it will rain at night in the cities so that they will be clean. Ships will cross the polar seas, thawed beneath the Aurora Borealis. For everything is produced by the conjunction of two fluids, male and female, gushing out from the poles, and the northern lights are a symptom of the blending ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... him to-morrow, which puts Roslin out of the question for that day, as it might keep you late. On Sunday I hope you will join our family-party at five, and on Monday I have asked one or two of the Northern Lights on purpose to meet you. I should be engrossing at any time, but we shall be more disposed to be so just now, because on the 12th I am under the necessity of going to a different kingdom (only the kingdom of Fife) ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... not the little flicker that comes for a moment and is gone, like in most of our lives, but the pure fire. The love that mankind tries to find in God—the final wonder. Some of us, at most, have a day or hour—a vision that's as far off and dim as northern lights. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the mighty crashing elk, the fleet reindeer, the fearless bear, the nimble lynx, the shy wolf, those eagles and swans, and seabirds, those many tones and notes of Nature's voice making distant music through the twilight summer night, those brilliant, flashing, northern lights when days grow short, those dazzling, blinding storms of autumn snow, that cheerful winter frost and cold, that joy of sledging over the smooth ice, when the sharp-shod horse careers at full speed with the light sledge, or rushes down the ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... on the water; past the isles, where overhead drove the wedges of the wild swans, trumpeting as on a battle-field; past the Hebrides, where strange arctic birds whined like hurt dogs; northward still to where the northern lights sprang like dancers in the black winter nights; eastward and southward to where the swell of the Dogger Bank rose, where the fish grazed like kine. Over the great sea he would go as though nothing had happened, not even the snapping of a stay—down ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... in distant lands may seek On Alpine Mountains high the magic Edelweis; I am an Element Immovable; each year, April delights me in my garden, and the May In my own village. O lakes and fiords, O palaces of France and shrines And harbors, Northern Lights and tropic flowers and forests, O wonders of art, and beauties of the world unthought,— A little Island here I love ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... of the parson's son, as he squats in his shack alone, On the wild, weird nights, when the Northern Lights shoot up from the frozen zone, And it's sixty below, and couched in the snow the ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... to get his tail cut off, as a badge of the reptile nature in him, and to achieve the higher sphere of the Croakers at a single hop? Why, it is all he steers by; without it, he would be as helpless as a compass under the flare of Northern Lights; and he no doubt regards it as a mark of blood, the proof of his kinship with the preadamite family of the Saurians. Shall we send missionaries to the Bear to warn him against raw chestnuts, because they are sometimes so discomforting to our human intestines, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... or Northern Lights, understood to be an electric discharge through the atmosphere connected with ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Northern Lights, a luminous appearance in the northern parts of the heavens, seen mostly during winter, or in frosty weather, and clear evenings; it assumes a variety of forms and hues, especially in the polar regions, where it appears in its ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... names." The stranger grinned so broadly Little White Fox quite lost his fear at once. "Some call me Barred Seal," the stranger continued, "and some call me Ring Seal. Others call me Rainbow Seal, and still others call me Northern Lights. You may call me what you like. But say, there's room for us both up there, isn't there? ...
