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Tropic   Listen
adjective
Tropic  adj.  Of or pertaining to the tropics; tropical.
Tropic bird (Zool.), any one of three species of oceanic belonging to the genus Phaethon, found chiefly in tropical seas. They are mostly white, and have two central tail feathers very long and slender. The yellow-billed tropic bird. Phaethon flavirostris (called also boatswain), is found on the Atlantic coast of America, and is common at the Bermudas, where it breeds.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books



... grew hot from the presses and the steam, along about 4, and our feet began to burn and grow weary, I would look at Ida. It was so easy to picture the exact likes of her, not more than a generation or two ago, squatting under a palm tree with a necklace of teeth, a ring through her nose, tropic breezes playing on that velvet skin. (Please, I know naught of Trinidad or its customs and am only guessing.) And here stood Ida, thumping, thumping on the ironing press, nine hours, lacking ten minutes, ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... want to know, first, where this wonder is. Get out the map of the Western Hemisphere, put your finger on any of the lines running north and south, through North America, and called meridians; follow it south until you come to the Tropic of Cancer, running east and west; then "left-about-face!" and, following the tropic, sail out into the calm Pacific. After a voyage of about two thousand miles, you'll run ashore on one of a group of islands marked ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various

... Inanimate nature knew it, and the bottle of cocoa-nut oil stood frozen in every bird-cage house about the island; and the men knew it, and shivered. They wore flimsy cotton clothes, the same they had sweated in by day and run the gauntlet of the tropic showers; and to complete their evil case, they had no breakfast to mention, less dinner, and no supper ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... do nothing to help my friend. But I felt I must do something. The cabin skylights were open, for it was tropic weather, and a murmur of voices ascended through the opening. I could not distinguish words, but I felt I must know what they were saying to Newman, or about him. So I took a chance. I slipped the wheel into the becket, and crept to the edge ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer

... sailed south through and past the Tropic of Cancer, almost to the equator, without a sign of an enemy. It was in fact just a day's sail from the equator before the Cumberland ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake

... of the ocean slowly crawled 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 ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... golden bird of happy song! A cage cannot restrain the rapturous joy Which thou dost shed abroad. Thou dost employ Thy bondage for high uses. Grievous wrong Is thine; yet in thy heart glows full and strong The tropic sun, though far beyond thy flight, And though thou flutterest there by day and night Above the clamor of a dusky throng. So let my will, albeit hedged about By creed and caste, feed on the light within; So let my song sing through ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave, Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve? Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before, Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat And full of bitter summer, but more sweet To thee than gleanings of a northern shore Trod by no tropic feet? ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... in the midst of the throng milling up the Elevated station stairs. "And later, when I had come back from the circus, I took that long bum on brake-beams. And when I had come back from that, a little later I went off in the forecastle of the 'Tropic Bird' to Tahiti. And each time that flapping business came first. Every time I've done something wild and foolish, I've flapped first like this. First I'd flap, then I'd feel like doing something, I wouldn't know what, then I'd do it—and it ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper

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

... must be divided into Spain the frigid and Spain the semi-tropic; for while snow lies a foot deep at Christmas in the north, in the south the sun is shining brightly, and flowers of spring are peeping out, and a nosegay of heliotrope and open-air geraniums is the Christmas-holly and mistletoe of Andalusia. There is no chill in the ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... throbbing keel, Milky foam to left and right; Whispered converse near the wheel In the brilliant tropic night. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... of water-plants,—all these gave her a pleasure intense as pain; and the songs of the winds, the love-whispers of June midnights, the gathering roar of autumn tempests, the rattle of thunder, the breathless and lurid pause before a tropic storm,—all these the Spark enhanced and vivified; till, seeing how blest in herself and the company of Nature the Child of the Kingdom grew, Queen Lura deliberated silently and long whether she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... of explaining its peculiarities by facts of ancestry,—of finding hints of the Pow-wow or the Grand Custom in each grotesque development. We were conscious of something warmer in this old soul than in ourselves, and something wilder, and we chose to think it the tropic and the untracked forest. She had scarcely any being apart from her affection; she had no morality, but was good because she neither hated nor envied; and she might have been a saint far more easily than ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... Optics are defied 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 ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... in several spots, and replaced with plain tiles. Here lie buried some of the many British officers who have fallen victims to the deadly atmosphere of this region; and among them rests L.E.L. Her grave is distinguishable by the ten red tiles which cover it. Daily, the tropic sunshine blazes down upon the spot. Daily, at the hour of parade, the peal of military music resounds above her head, and the garrison marches and counter-marches through the area of the fortress, nor shuns to tread upon the ten ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge

... their love for it with them wherever they go, and they reject as mistaken and unworthy the doctrine that we lose our own liberties by securing the enduring foundations of liberty to others. Our institutions will not deteriorate by extension, and our sense of justice will not abate under tropic suns in distant seas. As heretofore, so hereafter will the nation demonstrate its fitness to administer any new estate which events devolve upon it, and in the fear of God will "take occasion by the hand and make the bounds of freedom wider yet." If there are those among us ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley

... 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 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 at the foot of an enthusiastic cataract. But to me there is something more impressive in the fall ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... other big stores were as hot or hotter than Peter Rolls's that July; but it seemed to Winifred Child that the Tropic of Cancer might have breezes which the Hands missed. Those of the salespeople who did not look as if at any moment their eyes might come out and all their veins burst, were living advertisements for Somebody's Anti-Anemia Mixture before the mixture was taken. Win was of the ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson

... of the tropic nights she read the books and magazines and papers which friends sent her, and in this way kept abreast of world affairs. Her favourite journals were The British Weekly, The Christian, The Life of Faith, and The Westminster ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone

... thought it my duty to press upon him. One magnificent evening, the 30th July (that is to say, three weeks after our departure), the frigate was abreast of Cape Blanc, thirty miles to leeward of the coast of Patagonia. We had crossed the tropic of Capricorn, and the Straits of Magellan opened less than seven hundred miles to the south. Before eight days were over the Abraham Lincoln would be ploughing the ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

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

... 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 ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous

... had his enemies during his life and his detractors ever since, and we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. He was a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed, even to excess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He lived in a perpetual alternation of thunderstorm and blazing sunshine. He admitted himself that his "reason," by which he meant his judgment, "was exceeding weak," and his tactlessness constantly precluded a ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... pursuing our voyage, which must have been the consequence of an engagement. They had also the advantage of being double our number; but, leaving them to their reflections, we pursued our course, and crossed the line and tropic without any remarkable accidents occurring, excepting that fever and fluxes began to attack us, especially the soldiers; and in forty-four days we arrived at the island of St. Catherine, on the coast of Brazil, ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross

... She put the book in her top bureau-drawer with her ribbons. We wondered and wondered whether young Derry Willard would come. Carol thought he wouldn't. I thought he would. Rosalee wouldn't say. Carol thought it would be too cold. Carol insisted that he was a tropic. And that tropics couldn't stand the cold. That if a single breath of cold air struck a tropic he blew up and froze. Rosalee didn't want young Derry Willard to blow up and freeze. Anybody could see that she didn't. I comforted her. I said he would come in a huge fur coat. Carol insisted ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

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

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

... glance; We hear anear the throbbing drum, the bugle-challenge ring; Quick bursts and loud the flashing cloud, and rolls from wing to wing; But on the height our bulwark stands, tremendous in its gloom,— As sullen as a tropic sky, and silent as ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various

... contemplated with horror, yet Livingstone's mind can find pleasure and food for philosophic studies. The wonders of primeval nature, the great forests and sublime mountains, the perennial streams and sources of the great lakes, the marvels of the earth, the splendors of the tropic sky by day and by night— all terrestrial and celestial phenomena are manna to a man of such self-abnegation and devoted philanthropic spirit. He can be charmed with the primitive simplicity of Ethiop's dusky children, with whom he has ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... of our sufferings past; For who hath much endured, and wander'd far, Finds the recital ev'n of sorrow sweet. Now hear thy question satisfied; attend! There is an island (thou hast heard, perchance, Of such an isle) named Syria;[68] it is placed 490 Above Ortigia, and a dial owns[69] True to the tropic changes of the year. No great extent she boasts, yet is she rich In cattle and in flocks, in wheat and wine. No famine knows that people, or disease Noisome, of all that elsewhere seize the race Of miserable ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... abundantly supplied with rivers, and of a larger magnitude, than any out of the tropics, the Murray alone excepted; and doubtless a journey across the island within the tropic would present fewer difficulties than one direct from Perth to Sydney, or Adelaide; but, excepting for the advancement of geographical knowledge, there is no object to be gained by such a journey. The best way is along the valley of ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... 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 ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey

... of the stone benches of the lovely room sat Aileen, the level pool of water before her, the sunrise glow over every thing, tropic birds in their branches, and she, her hair disheveled, her face pale, one arm—her left—hanging down, ripped and bleeding, trickling a thick stream of rich, red blood. On the floor was a pool of blood, fierce, scarlet, like some rich cloth, already turning darker ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... hill and wanton thro the grove. The woodlands wide their sturdy honors bend, The pines, the liveoaks to the shores descend, There couch the keels, the crooked ribs arise, Hulls heave aloft and mastheads mount the skies; Launcht on the deep o'er every wave they Feed tropic isles and ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... was the surviving daughter, the princess. From her mother she inherited warmth of nature and a dusky, semi-tropic beauty. From Ben O'Donnell the royal she acquired a store of intrepidity, common sense, and the faculty of ruling. The combination was one worth going miles to see. Josefa while riding her pony at ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... the 22nd parallel of south latitude we fairly entered into the region of flying fish, and dolphins as they are commonly called; tropic birds were now also frequently seen, which had not up to this moment been the case; we often also met hereabouts with a dark-coloured bird with bronzed wings, having a cry precisely like a Snipe. I know not the name of this bird. ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey

... wings of the morning, and follow that flying zone of light, as swiftly as the air, one could pursue the same sunset all the world over, and see the fiery face of the sun ever sinking to his setting, over the broad furrows of moving seas, over tangled tropic forests, out to the shapeless wintry land of the south. Day by day has the same pageant enacted itself, for who can tell what millions of years. And in that vast perspective of weltering aeons has come the day when God has set me here, a tiny sentient point, conscious, ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... Meek, destitute, as seemed, of hope or aim She sat, from notice turning not away, But on all proffered intercourse did lay A weight of languid speech—or at the same Was silent, motionless in eyes and face. Meanwhile those eyes retained their tropic fire Which burning independent of the mind, Joined with the luster of her rich attire To mock the outcast—O ye heavens, be kind! And feel, thou ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • 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 ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... was ruffling the surface of the water. Three miles away were two small, low-lying islands, clad with coco-palms, their white belting of beach glistening like iridescent pearl-shell under the glowing tropic sun. ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke

... grassed slopes of a beautiful open forest, intersected by frequent watercourses where the land trended gradually upward to the distant mountain-range. Sometimes they had to go out of their course in order to avoid the tangle of tropic jungle; but onward north by east they went, beneath the shade of heavy-fruited palms, their road again made difficult by the large and numerous anthills that give these northern latitudes so strange a ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various

... 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 country, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... boat smartly, into which sprang half a dozen brown-skinned sailors clad only in scarlet loincloths. They took the oars, while in the stern sheets, at the steering sweep, stood a young man garbed in the tropic white that marks the European. The golden strain of Polynesia betrayed itself in the sun-gilt of his fair skin and cast up golden sheens and lights through the glimmering blue of his eyes. Raoul he was, Alexandre Raoul, ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London

... virtue: to be free From foolishness is wisdom's first degree. Think of some ill you feel a real disgrace, The loss of money or the loss of place; To keep yourself from these, how keen the strain! How dire the sweat of body and of brain! Through tropic heat, o'er rocks and seas you run To furthest India, poverty to shun, Yet scorn the sage who offers you release From vagrant wishes that disturb your peace. Take some provincial pugilist, who gains A paltry cross-way prize for all his pains; Place on his brow Olympia's chaplet, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

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

... week after they had bidden farewell to the Bay of Biscay with all its terrors and troubled waters, as the ship was approaching that region of calms which lies adjacent to the Tropic of Cancer, her rate of progression had grown so "small by degrees and beautifully less," that she barely drifted southward with the current, until at length she came to a dead stop, so far as those on board could judge, lying motionless on the surface of the water "like a painted ship upon ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson

... Pacific, raised by the fires of the very Inferno out of the depths of the ocean centuries ago, to become in recent years a smiling land of tropic beauty and an American island possession! Hawaii is the land of great volcanoes, sometimes slumbering and again pouring forth floods of molten fire to overwhelm the peaceful villages and arouse the superstitious fears ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... hair of which the exquisitely woven cloth was made. Agriculture flourished. The country, upraised from the sea by the great range of mountains, afforded every variety of {70} climate from temperate to tropic, and the diversified products of the soil corresponded with the opportunities presented. And every foot of space was utilized for a population of millions of industrious workers, with an economy and resourcefulness ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady

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

... Belyando—one of the main tributaries of the Burdekin so lately discovered by Leichhardt. Following it down through the thick brigalow scrub, which is a marked feature of this river and its companion the Suttor, of Leichhardt, the party crossed the southern tropic on the 25th July, being, as Mitchell says, the first to enter the interior beyond that line. In this he rather overlooked the fact, which he must have known, that Leichhardt's track was only a few miles to the eastward, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... dawns and evenings, of each shade of intercourse in fishing or swimming or dancing with the best companions in the world. That alone is life; all else is death. And after dark, the black palms against a tropic night, the smell of the wind, the tangible moonlight like a white, dry, translucent mist, the lights in the huts, the murmur and laughter of passing figures, the passionate, queer thrill of the rhythm of some hidden dance—all ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... 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 corner ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... set 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 deny that the degree of excellence of ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... large establishment for making jellies, comfits, pickles, and all the varieties of tropic preserves. In each of them thirty or more persons are constantly employed, and a capital of some thousands of dollars invested. Several large rooms were occupied by boxes, jars, and canisters, with the apparatus necessary to the process, through which ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... character to the others, and like them raised on bamboo piles seven or eight feet from the ground, but with numberless little additions such as would be made by an Englishman. Notably a high rustic fence enclosing a large garden planted liberally with tropic shrubs and flowers, and a broad flight of steps leading up to a great open verandah which ran nearly along the whole of the front, and over which the attap roof was brought to rest on clusters of bamboo formed into pillars, ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn

... wonderful Gulf Stream, once a myth, still a mystery, the strange current of human existence bears each and all of us with a strong, steady sweep from the tropic lands of sunny childhood, enameled with verdure and gaudy with bloom, through the temperate regions of manhood and womanhood, fruitful or fruitless as the case may be; on to the often frigid, lonely shores ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

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

... the south wind, when it brings The scent of aromatic shrub and tree, And tropic flower on ifs glowing wings, Thine odorous breath is wafted over me; How to thy dewy lips mine own lip clings, And my whole being is absorbed in thee; And in my breast thine eyes have lit a fire That never, never, never ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands

... suppository. Hippocrates mentions a hysterical woman who could only be relieved of the paroxysms by pouring cold water on her: yet this is a strange cure, and should only be administered in the heat of summer, when the sun is in the tropic of Cancer. ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... boiling sea, which appeared every moment to be on the eve of swamping us, we bent to our oars and headed for the northwest. It is hardly necessary to say that we had lost our reckoning; but, after a manner, we made out that we were nearly in longitude 136.30 west, and about upon the Tropic of Capricorn. This would have made our situation about a hundred and seventy miles from a number of small islands lying to the eastward of the one hundred and fortieth meridian. The prospect was discouraging, as there was hardly a sound ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow

... far behind him. The incredible greenness of tropic verdure, of the jungle which rings Rio all about. The many glitterings of sunlight upon glass, and upon the polished domes of sundry public buildings, and the multitudinous shimmerings of the tropic sun upon the bay. The deep dark shadow of the banking clouds drew a sharp line across the earth, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... strong breeze the night was quite warm, for we were not very far south of the tropic of Capricorn, and, moreover, it was close upon the midsummer of the Southern Hemisphere; consequently when two bells of the first watch struck, a good many of the passengers were on deck, most of them listening to the miners, ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood

... chase of ocean, where England takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and summer, from the rising to the setting sun. Ah, what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands through which the pinnace moved! And upon her deck what a bevy of human flowers: young women how lovely, young men how noble, that were dancing together, and slowly drifting towards us amidst music and incense, amidst blossoms from forests and gorgeous ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

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

... of butterfly, with twelve color designs by Miss L.B. Humphrey. This really original and charming novelty imitates in outside appearance a large, handsome tropic butterfly; but, on parting the wings, we find between, on a dozen leaves shaped like the wings, the gracefully told story—a prose poem in fact—of "Girl Goldie" and her strange adventures with the butterflies. Miss L.B. Humphrey, the popular ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various

... Aries and in the beginning of Libra; and it is divided by two arcs from it, one towards the North and one towards the South; the points of these two said arcs are equi-distant from the first circle in every part by twenty-three degrees and one point more, and the one point is the tropic of Cancer, and the other is the tropic of Capricorn; therefore it must be that Maria in the sign of Aries can see, when the Sun sinks below the mid-circle of the first Poles, this Sun to revolve round ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

