"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Alaska could be laid upon China there would be room left for several Great Britains. Extending from the fifty-fourth parallel of latitude southward to the eighteenth, the Empire has every variety of climate from arctic cold to tropic heat. It is a land of vast forests, of fertile soil, of rich minerals, of navigable rivers. The very fact that it has so long sustained such a vast population suggests the richness of its resources. There are said to be 600,000,000 acres ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... am sure that there is a common spirit that plays within us, and that is the Spirit of God. Whoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this Spirit, I dare not say he lives; for truly without this to me there is no heat under the tropic, nor any light though I dwelt in the body of the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... there might be seen upon our foreheads and noses, which were the only parts of us open to view, the beads of perspiration. It was a marvellous experience. The memory of the crimson comforters has remained with me through life; light as sunset clouds, they accomplished the miracle of importing tropic warmth into the circle of the frozen arctic. I think we must have been undressed and night-gowned before this treatment; at any rate, I have forgotten how we got to bed, but to bed we somehow got, and slept the blessed ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... out was in some respects the most interesting. All the forenoon we had Cuba on our right and most of the forenoon and part of the afternoon Hayti on our left; and in each case green, jungly shores and bold mountains—two great, beautiful, venomous tropic islands. These are historic seas and Mother and I have kept thinking of all that has happened in them since Columbus landed at San Salvador (which we also saw), the Spanish explorers, the buccaneers, the English and Dutch sea-dogs and adventurers, ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... 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 ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... Since he left his primitive state, in his wanderings up and down the face of the earth to escape destruction by terrific terrestrial convulsions and cataclysmic changes in climate and temperatures, chilled during long glacial periods, parched and blistered by tropic heats, starved and wasted by drouth and famine, man has been driven by ages of hardships and emergencies to adopt every imaginable expedient to survive immediate destruction, and in so doing has acquired so great a number of unnatural tastes, appetites and habits, perversions ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... followers of Pythagoras do distribute the universal globe of heaven into five circles, which they denominate zones; one of which is called the arctic circle, which is always conspicuous to us, another is the summer tropic, another is the solstice, another is the winter tropic, another is the antarctic circle, which is always out of sight. The circle called the zodiac is placed under the three that are in the midst, and is oblique, gently ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... 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 the same ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a fair breeze sprang up, and sent us at a moderate and agreeable rate upon our course. The heat, however, was most oppressive; even awnings being unable to afford sufficient shelter. We were fast approaching the tropic of Cancer, and every day experienced a greater degree of sultriness; till at length, on the 25th, we crossed that imaginary boundary. Here we were visited, according to custom, by Neptune and his wife; and as the ceremony of shaving may be unknown ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... early part of his reign, attempted the reduction of Ethiopia and Arabia Felix. They marched near a thousand miles to the south of the tropic; but the heat of the climate soon repelled the invaders, and protected the un-warlike natives of those sequestered regions. [2] The northern countries of Europe scarcely deserved the expense and labor of conquest. The forests and morasses ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... thou democratic Lord, Born 'neath the tropic sun and bronzed to splendour In lands of Wealth and Wisdom, who can render Such service to the wandering Human Horde As thou at every proud or humble board? Beside the honest workman's homely fender, 'Mid dainty dames and damsels sweetly tender, In china, gold and silver, have we poured ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... one of the still, breathless nights of the tropic seas. Pedro's small strong hands had not grasped the helm for a half-hour before the wind freshened, and then a tremendous gust swept down upon the flagship hurling her right upon the unknown shore. Pedro strove desperately with the fearful odds, but before the half-awakened sailors ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... a stone as a jeweler approaches a casket to unlock the hidden gems. Geikie causes the bit of hard coal to unroll the juicy bud, the thick odorous leaves, the pungent boughs, until the bit of carbon enlarges into the beauty of a tropic forest. That little book of Grant Allen's called "How Plants Grow" exhibits trees and shrubs as eating, drinking and marrying. We see certain date groves in Palestine, and other date groves in the desert a hundred miles away, and the pollen of the one carried upon the trade winds to the branches ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... on his oars within a few strokes of her. She was floating as placidly as though she were in the harbour of San Francisco; the green water showed in her shadow, and in the green water waved the tropic weeds that were growing from her copper. Her paint was blistered and burnt absolutely as though a hot iron had been passed over it, and over her taffrail hung a large rope whose end was lost to ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of Akron on the stair, and the still fainter murmur from the streets. The very