— Little White Fox and his Arctic Friends • Roy J. Snell
... unused to marsh and mere? Each time when we thought that we must be right, now at last, by track or passage, and approaching the conflict, with the sounds of it waxing nearer, suddenly a break of water would be laid before us, with the moon looking mildly over it, and the northern lights behind us, dancing down the ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... and well on their raw fish, for the journey was short and provisions plentiful. The two men fared in their usual plain way. They slept in their fur-lined bags while the wolfish burden-bearers of the North first prowled, argued out their private quarrels, sang in chorus as the northern lights moved fantastically in the sky, and finally curled themselves ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... open, putting back from his forehead the long hair which fell over them, and revealing a face not actually looking old, but strongly suggesting age. His eyes were of a pale blue, with a hazy, mixed, uncertain gleam in them, reminding one of the shifty shudder and shake and start of the northern lights at some heavenly version of the game of Puss in the Corner. His features were more than good; they would have been grand had they been large, but they were peculiarly small. His head itself was very small in proportion to his height, ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... Pierre and His People Romany of the Snows Northern Lights Mrs. Falchion Cumner & South Sea Folk Valmond Came to Pontiac The Trail of the Sword Translation of a Savage Pomp of the Lavilettes At Sign of the Eagle The Trespasser March of White Guard Seats of the Mighty Battle Of The Strong Lane Had No Turning ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... by-and-by, as if unwillingly drawn by a loadstone, and found the heavens wrapped in a rosy flame of Northern Lights. He looked as though he belonged to them, so pale and elf-like was his face then, like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... well out of the district before allowing himself breathing space. McTavish intended surprising him by the swiftness of pursuit. So, lighted on his way by the brilliant stars and the silent, flaunting banners of the northern lights, he plodded doggedly on until midnight. Then he built a fire, thawed fish for the dogs, and prepared food for himself, finally lying down on his bed of spruce boughs, his feet ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... self has it all its own way with us except for a corner of dim, burning consciousness keeping guard. Sometimes the conscious has it all its own way with us and the subconscious self is crowded to the horizon's edge, like Northern Lights still playing in the distance; but the result is the same—the dim presence of one of these moods in the other, when one's power is least effective, and the gradual alternating of the currents of the moods as power grows more effective. In the higher states of power, the moods are seen alternating ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... happened to drive past the house, had written to me to suggest it as a likely place. I had got into the train at midnight, and had fallen asleep, and had woke up and had sat looking out of window at the brilliant Northern Lights in the sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to find the night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I hadn't been to sleep at all;—upon which question, in the first imbecility of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would have done wager ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... kingdom of the saints in America, had "come down in great wrath," and was present among them, sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt. Special providences and unusual phenomena, like earth quakes, mirages, and the northern lights, are gravely recorded by Winthrop and Mather and others as portents of supernatural persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, the celebrated leader of the Familists, having, according to rumor, been delivered of a monstrous birth, the Rev. ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Isles! Then for tobacco in a hammock 'twixt the palms! Then for wine cooled in a brooklet losing itself in silver sands! Then for — but O these bilboes on our ankles, how mercilessly they grip! The vertical sun blisters the bare back: faint echoes of Olympian laughter seem to flicker like Northern Lights across the stark and pitiless sky. One earnest effort would do it, my brothers! A little modesty, a short sinking of private differences; and then we should all be free and equal gentlemen of fortune, ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... thonged lightning, and flick away an inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast growled, snapped, choked once over his portion, and hurried back to the protection of the passage, while the boy stood upon the snow under the blazing Northern Lights and dealt out justice. The last to be served was the big black leader of the team, who kept order when the dogs were harnessed; and to him Kotuko gave a double allowance of meat as well as an extra ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... in all her varying moods through all the days and seasons, which we ascribe to the operations of law, were to them the visible tokens of the wrath or favor of the Almighty. On December 11th, 1719, for the first time in the history of the Colony, the northern lights were seen here. They shone with the greatest brilliancy. The consternation they caused was fearful. The people had never heard of such a phenomenon. They considered it the opening scene of the day of judgment. All amusements were given up, all business was forsaken, and sleep itself ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... scene, encamped there as they were on that dreary expanse of snow, with the mysterious Northern Lights flashing overhead, giving a weird illumination, the snarling wolves fairly surrounding the tent, and the frightened Indians guarding ...
— The Young Treasure Hunter - or, Fred Stanley's Trip to Alaska • Frank V. Webster
... in the narrative thinks now of the wonderful nights when the Northern Lights held him in their spell. Always the sentry called to his mates to come and see. It cannot be pictured by brush or pen, this Aurora Borealis. It has action, it has color, sheets of light, spires, shafts, beams and broad finger-like spreadings, that come and ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... meant nothing sour, or bitter, or ignoble with the parson. It was merely the low, far-off play of the northern lights of his mind, irradiating the long polar night of his bachelorhood. But even on the polar night the sun rises—a little way; and the time came when he married—as one might expect to find the flame of a volcano hidden away in a mountain of ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... human nature of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more interesting—shy, delicate, evanescent—shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the colored pencilings on a frosty night from the Northern Lights, than in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the 5th they were awaked by the man on guard, who called them to witness a peculiarly beautiful appearance of the aurora borealis, or northern lights. Along the sky, towards the north, a large space was occupied by a light of brilliant white colour, which rose from the horizon, and extended itself to nearly twenty degrees above it. After glittering ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... think too, of dainty emerald scarves that are seen and lost in a flash at a dance; of the air-cooled, living green of curling breakers; of a lonely light that gleams to starboard of an unknown passing vessel, and of the transparent green of northern lights that flicker and play on winter nights high over the garish ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... born at Edinburgh in the year 1818; the grandson of Thomas Smith, first engineer to the Board of Northern Lights, son of Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David; so that his nephew, David Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time of his death in the engineership, is the sixth of the family who has held, successively or conjointly, that office. The Bell ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... way, he said such droll things that the Cardross boys fell into shouts of laughter. He had the rare quality of seeing the comical side of things, without a particle of ill-nature being mixed up with his fun. His wit danced about as brilliantly and harmlessly as the Northern lights that flashed and flamed of winter nights over the mountains at the head of the loch; and the solid, somewhat heavy Manse boys, gradually growing up to men, often wondered why it was that, miserable as the earl's life was, or seemed to ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... look out of the window, she called to the others to come quickly to see the northern lights; for out of the north there had come a gorgeous illumination, filling the heavens with a marvellous radiance such as only the aurora borealis ...
— Gerda in Sweden • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... brother's bed. And last, and by no means least, had he not the morning he had left for New York, his holiday being over, taken Ruth in his arms and putting his lips close to her ear, whispered something into its pink shell that had started northern lights dancing all over her cheeks and away up to the roots of her hair; and had she not given him a good hug and kissed him in return, a thing she had never done in her whole life before? And had he not stopped on ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... middle of the trip of 1890. Muir's notes on the remainder of the journey have not been found, and it is idle to speculate how he would have concluded the volume if he had lived to complete it. But no one will read the fascinating description of the Northern Lights without feeling a poetical appropriateness in the fact that his last work ends with a portrayal of the auroras—one of those phenomena which elsewhere he described as "the most glorious of all the terrestrial manifestations ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... no tapers to be seen, but northern lights shot up into the dark blue sky, and just over the fir-tree shone ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... blazing tails, were long regarded, and still are by many, as harbingers of divine vengeance, presaging famines and inundations, or the downfall of princes and the destruction of empires. The northern lights have been frequently gazed at with similar apprehensions, whole provinces having been thrown into consternation by the fantastic coruscations of these lambent meteors. Some pretend to see in these harmless lights armies mixing in fierce ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... must keep them moving or they will swarm and fly away in a panic. If a flock panic on you, you might as well quit, for every bird in the canyon will follow. You see this is the game: snowbirds live on little bugs that are found in great numbers around the great Northern Lights. When they see those candles flickering there in the great white quiet, the snow reflecting the long rays out between the dark tree trunks, they think it's the northern lights, and fly straight toward the candle. ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... which hung at the side of the vessel. The helmsman was nodding silently upon his tiller; two seamen sat motionless upon the bow, and the lookout party in the crow's-nest talked mutteringly of our ill-luck as they scanned the horizon. The Northern Lights were pulsing like some great radiating heart, and the sea was alternately flame and shadow. The headlands of Labrador lay to the south—bare, boundless, precipitous; and to the east a glittering iceberg floated slowly towards us, like a palace of gold and emerald. ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... which he had impiously removed the warning beacon. No evidence of the existence of the bell is found in the records of the Abbey; and on the subject of its wanton removal, the sagacious engineer of the Northern Lights say, "It in no measure accords with the respect and veneration entertained by seamen of all classes for landmarks; more especially as there seems to be no difficulty in accounting for the disappearance of such an apparatus, unprotected, as it must ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... is as often grave as gay. Its character depends very much on the face through which it beams. And it cannot be counterfeited. Its ring defies imitation. Like the clouded sun of April, it can pierce through tears of sorrow; like the noontide sun of summer, it can blaze in warm smiles; like the northern lights of winter, it can gleam in depths of woe;—but it is always the same, modified, doubtless, and rendered more or less patent to others, according to the natural amiability of him or her who bestows it. No one can put it on; still less can any one put it off. ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... would think, watching the muffled-up figures continually bending over their work; "and they're digging graves, graves." And she would think of Annie, and the grave Will had been digging for her while he dug for gold. A red sun, dull as copper, hung above them, and sometimes the great Northern Lights would send up a red flame behind the horizon; and to Katrine it seemed like a blood-covered sword held up by Nature to warn them off a land not fit for men. One afternoon, when the sun looked more sullen and the sky more threatening than ever, and the men moving at the ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... the stars, and the wavering peaks and jagged edges of the northern lights, brought out the shadows of the uneven hills, and revealed the winding length of downy mist which kept the stream in the valley warm. Such was the stillness, and the subdued tone of the landscape, that it seemed unreal—the phantom of a world which had ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... sponge, making currents, the direction of which are indicated by these magnetic poles. The same silent fluid which makes this needle point down to the deck makes the telegraphic instrument click, makes the northern lights, ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... snow-covered mountains, it lies fifty-five hundred feet above sea-level. We had come up in two days from eleven hundred feet, a considerable climb. That night, for the first time, we saw the northern lights—at first, one band like a cold finger set across the sky, then others, shooting ribbons of cold fire, now bright, now dim, covering the northern horizon and throwing into silhouette the peaks over ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of the infectious character of superstition occurs in a Scottish book, and there can be little doubt that it refers, in its first origin, to some uncommon appearance of the aurora borealis, or the northern lights, which do not appear to have been seen in Scotland so frequently as to be accounted a common and familiar atmospherical phenomenon, until the beginning of the eighteenth century. The passage is striking ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... old northern lights,' said the reindeer; 'see how they flash!' and on it rushed faster than ever, day and night. The loaves were eaten, and the ham too, and then they were ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... to go on without instruments to take observations of the Arctic Circle; so for a second time Hearne was compelled to turn back to Fort Prince of Wales. Terrible storms impeded the return march. His dog was frozen in the traces. Tent poles were used for fire-wood; and the northern lights served as the only compass. On midday of November 25, 1770, after eight months' absence, in which he had not found the "Far-Off-Metal River," Hearne reached shelter ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... near, and his face wore the smile of victory. All of Mr. Cooke's money could not save me. My spirits sank as the immediate future unfolded itself, and I even read the article in O'Meara's organ, the Northern Lights, which was to be instrumental in divesting me of my public trust and fair fame generally. Yes, if the Celebrity was caught on the other side of Far Harbor, all would be up with John Crocker! But it would never do to let ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... forest fires," said Bruce, who had come into the room just in time to hear Ray Martin's remark; "speaking of forest fires, did any of you fellows see the Northern Lights last night up back of Haystack Mountain? Father and I thought first it was a forest fire. The sky was all pink and white. But we concluded it must have been the reflection of the Aurora Borealis. You can see 'em ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... maiden. Viking gave the sword to his son Thorsten, and Thorsten gave it to Frithiof. The hilt was of hammered gold, covered with mystic red letters. Whenever he drew the sword light filled the hall, as when the northern lights gleam or the ...
— Northland Heroes • Florence Holbrook
... before one of these that the lady stopped; the iron figure of a bishop rested on it; the eyes were closed, the hands folded. She touched the figure; it instantly rose, and the eyes sparkled, as you may have seen the northern lights sparkle through the keen air of a winter night. He went to the altar, and standing before the bridal pair, said, in a deep and ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... sufficiently frightful, superstition, as usual, added bugbears of her own. Indian bows were seen in the sky, and scalps in the moon. The northern lights became an object of terror. Phantom horsemen careered among the clouds or were heard to gallop invisible through the air. The howling of wolves was turned into a terrible omen. The war was regarded as a special judgment in punishment of prevailing sins. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... was first discovered by the coruscations of the comet of 1807. "In less than one second, streamers shot forth, to two and a half degrees in length; they as rapidly disappeared, and issued out again, sometimes in proportions, and interrupted, like our northern lights. Afterward the tail varied, both in length and breadth; and in some of the observations, the streamers shot forth from the whole expanded end of the tail, sometimes here, sometimes there, in an instant, two and a half degrees long; so that within a single second they must have shot out a distance ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... gun-powder, and so making the first forerunner of the electric fuses now so universally used in blasting, firing cannon, and other similar purposes. It was Bose also who, observing some of the peculiar manifestations in electrified tubes, and noticing their resemblance to "northern lights," was one of the first, if not the first, to suggest that the aurora borealis is of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... night, drinking in the mystic beauty of the scene. Northern lights, pale and dim, stretched their arc across beneath the Dipper. The air, soft as the dead leaves of spring, fanned his cheek. By and by the moon, like a red fire at sea, lifted itself from the waves. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... blazing merrily. But on a mound above the creek, an ancient fortress of some long-forgotten people, a small group of Indian horsemen, might be observed, steady as rocks in the refluent tide of war. The fire from their Winchester repeaters blazed out like the streamers of the Northern Lights. Again and again the flower of the United States army had charged up the mound, only to recoil in flight, or to line the cliff with their corpses. The First Irish Cuirassiers had been annihilated: Parnell's own, alas! in the heat of the combat had turned their fratricidal ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... the oilcloth kind, the kind that looks like the marble floor in the Boston post-office. They was pretty tolerable seedy, and so was his hat. Oh, he was a last year's bird's nest NOW, but when them clothes was fresh—whew! the northern lights and a rainbow