goldfish in the fountain do not stir, and the long line of slaves against the marble wall, save for their branded foreheads, might be gaunt caryatides hewn in Egyptian wood or carved in ebony and amber. That gaudy tropic bird scarce ruffles a feather. What is the difference between life and death? A voice, a call, some sudden strange or familiar message on old paths, to the consciousness that lies under that apparent unconsciousness, will waken all these semblances of inanimation ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... out to be the most gorgeous cinema in the Five Towns; and it simply was. Its advertisements read: "There is always room at the top." There was. Over the ceiling of its foyer enormous crimson peonies expanded like tropic blooms, and the heart of each peony was a sixteen-candle-power electric lamp. No other two cinemas in the Five Towns, it was reported, consumed together as much current as the Imperial de Luxe; and nobody could ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... upon a weekday the bookstall shines emblazoned, discreetly hidden behind dingy shutters; the rare officials, undisguisedly somnambulant; and the customary loiterers, even to the middle-aged woman with the ulster and the handbag, fled to more congenial scenes. As in the inmost dells of some small tropic island the throbbing of the ocean lingers, so here a faint pervading hum and trepidation told in every ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tropic isle, In the bosom of the deep; Where the skies forever smile, And th' oppressed forever weep! O'er the negro's night of care Pour the living light of heaven; Chase away the fiend despair, Bid him hope ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... now provided. On a clear sunny day the charnel-house, I repeat, is lovely, mais c'est la mort; it is the terrible beauty of death. Mrs. Melville says, with full truth, 'I felt amidst all the glory of tropic sunlight and everlasting verdure a sort of ineffable dread connected with the climate.' Even when leaving the 'pestilent shore' she was 'haunted by the shadowy presence.' This is womanly, but a little reflection ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... complexion was rendered extremely swarthy by the long exposure to weather, and tropic weather at that, which he had undergone. The expression of his face was of that abstract and thoughtful, nay, even melancholy, cast which we commonly associate with the student rather than the man of affairs. He was dressed in ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... were playing all day long by the side of the hanging wood, and over my fields. Did these small weak birds, some of which were nestlings 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 • Gilbert White
... kinship in that lust for wealth that makes one's fancy revel more pleasantly in the story of the division of treasure in the pirate's island retreat, the hiding of his godless gains somewhere in the sandy stretch of tropic beach, there to remain hidden until the time should come to rake the doubloons up again and to spend them like a lord in polite society, than in the most thrilling tales of his wonderful escapes from commissioned cruisers through tortuous ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... stereographic projection on the plane of the equinoctial; the eye is supposed in one of the poles, so that the tropic, ecliptic, and horizon form the arches of the circles, but the hour-circles are all curves, drawn by means of several altitudes of the sun, for some particular latitude, for every day in the year. The use of this instrument is to find the hour of the day, the sun's azimuth, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... encouraged to believe that rail-splitting is his vocation. The tragedy in the life of Mr. J.M. Barrie's "Admirable Crichton" was not due to any legal prohibition of his conversion in England, as on the tropic island, into a veritable chief, but that on English soil he did not in his own soul want any such elevation and distinction. His very loyalty to the forms and fabric of English life kept him fatuously content with the mean truckling and meaner domineering of his position ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... rise, perpetual descent. As though their scintillant flickerings had met In the vague meshes of some airy net! And now mysteriously I seemed to guess, While watching their tumultuous loveliness, What fervor of deep passion strangely thrives In the warm richness of these tropic lives, Whose wings can never tremble but they show These hearts of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... headquarters were in the house the German merchant built, the Chinese millionaire bought, and the Admiral, without a fleet since the 1st of May, rented. The furnishing was rich; there were frescoes that were aglow with the tropic birds and window curtains that were dreams. The vast mansions of the ex-officials were not, however, such as would have been sought as accommodations for the management of the military and other affairs, and there was much lacking to comfort; but as ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... it neglected or torn to pieces. Above all men, he longs for sympathy, recognition, applause. He respects his fellow-creatures, because he beholds in him a possible reader. To write a book, to send it forth to the world and the critics, is to a sensitive person like plunging mother-naked into tropic waters where sharks abound. It is true that, like death, the terror of criticism lives most in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criticised, and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man's life. Most men endure criticism with commendable fortitude, just as ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... a tropic isle, The hush of the forest, the ocean blue, A lament for all that is false and vile, A paean for all that is good and true. Pompadour's fan, or Louis's queue, Mournful or merry, right or wrong. Subjects, you'll find, are ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... Don't know the country from the crockery. I'll try her once more. Name the limits of the Tropic of Capricorn, and tell me ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... incognita. ..