mixed wouldn't have been more'n a cloudy day ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of forest flowers; and the incense of rolls of birch-bark, crinkling and flaring in the camp-fire; and the soothing odour of balsam-boughs piled deep for woodland beds—the veritable and only genuine perfume of the land of Nod. The thin shining veil of the Northern lights waves and fades and brightens over the night sky; at the sound of the word, as at the ringing of a bell, the curtain rises. Scene, the Forest of Arden; enter a ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... bending over the wheel. She was dead. While stooping to join a broken thread God took her. Next day buried her on a rising bit of ground overlooking the pond. What a mother she was I alone can know. I shall never forget her. Last evening there was to us a marvellous display of northern lights. When daylight faded pink clouds appeared in the sky mixed with long shooting rays of white light. The clouds changed shape continually, but the color was always a shade of red. At times the clouds filled the ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... is yonder? Shape of mystery, did the tremor of my heartstrings vibrate to thine own, and call thee from thy home among the dancers of the northern lights, and shadows flung from departed sunshine, and giant spectres that appear on clouds at daybreak and affright the climber of the Alps? In truth it startled me, as I threw a wary glance eastward across the chamber, to discern an unbidden guest with his eyes bent on mine. The identical ...
— Monsieur du Miroir (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Depositio,[7] which was afterwards kept on every 12th of October. According to Eddius a remarkable phenomenon occurred on this occasion. In the evening the monastery was suddenly encircled with brilliant light, as of day, and whether this was a display of Northern Lights or not, it was regarded as a Divine testimony to the sanctity of Wilfrid. The story shows, at any rate, that he was already beginning to be regarded as a saint, and it was probably about this time that his name was coupled with St. Peter's in the dedication ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... red-skin ancestors, not to the Cambridge paternity! What was the explanation? Where was the story of heartache and tragedy—I asked myself, as we stood in our tent door watching the York boat come in with provisions for the year under a sky of such diaphanous northern lights as leave you dumb before their beauty and their splendor? How often he must have stood beneath those northern lights thinking out the heartbreak ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... turned and was pointing now to the north. There a stream of white light shot into the air, then dropped, and left only its reflection. But in a moment others joined it, and the whole sky to the north was brilliantly lighted. It was like a display of Northern Lights, only nearer and ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... point which we will dwell on for a moment as bearing on the question of Dante's orthodoxy. His nature was one in which, as in Swedenborg's, a clear practical understanding was continually streamed over by the northern lights of mysticism, through which the familiar stars shine with a softened and more spiritual lustre. Nothing is more interesting than the way in which the two qualities of his mind alternate, and indeed play into each other, tingeing his matter-of-fact sometimes with unexpected glows ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Mr Smith's researches caused the first Board of Northern Lights to make him their engineer, and he designed Kinnaird Head, the first light they exhibited, and illuminated it in 1787. He was ultimately succeeded as engineer to the Board by his stepson, of Bell Rock fame, and his ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... seen the Northern lights when the many-hued glory seemed to be poured from vast, invisible pitchers, till it spread over the floor of heaven and spilled earthward. Her memories had come upon her ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... imparting a ghastly horror to the scene, or arranging themselves like the golden pillars of some mighty organ, while, ever and again, a wild unearthly sound is heard, as if swords were clashing. Those mysterious northern lights, whose appearance in superstitious times was supposed to threaten, or be the forerunner, of dire calamity; and no wonder was it, for even now, with all the light science has thrown upon such things, there is attached ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... hypersensitive moral nature of the Easter-Day speaker, on the other hand, sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind before all else, and the divine visitation becomes a Last Judgment, with the fierce vindictive red of the Northern Lights replacing the mild glory of the lunar rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination the silent swift convoy of the winged robe. This difference of temper is vividly expressed in the style. The rollicking rhymes, the "spume and sputter" of the fervent soul, give place to ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... three, but did not find one. So in the absence of any plan of action, we rowed slowly forward—or what we thought was forward, for it was in the direction the Titanic's bows were pointing before she sank. I see now that we must have been pointing northwest, for we presently saw the Northern Lights on the starboard, and again, when the Carpathia came up from the south, we saw her from behind us on the southeast, and turned our boat around to get to her. I imagine the boats must have spread themselves over the ocean fanwise as they escaped from the Titanic: those on the starboard and ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... of the Isles, the last of the great quintet, appeared in December 1814. Scott had obtained part of the scenery for it in an earlier visit to the Hebrides, and the rest in his yachting voyage (see below) with the Commissioners of Northern Lights, which also gave the decor for The Pirate. The poem was not more popular than Rokeby in England, and it was even less so in Scotland, chiefly for the reason, only to be mentioned with all but ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... Chambers's Journal tells of a curious class of clergymen who existed forty years ago, and were known as "Northern Lights," the light from a spiritual point of view being somewhat dim and flickering. The writer, who was the vicar for twenty-five years of a moorland parish, tells of several clerks who were associated with these clerics, and who were as quaint and curious in their ways as their masters[83]. ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... now, o' th' northern lights," remarked Bob, when they had watched them for some time, "that they's flashes o' light from heaven. I'm thinkin' th' Lard sends un t' give us promise o' th' glories ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... with northern lights, and then they came to Finland and knocked at the Finland woman's chimney, for ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... odd about the snow-hills. They were so many and so long that there was really no end to them, and he kept on trampling in deep and deeper snow and never got to the sea-shore at all. Never before had he seen the northern lights last so long into the day. They blazed and sparkled, and long tongues of fire licked and hissed after him. He was unable to find either the beach or the boat, nor had he the least idea in the world ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... the last drama in Kaiachououk's life was played, when the northern lights sent their many-coloured banners floating over the heavens, and the stars looked so large and shining that it seemed one must surely touch them from the tops of the high hills, he was camping with his family and two or three others on a small ledge at the foot of the mighty Kiglapeit (shining ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... on through the frosty night. The snow made music beneath her hurrying feet, the bridge by which she crossed the river cracked and echoed with the frost, and the Northern lights flashed the signals of their heavenly masonry—for what knew they of plague and love and sorrow, and of the story of ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... deviltry of Joy Molineau. They confessed, afterward, that they had failed to appreciate this dark-eyed daughter of the aurora, whose father had traded furs in the country before ever they dreamed of invading it, and who had herself first opened eyes on the scintillant northern lights. Nay, accident of birth had not rendered her less the woman, nor had it limited her woman's understanding of men. They knew she played with them, but they did not know the wisdom of her play, its deepness and its deftness. They failed to ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... the counsellor, becoming quite cheerful at the sight of this antique drawing. "Where did you get this singular sheet? It is very interesting, although the whole affair is a fable. Meteors are easily explained in these days; they are northern lights, which are often seen, and are no doubt caused ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... even without the assistance of the moon and the stars, made some amends for that deficiency, for it was frequently so light all night that travellers could see to read a very small print (Samuel Hearne). The importance of these "Northern lights" must not be overlooked in forming an opinion on the habitability of the far north in the "dark" winter months. The display ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... the white death," answered the boy. "You needn't fear. Only stay in the house and don't breathe the outside air. I have seen it once before. Tonight will come the northern lights and they will hiss and pop and snap. And they will be so bright it will look like the whole world is on fire. Then the wind will come, and tomorrow it will be gone, and everything will ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... hills, and fancied resemblances to various objects in the shapes of the crags against the evening sky. The sun had not set till nearly, if not quite, eight o'clock; and before the daylight had quite gone, the northern lights streamed out, and I do not think that there was much darkness over the glen of Arroquhar that night. At all events, before the darkness came, we withdrew into ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... been observed. During five months of the year we recorded temperatures below -50 deg. Centigrade. On August 23d the lowest temperature was recorded, -59 deg.. The aurora australis, corresponding to the northern lights of the Arctic, was observed frequently and in all directions and forms. This phenomenon changed very rapidly, but, except in certain cases, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... noisy, disorderly, and, in some cases, more or less drunk. "I doubt," he told the General, "whether straggling fellows, three, four, or seven out of a company, ought to go on such a service." [Footnote: Waldo to Pepperell, 23 May, 1745.] A bright moon and northern lights again put off the attack. The volunteers remained at the Grand Battery, waiting for better luck. "They seem to be impatient for action," writes Waldo. "If there were a more regular appearance, it would give me greater sattysfaction." [Footnote: Ibid., ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... the northern lights a-stream; Glorious the song, when God's the theme; Glorious the thunder's roar; Glorious, Hosannah from the den; Glorious the catholic amen; Glorious ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... in October we saw marvellous Northern Lights in Rome. The northern half of the heavens, about nine o'clock in the evening, turned a flaming crimson, and white streaks traversed the red, against which the stars shone yellow, while every moment bluish flashes shot across the whole. When I discovered it ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... northern lights,' said the reindeer; 'see how they flash!' and on it rushed faster than ever, day and night. The loaves were eaten, and the ham too, and ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the aurora borealis—Northern Lights—plays in the sky the Indians always say that the 'marionettes are dancing.' About four weeks ago we had some electrical disturbances up here and a kind of an earthquake. It scared these Indians silly. There was a tremendous display, almost like a volcano. It beat anything I ever saw, and I've ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... said. "I—I—that's the first time in ages that I've had the heart to sing. I was hungry for music, I was starving for it. I've sat in my cabin at night longing for it until my soul fairly ached with the silence. I've frozen beneath the Northern Lights straining my ears for the melody that ought to go with them—they must have an accompaniment somewhere, don't ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... appeared between the curtains of a deep window. She was talking with Count de Chaumont and an officer in uniform. Her face pulsed a rosiness like that quiver in winter skies which we call northern lights. The clothes she wore, being always subdued by her head and shoulders, were not noticeable like other women's clothes. But I knew as soon as her eyes rested on me ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... I stared at it; there could be no doubt about it, the letters burned and glared and reddened before my very eyes, and seemed to wave like the northern lights, and bicker into angrier flame as I looked at them. They fascinated me as I stood there dumb and stupefied, when suddenly I saw the dark and massive form of a hand, over which hung the skirt of a black robe, moving slowly away from the last letter. ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... having grown from summer to autumn very rapidly since nightfall), and drove home, six miles or thereabouts. A new moon and the long twilight gleamed over the first portion of our drive, and then the northern lights kindled up and shot flashes towards the zenith as we drove along, up hill and down dale, and most of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders, backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up the East Coast of Africa; another wanted a sealskin sacque, and fleets of ships faced floating ice under the Northern Lights. The bees of the Shire Riverway help to illuminate the cathedrals of St. Peters and Notre Dame, and back of Mozambique thousands of rubber-trees are being planted to-day, because, at the other end of the globe, people want tires for their ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... about them at all times; in the winter were the stars; in winter often, too, the northern lights, a firmament of wings, a conflagration in the mansions of God. Now and then, not often; not commonly, but now and then, they heard the thunder. It came mostly in the autumn, and a dark and solemn thing ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... flowers. "Go softly on," Said the snow-maiden; "touch not, with thy hand, The frail creation round thee, and beware To sweep it with thy skirts. Now look above. How sumptuously these bowers are lighted up With shifting gleams that softly come and go! These are the northern lights, such as thou seest In the midwinter nights, cold, wandering flames, That float with our processions, through the air; And here, within our winter palaces, Mimic the glorious daybreak." Then she told How, when the wind, in the long winter nights, Swept the light snows into ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... and the Rhine still roll their course, Mont Blanc stands firm with its snow-capped summit, and the Northern Lights gleam over the lands of the North; but generation after generation has become dust, whole rows of the mighty of the moment are forgotten, like those who already slumber under the hill on which the rich trader whose ground it is has built a bench, on which he can sit ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... blow the hideous goblin, and rescued the maiden. Viking bequeathed the good weapon to Thorstein, his son, and Thorstein, To Odin ascended, bequeathed it to Fridthjof. Whenever he drew it, Light filled the hall as when northern lights entered, or lightning flashed through it. Hammered of gold was the hilt, with strange letters 'twas covered; Wonderful mysteries were they in Northland, but known to the people Who dwell near the gates of the sun, where our fathers lived ere ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner |