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 ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... more westerly than any navigator had done before him in so high a latitude; but met with no land till he got within the tropic, where he discovered the islands of Whitsunday, Queen Charlotte, Egmont, Duke of Gloucester, Duke of Cumberland, Maitea, Otaheite, Eimeo, Tapamanou, How, Scilly, Boscawen, Keppel, and Wallis; and returned to ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... Will—a handsome, stalwart man, with a heavy amber moustache, hard blue eyes, and a skin tanned red by hotter suns than English Augusts know. His disposition, also, as it seemed, reflected years of a tropic or subtropic existence, for this trivial meeting and momentary intrusion upon his solitude resulted in an explosion as sudden as unreasonable ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... semi-tropic sun, he glowered at the lily-drift. Then he snarled at Crump to reverse the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... 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 ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... be compared with the sea, the kopjes which accentuate, rather than relieve, its monotony resemble in as marked a degree the isolated islands which rise abruptly from the waters of some tropic archipelago. Sometimes, indeed, the kopjes form a rough series of broken knolls, extending over a space of several miles, as, for instance, the ridges of Magersfontein and Spytfontein, between Kimberley and the Modder; sometimes a group of three or four, ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... 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 ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the glare Of the tropic sun, bringing, ere evening, 485 Strange night upon some Indian ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... length of the days. Then I must try and make a rough calculation of the sun's parallax. And then my botany will help me a little; spices furnish a clew; there are one or two that will not grow outside the tropic. It was the longitude that beat me, and now we have conquered it. Hurrah! Now I know what to diffuse, and in what direction; east, southeast; the ducks have shown me that much. So there's the first step toward ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... pride of freedom on the 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 materials. And as ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Don from his stronghold in the Greater Antilles; and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a corporal-usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air college in which the Filipino was schooled. Now, with his bayonet beaten into a cheese-slicer, he rallies his corporal's guard of cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the matted jungles ...
— Options • O. Henry
... dined, Fritz, Molly, and I, proceeded to investigate the place by carriage. The day was warm, but Bethlehem has the luxury of admirably-shaded streets; and although tropic heat may flood the outer world, they lie temptingly cool beneath the great boughs; delightful breezes sweeping from the mountains, so that a ride is always enjoyable. There are regulation drives, and there are other drives, for one can take a different route ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... extends from Panama westward and northward, without any remarkable irregularity in its outline, to the tropic of Cancer, almost immediately under which is the entrance of the great Gulf of California, separating the Peninsula of California from the main continent on the east. From the southern extremity of this peninsula the coast runs generally north-westward to Mount Saint Elias, ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... filmiest 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 ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... droning twang Of stringed instruments; while there before Mine eyes brown, yielding beauties dance in time To the pulsing music of a saraband! And yet there is a flavor of the sea, [Sipping wine. The long-drawn heaving of the ocean wave, The gentle cradling of a tropic tide; Its native golden sun—I fear you sleep? Or do the travels of the wine so rock Your soul that self is lost in revery? Why, man, dream not too much of placid bliss; Nor wine, nor man, can reach this clear ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... sorrow, despair; and preserves the region of the mind in serenity. Whatsoever feels not the warm gale and gentle ventilation of this spirit (though I feel his pulse), I dare not say he lives; for truly without this, to me there is no heat under the tropic; nor any light, though I dwelt in ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... shattered star Set in the silver crescent of the sand. The palm trees' plume uplifted dauntlessly To call the morning. At the forest's brim The day was made alive by human flowers, Sweet maidens who against the emerald Showed warm and brown in purest harmony. The fierce bright flame that is the tropic sea Burned on their eyes and called them to its heart. Like eager sea birds they forgot the land, And, happy as the amorous waves, they gave Their slim brown bodies to the sea's embrace. They found them driftwood and astride they leapt The feathered breakers, one ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... tropic woods there grows A tree, whose tall and silvery bole Above the dusky forest shows, As shining as a saintly soul Among the souls of sinful men;— Lifting its milk-white flowers to heaven, And breathing incense out, as when The passing ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... many sailors who were of neither race. Some were brown men with rings in their ears, and they spoke languages that Robert did not understand. But he knew that they came from far southern seas and that they sailed among the tropic isles, looming large then in the world's fancy, bringing with them a whiff ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... at anchor in these strange countries and behold the Spaniards established, not only in the Tropic of Cancer, but almost on the equator,—contrary to the opinion of many scientists,—ready to settle and to ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... autumn of 1812 the frigate cruised beneath tropic suns, much of the time off the coast of Brazil. Today the health and comfort of the bluejacket are so scrupulously provided for in every possible way that a battleship is the standard of perfection for efficiency in organization. ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... dawned, he was ordered below, and as the tropic sun was sinking over that eery floating tombstone, which according to Professor Stevens marked a nation's grave, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... the captain quietly, "with the simple beauty of home; but you will have to see the grand sunrises and sunsets of tropic lands to fully understand the full beauty of God's ever-changing ocean. But even now, Mr Meadows, I think you can hardly say you don't like ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... for a week, during which time the Eagle made good progress. Then came several days of dead calm, when they were near the Tropic of Capricorn, and they suffered much from ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster
... occupy, at last understood how the model of the Mirabelle had been so painstakingly arranged inside a bottle. For the time seemed long between glimpses of shore and shore, or until they sailed for a time along some wild and beautiful tropic coast. Then Chris would lean on the side of the ship looking at the mountainous or jungled shore. A scent such as comes from the opened door of a hothouse would drift out to sea to the sailors, who looked yearningly toward the land and the greenness. ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... 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 ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... pagodas which were then lightly got and as lightly spent by the English in India. The baron was accompanied by his wife, a native, we have somewhere read, of Archangel. This young woman who, born under the Arctic circle, was destined to play the part of a Queen under the tropic of Cancer, had an agreeable person, a cultivated mind, and manners in the highest degree engaging. She despised her husband heartily, and, as the story which we have to tell sufficiently proves, not without reason. She was interested ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... up the slant of the deck. We battened down the engine-room hatch, and the sea rose to it and over it and climbed perilously near to the cabin companion-way and skylight. We were all sick with fever, but we turned out in the blazing tropic sun and toiled madly for several hours. We carried our heaviest lines ashore from our mast-heads and heaved with our heaviest purchase until everything crackled including ourselves. We would spell off and lie down like dead men, then get up and heave and crackle again. And in the end, ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... different islands, whilst designing to 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 sources, and much like our own mediaeval conceit of Prester John's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... world of light and life and beauty, which begins here at the open door, and stretches away over the hay-fields, over the woods, over the southern moors, over sunny France, and sunnier Spain, and over the tropic seas, down to the equator, and the palm-groves of the eternal summer. If we cannot find something, even at starting from the open door, to teach us about Why and How, we must be very short-sighted, or ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... situated in latitude 26 deg. 12' 30", and in longitude 16 deg. 47'. We then saw the skirts of the immense desert of Zaara, and we thought we perceived the mouth of the river St. John [A4], which is very little known. We passed the tropic at ten o'clock in the morning; the usual ceremony was there performed with a certain pomp; the jokes of the sailors amused us for some moments; we were far from thinking of the cruel event which was soon ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... grass this morning; and I suppose you have rubbed your hands and cried 'Oh Lauk, how cold it is!' twenty times before I write this. Now one's pictures become doubly delightful to one. I certainly love winter better than summer. Could one but know, as one sits within the tropic latitude of one's fireside, that there was not increased want, cold, and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... centuries: this city I will bury, but not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my mysterious anger; set in azure light through generations to come: for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas." This city, therefore, like a mighty galleon with all her apparel mounted, streamers flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating along the noiseless depths of ocean: and oftentimes in glassy calms, through the translucid atmosphere of water that now stretches like an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... white-aproned stewardesses took care of the galley and the cleaning of the floating hearthside, sharing the dangers of the ruddy and tranquil sailors exempt from the temptation that contact with women provokes. On Sundays, under the tropic sun or in the ash-colored light of the northern heavens, the boatswain would read the Bible. The men would listen thoughtfully with uncovered heads. The women had dressed themselves in black with lace headdress ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... wrong. It would be better now to wait and prepare her mind gradually for the only proposition which his exalted estate would permit him to offer her. He would go slow. He glanced down at the girl's profile. It was bathed in the silvery light of the great tropic moon. The Hon. Morison Baynes wondered if it were to be so easy a matter to "go slow." She was ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... these ledges of lime and sandstone, some red, some yellow, some white; and, heaped upon the top like a rich coating of chocolate, was the brownish-black cap of the lava. In ages long past each layer had been a mud bank at the bottom of a tropic sea, until the weight of waters had pressed them down and time had changed them to stone. Then Mother Earth had breathed and in a slow, century-long heave, they had emerged from the bottom of the sea, there to be broken and shattered by the ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... any other his music is an image of the time. In the quartet, his magistral work, the Hebraic element is only one of several. The trio of the scherzo is like a section of some Polynesian forest, with its tropic warmth, its monstrous growths, its swampy earth, its chattering monkeys and birds of paradise. There is the beat of the age of steel in the finale. And the delicate Pastorale is redolent of the gentle fields of Europe, smells of the hay, gives again the nun-like close of day in temperate ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Juggernaut, you may recollect, drawn by twenty little pigs of elephants. That show I also attended, and was well repaid for going. Near the entrance of the tent was a large cage, peopled with the gayest denizens of tropic life, macaws, cockatoos, paroquets—what know I?—a feathered iridescence, that sulked prehensile or perched paradisiacal in their iron house. Two youths entered; one paused admiringly. 'Come along, Jack,' remonstrated the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... colossal pines are most impressively beautiful. Then they bow like willows, their leaves streaming forward all in one direction, and, when the sun shines upon them at the required angle, entire groves glow as if every leaf were burnished silver. The fall of tropic light on the royal crown of a palm is a truly glorious spectacle, the fervid sun-flood breaking upon the glossy leaves in long lance-rays, like mountain water among boulders. But to me there is something more impressive in the fall ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... sailed up the Surinam river, the world of tropic beauty came upon him with enchantment. Dark, moist verdure was close around him, rippling waters below; the tall trees of the jungle and the low mangroves beneath were all hung with long vines and lianas, a maze of cordage, like a fleet at anchor; odd monkeys travelled ceaselessly up and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... them, like a paradise bird hovering over a bed of gaudy flowers, the story came out, too, between puffs of the pipe, while the fire crackled a cheery accompaniment, sputtering defiance to the wind that whistled outside. Some tale of the southern seas, and the wild tropic islands, of coral reefs and pearl-fisheries, sharks and devil-fish; or else a whaling story, fresh and breezy as the north, full of icebergs, and seal-hunts over the cracking floes, polar bears, and all the wild ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... and rode out of the courtyard of the Baggott Hotel and down the Calle Rivera under a seething tropic sun. Limasito's principal street was well-nigh deserted in the lethargy of the noon-day siesta, but the flower-market was a riotous blaze of color in the glistening white plaza, from which radiated broad vistas of fantastically painted adobe and soberer concrete, ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... 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 ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... the Huns- No coward thought could bind me, I sizzled n the tropic suns, I faced the bayonets and the guns. And when in daring deeds I shone One little woman spurred me on- The girl I left ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... by the sounds which you hear within yourselves in sleep, and by the light of an electric sun whose rays often overcome you. You know no more how light makes itself seen within you, than you know the simple and natural process which changes it on the throats of tropic birds to rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and opals, or keeps it gray and brown on the breasts of the same birds under the cloudy skies of Europe, or whitens it here in the bosom of our polar Nature. You know not how to decide whether color is a faculty with which ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... streets, with their high collars and nice clothes, their newspapers and walking-sticks and gloves. What did they know? I'd been like that, just as ignorant, just as conceited and narrow-minded. And I thought of the Corydon and the blue tropic sea! ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... three tall ships, the Penelope, Merchant-Royal, and Edward Bonadventure, sailed from Plymouth the 10th April, 1591, and arrived at the Canary Islands on 25th of that month, whence we again took our departure on the 29th. The 2d May we were in the latitude of Cape Blanco, and passed the tropic of Cancer on the 5th. All this time we had a fair wind at north-east, sailing always before the wind, till the 13th May, when we came within eight degrees of the line, where we met a contrary wind. We lay off and on from that time till the 6th June, when we crossed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... Hotel, that was very far from being a mere country hotel. The stately bow-windows of its coffee-room have already been mentioned, but its wide verandah must not be forgotten, stone-paven, glass-roofed, umbrageous with tropic vegetation, beneath whose shade, on the sunny days that are enjoyed by the lesser world of men, sad anglers, in ancient tweed suits, lolled, broken-heartedly, in basket-chairs. And, finally, on the town's highest level, was The Mall, reserved, dignified, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... to teach the young tigress that it is cruel to tear the antelope for food. What Cigarette was, that nature had made her; she was no more trained to self-control, or to the knowledge of good, than is the tiger's cub as it wantons in its play under the great, broad tropic leaves. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... ridden range on the plains of Texas and others on the plains of Queensland. When, in the recreation huts, the phonograph plays "Home, Sweet Home" the thoughts of some drift to nipa-thatched huts on flaming tropic islands, some think of tin-roofed wooden cottages in the environs of Sydney or Melbourne, others of staid, old-fashioned, red-brick houses in ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... even thirty generations ago. In dealing with the Philippine people we must show both patience and strength, forbearance and steadfast resolution. Our aim is high. We do not desire to do for the islanders merely what has elsewhere been done for tropic peoples by even the best foreign governments. We hope to do for them what has never before been done for any people of the tropics—to make them fit for self-government after the fashion of the really ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to Florida with Zane ... scouting down th' coast; Whipped the deep for Tarpon, too, that natives love th' most. Seen the smiling, Tropic isles that pass, in green review, Gathered cocoanut and moss where Southern skies were blue. Seen him laugh that boyish laugh, when things were goin' right; Helped him beach our little boat and kindle fires at night. ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... Except for the tropic temperature, the weather had been fine and the voyage smooth and uneventful. The Sacramento rolled easily, lazily along. The men had morning shower-baths and, a few at a time, salt-water plunges in big ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... slender stalks, brushing the high glass roof. In the midst of the conservatory a pool slumbered between rocky margins, overgrown with a profusion of reeds, grasses, and water-plants. There floated the giant leaves and blossoms of the tropic water-lily; and on a fragment of rock rising above the surface dozed a small crocodile, not more than four feet long, but looking as old, dried up, and coldly cruel ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... ship; insomuch, that the mariners, in the performance of their duty, were compelled to tread upon them. This boisterous weather being over, we had very favourable gales again, till we came to the tropic of Cancer. This tropic is an imaginary circle, which astronomers have invented in the heavens, limiting the progress of the sun towards the north pole. It is placed in the latitude of 23 deg. 30 min. Here we were baptized a second ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... smoke again," muttered the wounded man, apparently oblivious to the other's response. As he spoke he withdrew his hand from that of his brother. At that moment the tropic sun was bathing him in its light and the white walls shone with luster. "No; it's like the desert; the dark hour before the sand-storm." Upon his brow the perspiration gathered, but his lip curled half-scornfully, half-defiantly. "Turn me toward the valley, Ernest. There's ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... morning to the noise, if noise it can be called, of the mower's scythe, the rustle of acacia leaves, and the notes of the stock-dove, looking back as upon a nightmare to the horn of the tramway conductor, and the perpetual grind of the stone-mason's saw. Yes! to quit Paris at a time of tropic heat, and nestle down in some country resort is, indeed, like exchanging Dante's lower circle for Paradise. The heat has followed us here, but with a screen of luxuriant foliage ever between us and the burning blue sky, and with a breeze ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... principal poets of the end of the eighteenth century, and of the Empire, such as Delille and Fontanes; but their high-sounding and material poetry was not suited to us. She had been lulled by the melodious murmur of the waves of the tropic, and her soul contained treasures of love, imagination, and melancholy, which all the voices of the air and waters could not have expressed. She would sometimes attempt with me to read these books, on the strength of their reputation, but would throw them down again impatiently; ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... single-handed, and what would he not have given to be on the bridge again, with Jo and the rest of the old crew on deck, and the Sea Eagle pushing her nose out through the Golden Gate, heading for the enchanted regions of the tropic seas. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... the comfort as an orchid to cloying tropic airs, she drew on her sheerest chemise, her most frivolous silk stockings. In a dreaming enervated joy she saw how smooth were her arms and legs; she sleepily resented the redness of her wrists and the callouses of the texture of corduroy ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... when he gets hungry." But the lad did not wait for hunger to drive him from his hiding-place. That very night he came from the hold, crawled stealthily across the deck, and dropped into the water, regardless of the sharks that abound in those tropic seas. A short swim took him to a Danish vessel, by which he was carried across the Atlantic. Only after many months of voyaging as a common sailor did the lad succeed in working his way ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... early astir, to greet the glory of June sunlight over the shoulder of Storm King. A perfect morning, if ever any one was perfect since the world began—soft airs stirring in the forest, golden robins' full-throated song, the melody of the scarlet tropic birds they had named "fire-birds" for want of any more descriptive title, the chatter of gray squirrels on the branches overhead, all blent, under a sky of wondrous azure, to tell them of life, full and abundant, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Height, in within 1 French foot Temperature English Tropic [1.006 of the of the feet, above Zones. English foot] air. the level below the of the sea. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... bungalow that waits me by the tide. Where the Tamil and Malay tell their lore At evening—and the fates Have set no soothless canker at life's core. I want to go back and mend my heart Beneath the tropic moon, While the tamarind-tree is whispering thoughts of sleep. I want to believe that Earth again With Heaven is in tune. I want to go back to Penang! I ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... the strength you boast of seems a weakness; manhood leans into childish memories, and melts—as Autumn frosts yield to a soft south-wind coming from a Tropic spring. You feel in a desert, where you once felt at home,—in a bounded landscape, that was once ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... therefore likely to be irritated by an interloper. The spiritual lion was that Brant was connected with Lysbeth van Goorl, once known as Lysbeth de Montalvo, a lady who had brought her reputed husband no luck. Often and often during dreary hours of reflection beneath tropic suns, for which the profession of galley-slave gave great leisure, the Senor Ramiro remembered that very energetic curse which his new affianced wife had bestowed upon him, a curse in which she prayed that through her he might live in heavy labour, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... The forest between the headwaters and the sea affords a superb contrast to California; here are found fog and moisture, and super-abounding heavy vegetation. In the thick shade grow giant ferns of tropic luxuriance. The rhododendron thrives, its black glossy leaves a symbol of richly nourished power. The devil's club flaunts aloft its bright berries, and poisonously wounds whomsoever has the misfortune ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... Many of these tropic isles probably owe their present isolation, if not their actual existence, to mighty earthquake throes in remote ages of terrestrial history beyond the memory of man. But man's memory is not a very extensive affair, and at best probes the past ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... commenced. The phrase was 'India's coral strand.' In thinking upon it he forgot to listen to the speech. He saw the flags, banners, and pennons floating in the sunshine and in the heavy breeze; he felt the reverberation of the tropic sun on his head; he saw the crowded humanity of the Square attired in its crude, primary colours; he saw the great brass serpentine instruments gleaming; he saw the red dais; he saw, bursting with ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... a lovely Youth! I guess The panther in the wilderness Was not so fair as he; And when he chose to sport and play, No dolphin ever was so gay Upon the tropic sea. ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... Her lips moved gently, and a listener, had there been one, might have heard her murmur: "The four great alluvial plains of Asia—those of China and of the Amoo Daria in temperate regions; of the Euphrates and Tigris in the warm temperate; of the Indus and Ganges under the Tropic—with the Nile valley in Africa, were the theatres of the most ancient civilizations known to history ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... verdure. See how Kingsley grows contented,—how he becomes wise. "Have you eyes to see? Then lie down on the grass, and look near enough to see something more of what is to be seen; and you will find tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; mountain cliffs and debacles at the mouth of every rabbit burrow; dark strids, tremendous cataracts, 'deep glooms and sudden glories' in every foot-broad rill which wanders ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... island of Hainan, and also Tonquin, are actually in the tropics. Whether the houses there do really face north—which I have never noticed—or whether the expression is merely symbolical, I cannot say; but the idea is "to the regions where, when the sun is on the tropic, you have to ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... 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 early days which proclaimed it the possession of a humble sub-lieutenant. Withal it ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... islands. They are of all sizes. We give the description of a small one of this order in the Capricorn Group, an assemblage of islands and reefs on the north-east coast of Australia, so called from the parallel of the Tropic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... that land, And Summer's lap spilled o'er with fruits and flowers, And tropic trees cast shade on every hand, And twined ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Jack Howard, who never kept still long enough for any one to write a description of him. To explain how he differed from Philip or Geoffrey would be like bringing the Equator and the Tropic of Cancer together ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... taste of liberty again before sinking into the humdrum of married life. The thought of an ocean voyage, of the new life amid tropic splendours, excited his imagination all the more because it blended with the thought of recovered freedom. Marriage had come upon him with unfair abruptness; for such a change as that, even the ordinary bachelor demands ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... nights on the earth while the sun is in its plane. On each side are the two tropics, at the distance of 23 deg. 30 min., and described by the sun when in his greatest declination north and south, or at the summer and winter solstices. That on the north side of the equinoctial is called the tropic of Cancer, because the sun describes it when in that sign of the ecliptic; and that on the south side is, for a similar reason, called the tropic of Capricorn. Again, at the distance of 231/2 degrees from the poles are ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... in from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, Content to let the north wind roar In baffled rage at pane and door, While the red logs before us beat The frost-line back with tropic heat. And ever when a louder blast Shook beam and rafter as it passed, The merrier up its roaring draught The great throat of the chimney laughed. The house-dog on his paws outspread, Laid to the fire his drowsy head; The cat's dark silhouette ...
— Our Holidays - Their Meaning and Spirit; retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... on either side of the equator, which mark the limits N. and S. of the sun's verticality to the earth's surface, the distance being in each case 231/2 deg.; the northern tropic is called the Tropic of Cancer, and the southern the Tropic ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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
... survived from the time of that early punishment when each and every one of them contemplated running off and going to sea. Most of them still contemplate that running off. They visualize great spaces, and freedom, and tropic isles, and—well, you know. "Where there ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... false and grand As in the mystic tales of old, When genii answered man's command, And built of nothing halls of gold! O Banquet, bright with pallid jets, And tropic blooms, and vases caught In palms of naked statuettes, Ye can ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... has there been such exceptional weather, although the weather of my acquaintance invariably is exceptional. No sooner had the outlines of Madeira melted and blended into the soft darkness of a summer night than we appeared to sail straight into tropic heat and a sluggish vapor, brooding on the water like steam from a giant geyser. This simmering, oily, exhausting temperature carried us close to the line. "What is before us," we asked each other languidly, "if it be hotter than this? How can mortal man, woman, still ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... 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 falls the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... Magellan Clouds and of the Southern Cross. The Magellan Clouds consist of three small nebulae in the southern part of the heavens,— two bright, like the milky-way, and one dark. They are first seen, just above the horizon, soon after crossing the southern tropic. The Southern Cross begins to be seen at 18 N., and, when off Cape Horn, is nearly overhead. It is composed of four stars in that form, and is one of the brightest constellations in ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... and eighty-odd men and some thirty carriers stood under the tropic blaze for forty-five minutes while the commander checked over their equipment with minute precision. Nothing faulty or sloppy was going into that jungle with him if he ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... 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 many little islands, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... of beauty in the familiar northern scenes; but we miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic outbursts, the tropic glow, and all the surprising manifold and tender and sweet-scented outpourings of soil and sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... from sea with the cotton boats. Portuguese and Brazilianos, Men from the mountains, men from the Llanos, Men from the Pampas, men from the Sierras, Men from the mines of the Cordilleras, Men from the flats of the tropic mud Where the butterfly glints his mail with blood; Men from the pass where day by day The sun's heat scales the rocks away; Men from the hills where night by night The sheep-bells give the heart delight; Indians, Lascars ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... CRUZ was now rapidly drawing out of the cold northern winter and into a tropic warmth. Already the raw chill of higher latitudes was giving way to a balmy, spring-like temperature, while the glittering sunshine transformed the sea into a lively, gleaming expanse of sapphire. The nights were perfect, the days divine. ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... of 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
... to myself the second time the clouds had all cleared away, except a few that sailed there, white as cotton. The moon was up—a tropic moon. The moon at home turns a wood black, but even this old butt-end of a one showed up that forest, as green as by day. The night birds—or, rather, they’re a kind of early morning bird—sang out with their long, falling notes like nightingales. ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... far below. The goral was lost, and as though the Fates were laughing at us, ten minutes later a puff of wind sucked the cloud out of the canon as swiftly as it had come, and above us shone a sky as clear and blue as a tropic sea. ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... often Rosinante. I fought in 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 ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... Cantonment, over the massed trees of the park, and seen remarkably well from the wide veranda of Mrs. Wilder's bungalow, where the guests sat after a long dinner, remarking upon the heat and oppressiveness of the tropic night. The fire-flies danced over the trees like iridescent sparks hung on invisible gauze, and even came into the lighted drawing-room, to sparkle with less radiance against the plain white walls. Fans whirred ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... resolutions melted before 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 Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... career. The 1st July dawned bright and fair 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 rounded under sail and steam, and striking the ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... 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
... a gorgeous tropic land, and, with its bounteous rainfall and sunshine, brings forth many of the most highly prized productions of the tropics, with some that are peculiar to itself. Its botany is as yet very imperfectly known. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... 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 ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... me that seven of their number had died on the passage from Bombay; two or three after crossing the Tropic of Cancer, and the rest met their fate in the Channel, where the ship had been tost about in violent seas, attended with cold rains, peculiar to that vicinity. Two more had been lost ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... each other; and that behind every human eye there lies an undiscovered country, as mysterious, as fascinating, as that which Alice found behind the looking-glass,—a country like, and yet unlike, the one we know, where dreams grow beautiful as tropic plants, and passions crouch like wild beasts ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... to Imlac, "for five years the regulation of the weather, and the distribution of the seasons: the sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command; I have restrained the rage of the Dog-star, and mitigated the fervor of the Crab. The winds alone ... have hitherto refused ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... densely packed quarters of the slave ships may be imagined by any who have sailed on tropic seas. With seasickness added it was wretched; when dysentery prevailed it became frightful; if water or food ran short the suffering was almost or quite beyond endurance; and in epidemics of scurvy, small-pox ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... elephantiasis and which the mosquito takes from man and after a short time gives over to another subject. This discovery attracted world-wide attention and many looked again towards the innumerable species of biting insects that dwell in the Tropic Zone, as possible carriers of the obscure diseases which ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... slight, he was knit with a close and peculiar elegance, which made him look his best on a horse and in white linen. His face was burnt to the hue of brick-dust by the first quick assault of the tropic sun, but it was a thin face, well shaped, in spite of prominent cheek bones, and set with the features of long breeding; and it was mobile, fiery, impetuous, and very intelligent: ancestral coarseness had been polished fine ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... there has been a good deal said in poetry about the fringed gentian and the harebell of rocky districts and waysides, and I know that it is possible for maidens to bloom in very slight soil into a wild-wood grace and beauty; yet, the world through, they lack that wealth of charms, that tropic affluence of both person and mind, which higher and more stimulating culture brings,—the passion as well as the soul glowing in the Cloth-of-Gold rose. Neither persons nor plants are ever fully themselves ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner |