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

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

... his inquiries with diligence, Brendan returned to his native Kerry; and from a bay sheltered by the lofty mountain that is now known by his name, he set sail for the Atlantic land; and, directing his course towards the south-west, in order to meet the summer solstice, or what we should call the tropic, after a long and rough voyage, his little bark being well provisioned, he came to summer seas, where he was carried along, without the aid of sail or oar, for many a long day. This, which it is to be presumed was the ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy

... deep-sunken wells Of darksome mines, In some obscure and sunless place, Beneath huge Chimborazo's base, Or Potosi's o'erhanging pines And thus for thee, O little child, Through many a danger and escape, The tall ships passed the stormy cape; For thee in foreign lands remote, Beneath a burning, tropic clime, The Indian peasant, chasing the wild goat, Himself as swift and wild, In falling, clutched the frail arbute, The fibres of whose shallow root, Uplifted from the soil, betrayed The silver veins beneath it laid, The buried treasures of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... sun had just begun to pierce the misty tropic haze of early dawn, a small, white-painted schooner of ninety or a hundred tons burden was bearing down upon the low, densely-wooded island of Mayou, which lies between the coast of south-east ...
— The Tapu Of Banderah - 1901 • Louis Becke

... darkness, through the streaming deluge of that tropic clime. For the seraphic frenzy had now come upon the mage in good earnest, and all the Thought-reader ...
— HE • Andrew Lang

... Still our curiosity tempted us to proceed, but everywhere was the same wiry grass which we had taken at a distance for soft turf. At length we came to an open space, raised but slightly above the level of the sea. It was tenanted by innumerable aquatic birds—gannets, sooty terns, beautiful tropic and frigate birds, the nests of the latter constructed of rough sticks covering the boughs of the surrounding trees. While the gannets, whose eggs had been deposited on the ground without nests refused to move as we approached— only exhibiting their alarm or displeasure by loud croaks, ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston

... rule him: and at times he views Portraits of places he has never been to, Yet more minute and vivid than remembrance, Of boyhood homes, sail between sleep and waking Like some mirage, refuting all experience With topsy-turvy ships, That steals by in dead calms through tropic haze: And many a man in his climacteric years, Thoughts and remembered words have roused from sleep With knowledge that he lacked on lying down: And I, lapped in a trance of reverie, doubt Some spore of episodes Anterior far beyond ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... an occasional Northerner to whom he was not unknown, engineers and construction men who could talk of things that were comprehensible to him, gamblers and adventurers who took him poignantly back to the life he had left so far behind him. Along that crowded and shifting half-way house for the tropic-loving American he found more than one passing friend to whom he talked hungrily and put many wistful questions. Sometimes it was a rock contractor tanned the color of a Mexican saddle. Sometimes it was a new arrival in Stetson ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... Peru. Lewis might wear the imperial crown, might place a prince of his family on the throne of Poland, might be sole master of Europe from the Scythian deserts to the Atlantic Ocean, and of America from regions north of the Tropic of Cancer to regions south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Such was the prospect which lay before William when first he entered on public life, and which never ceased to haunt him till his latest day. The French monarchy was to him what ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

... the crest of an Atlantic wave, laughing in the trade wind's spindrift, down into the blue-green swirling trough! To chase the shrimps on a summer evening, when the sky is red and the light's all pink within the foam! To lie on the top, in the doldrums' noonday calm, and warm your tummy in the tropic sun! To wander hand in hand once more through the giant seaweed forests of the Indian Ocean, seeking the delicious eggs of the pop-pop! To play hide-and-seek among the castles of the coral towns with ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting

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

... sultry tropic day, when the last flicker of the far southeast trade was fading out and the seasonal change for the northwest monsoon was coming on, the Kittiwake lifted above the sea-rim the jungle-clad ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London

... such-like were rather monsters than men? Yet, although the Castilians in their voyages westwards, and the Portuguese sailing eastwards, have sought out, discovered, and surveyed so many places even beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, and now these countrymen of ours have sailed completely round the world, none of them have found any trustworthy evidence in favor of the existence of such monsters; and therefore all such accounts ought to be regarded as fabulous, and as ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair

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

... to reply when the war cries of Muda Saffir's Dyaks as they rushed out upon Bududreen and his companions came to them distinctly through the tropic night. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... purveyor? There was a Car of 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 other, hurrying him on by the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Para and on the Lower Amazon; and also that the AEneas-group of Papilios never have tails in the equatorial regions and the Amazons valley, but gradually acquire tails in many cases as they range towards the northern or southern tropic. Even in Europe we have somewhat similar facts; for the species and varieties of butterflies peculiar to the island of Sardinia are generally smaller and more deeply coloured than those of the mainland, and the same has ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... kith, kin, or alien. So his wanderings were not only in the most natural but in the wisest consonance with his creative dreams. Wherever he went, he found something essential for his use, breathed upon it, and returned it fourfold in beauty and worth. The longing of the Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for the palm, took him to the South Seas. There, too, strange secrets were at once revealed to him, and every island became an 'Isle of Voices.' Yes, an additional proof of Stevenson's artistic mission lay in his careless, careful, liberty ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... the world a broad inked brush be swept seawards round Africa, passing into the Mediterranean, round North and South America, round India, then continuously south of Java and round Australia south of Tasmania and northward to the tropic, this broad band will represent the encircling ribbon-like "deep," which gives strength to the suggestion that the continents in their main features are permanent forms and that their structural connexion with the oceans is not temporary and accidental. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... course 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

... tell us, is the oldest portion of the American Continent. It was also, and aside from the visits of the Scandinavians, the first to be discovered by Europeans,—the Cabots having come to land here more than a year before Columbus found the tropic mainland on his third voyage. And to-day it is that part of the continent which has been least explored. No one, to my knowledge, has ever crossed it: perhaps no one could do so. I am not aware that any European has penetrated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... or claimed by the American Union, spreads from the shores of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific ocean. On the east and west its limits are those of the continent itself. On the south it advances nearly to the tropic, and it extends upward to the icy regions of ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... it crosses the Red Sea about 16 deg. north of the equator, and at 120 deg. it falls at Borneo, several degrees below it;—and the points of the greatest heat, in this line, are in Abyssinia, nearer the tropic of Cancer than to the equator. On the other hand, the greatest mean cold points, according to the opinions of Humboldt, Sir David Brewster, and others, do not coincide, as would seem natural, with the geographical ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... sympathy; a pother about some few discredited and unremembered priests; details about half-savages, who 'quoi! ne portaient pas des haults de chausses'; the recollections of long silent rides through forest paths, ablaze with flowers, and across which the tropic birds darted like atoms cut adrift from the apocalypse; a hotch-potch, salmagundi, olla podrida, or sea-pie of sweet and bitter, with perhaps the bitter ruling most, as is the way when we unpack our reminiscences — yes, ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... the great archipelago or rather chain of archipelagoes, which stretches round the north-eastern and eastern ends of New Guinea and southward, parallel to the coast of Queensland, till it almost touches the tropic of Capricorn. Thus the islands lie wholly within the tropics and are for the most part characterised by tropical heat and tropical luxuriance of vegetation. Only New Caledonia, the most southerly of the larger islands, differs somewhat from the rest in its comparatively cool climate and scanty ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... 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

... leveled by waves and ocean currents, and when submarine plateaus, ridges, and peaks are built up by various organic agencies, such as molluscous and foraminiferal shell deposits. The reef-building corals, whose eggs are drifted widely over the tropic seas by ocean currents, colonize such submarine foundations wherever the conditions are favorable for their growth. As the reef approaches the surface the corals of the inner area are smothered by silt and starved, and their Submarine Volcanic Peak hard parts are dissolved and scoured away; ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... 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

... martyrdom. Here, too, the Spiderwort of our gardens, in a meeker form of beauty and with a paler radiance, luxuriated under the protection of the wood. Already I observed the predominance of luxuriant vines, indicating our nearness to the tropic, wreathed gayly over the tall and branchless trunks of the trees: some, like the Bignonia, in a full blaze of crimson; others, like the Climbing Fern, draping ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... in the friendly ring, O restless Pilgrim? Haply now thou ridest O'er the long tropic-wave; or now abidest 'Mid seas with ice eternal glimmering! Thrice happy voyage!... With a jest thou leapedst From the Lyceum's threshold to thy bark, Thenceforth thy path aye on the main thou keepedst, O child beloved of wave ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various

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

... some sixty aboriginal stocks or families found in North America above the Tropic of Cancer, about five-sixths were confined to the tenth of the territory bordering Pacific ocean; the remaining nine-tenths of the land was occupied by a few strong stocks, comprising the Algonquian, Athapascan, Iroquoian, Shoshonean, ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee

... voyage, 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 not so few, But love is ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles

... on, until it was time to boil the kettle once more, and make a cup of tea before setting out homewards. The lengthening shadows added fresh tenderness and beauty to the peaceful scene, and the sky began to paint itself in its exquisite sunset hues. It has been usual to praise the tints of tropic skies when the day is declining; but never, in any of my wanderings to East and West Indies, have I seen such gorgeous evening colours as those which glorify ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker

... height of a well-grown girl of twelve or thirteen, and had appealing eyes of delf blue, and a round face of peachy softness. Her hair was undeniably red, of a shade which put to shame such verbal mitigations as "auburn" or "golden," and was of tropic luxuriance and anarchistic disposition. It curled and uncurled and strayed all about her brow and neck like an explosion of spun lava. For the rest, had she really been a little girl of twelve, one would feel free to describe her as fat and roly-poly; ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick

... journal, and in the late afternoon G. and I drove down to Colaba, the point south of Bombay. This took us through the cantonments and past officers' houses on the low ground, amongst barracks, and soldiers in khaki and rolled up shirt sleeves, smoking their pipes under palms and tropic trees; with the lap of Indian Ocean on the shore to the west, and Bombay on the left and east. This is not the healthiest or most fashionable quarter. Our officers cannot afford to take the best ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... alone, Away from Earth and Time, In some diviner clime, In Fancy's tropic zone, Beneath its summer skies, Where all the live-long year the summer never dies! A stately marble pile whose pillars rise, From sculptured bases, fluted to the dome, With wreathed friezes crowned, all carven nice With pendant leaves, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... which gave forth a sweet smell, mingled with the odours of nono blossoms; for during the night rain had fallen after a long month of dry weather, and Nature was breathing with joy. High overhead there floated some snow-white tropic birds—those gentle, ethereal creatures which, to the toil-spent seaman who watches their mysterious poise in illimitable space, seem to denote the greater Mystery and Rest that lieth beyond all ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke

... children's prattle, Welcome to the North again, Welcome to mine ear thy strain, Welcome to mine eye the sight Of thy buff, thy black and white. Brighter plumes may greet the sun By the banks of Amazon; Sweeter tones may weave the spell Of enchanting Philomel; But the tropic bird would fail, And the English nightingale, If we should compare their worth With thine endless, ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock

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

... spectators, the criticism which you are too kind to utter. These scenes, you think, are all too sombre. So, indeed, they are; but the blame must rest on the sombre spirit of our forefathers, who wove their web of life with hardly a single thread of rose-color or gold, and not on me, who have a tropic-love of sunshine, and would gladly gild all the world with it, if I knew where to find so much. That you may believe me, I will exhibit one of the only class of scenes, so far as my investigation ...
— Main Street - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... ship. There is a nice clear space just ahead, with ample room in which to show ourselves and to make a downward plunge again beneath that large ship, the barnacle-covered bottom of which seems to tell of a long voyage through tropic seas. Now take up your stations of observation, gentlemen, and note the consternation which ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... Sam sliding a trifle closer. "We would sail about, visiting desert islands which lay like jewels in the heart of tropic seas." ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse

... Lucia, and St. Vincent soon shared its fate. The Earl of Albemarle and Admiral Sir George Pococke sailed in early spring on a more important errand, landed in June near Havana with eleven thousand soldiers, and attacked Moro Castle, the key of the city. The pitiless sun of the tropic midsummer poured its fierce light and heat on the parched rocks where the men toiled at the trenches. Earth was so scarce that hardly enough could be had to keep the fascines in place. The siege works were little else than a mass of dry faggots; and when, after ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... said, O Muse, and sound the trump For him not least among our noble tars Who first on tropic isle was made to jump By reason of a pericranial thump And prospect of a galaxy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various

... long, for on the 19th 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 to some of my readers, I shall beg leave to relate ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig

... 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 ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... 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 ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson

... in our star! Since I met you I see it shining clearer over the heights. We mount, we mount, peak beyond peak. We have enemies enough now, thick as the serpents in tropic forests. Well, let them soil with their impure slaver the hem of our garments. But how they will crawl fangless when Ferdinand—the Elect of the People—makes his solemn entry into Berlin. And at his side, drawn by six white horses, his blonde ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... was the corsair in the 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 ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... satisfaction they required. I know others whose occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture of beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet without poetry they would be less alive, their minds would be less young. As children, most of us would have flushed before the beauty of a sunrise on a tropic ocean, felt dimly if profoundly—and forgotten. The poet—like the painter—has caught, has interpreted, has preserved the experience, so that, like music, it may be renewed. And he can perform that miracle for greater ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... 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 Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay

... 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 passengers responded as if to a magic draught, and ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach

... dream a dream Of tropic shades in the lands of shine, Where the lily leans o'er an amber stream That flows like a rill of wasted wine,— Where the palm-trees, lifting their shields of green, Parry the shafts of the Indian sun Whose splintering vengeance falls between ...
— Riley Songs of Home • James Whitcomb Riley

... Falls was in existence the country round about was under the sea; before that under glaciers; before that under the tropics, and I don't know how many times it has swung on its pendulum between Frigid, Temperate and Tropic Zones. ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... see how quiet a pirate ship could be. The ruffians were bone-weary, for one thing, after the struggle to bring the vessel through the storm. And the scourge of tropic fever had left its marks. Moreover, the rum was running short because some of the casks had been staved in the heavy weather and Blackbeard was doling it out as grog with an ample dilution of water. There was no more dicing and brawling and tipsy choruses. Sobered against their will, some of these ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... 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

... the mingled sounds of dock and river which came to her she could hear the roar of surf upon a golden beach. The stuffy air of Limehouse took on the hot fragrance of a tropic island, and she sighed again, but this time rapturously, for in spirit she was a child once more, lulled by the voice of ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... that colour enables them best to escape notice among the monotonous verdure of equatorial woodland scenery. In the north, to be sure, green is a very conspicuous colour; but that is only because for half the year our trees are bare, and even during the other half they lack that 'breadth of tropic shade' which characterises the forests of all hot countries. Therefore, in temperate climates, the common ground-tone of birds is brown, to harmonise with the bare boughs and leafless twigs, the clods of earth and dead turf or stubble. But in the evergreen ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... current sweeps along below them. If now our friend the albatross, travelling westwards over the islands of Polynesia, wishes to be carried along by the wind, he knows that he has only to keep between the Tropic of Capricorn and the equator in order to be in the belt of the south-east trade-wind. And no doubt he has also noticed that this wind gives rise to the equatorial current which, broad and strong, sets westwards across the Pacific Ocean. If he wishes to fly north of the equator, he receives ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... we came to an anchor under a little island in the latitude of 23 degrees 28 minutes, being just under the northern tropic, and about twenty leagues from the island. Here we lay thirteen days, and began to be very uneasy for my friend William, for they had promised to be back again in four days, which they might very easily have done. However, at the end of thirteen days, we saw three sail coming ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... falling very much short of that region in all the qualities which constitute physical excellence. The soil is poor, consisting of alternate sand and clay—it is ill-watered, the entire tract possessing scarcely a single stream worthy of the name of river—and, lying only just without the northern Tropic, the district is by its very situation among the hottest of western Asia. It forms, however, no very large portion of the ancient Persia, being in general a mere strip of land, from ten to fifty miles wide, and thus not ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson

... Had scarcely melted into manhood, so The chiselled legend runs; a brother's woe Laid bare for epitaph. The savage ruth Of a sunny, bright, but alien land, uncouth With cruel caressing dealt a mortal blow, And by this summer sea where flowers grow In tropic splendor, witness to the truth Of ineradicable race he lies. The law of duty urged that he should roam, Should sail from fog and chilly airs to skies Clear with deceitful welcome. He had come With proud resolve, but still his lonely ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell

... little refreshing, as by very ripe and sweet grapes, which the fruitfulness of the earth at that season of winter, it may seems strange that those fruits were then there growing. But the reason thereof is this, because they being between the tropic and the equinoctial, the sun passeth twice in the year through their zenith over their heads, by means whereof they have two summers; and being so near the heat of the line they never lose the heat of the sun so much, but the fruits have their increase ...
— Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World • Francis Pretty

... not a single sound Breathes on the eternal stillness all around; 'Tis tropic noon! and yet the sultry time Seems like the twilight of some fairy clime. Spreading in lone luxuriance round is seen The mangrove's tangled maze of sombre green; Thro' mists that dwell those baneful fens upon Large orbed and pale peers out the shrouded Sun, And struggling sickly thro' the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... enjoy the evening of life, when the night of death closed upon him with tropic suddenness. He left one child only, his daughter Mildred, then just turned of eighteen; and as Mrs. Kinloch had only one son to claim her affection, the motherless girl would seem to be well provided for. Mildred was sweet-tempered, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... lawyer and achieved some distinction and success, but he could not shake off the habit of swearing. He would find himself "ripping out an oath," as the saying is, on the most surprising occasions—and they were brilliant oaths, splendid, flashing, coruscating oaths. His talk was a very tropic jungle ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

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

... essential inspiration wanting in the breast of the young bard. The climate of Caledonia is cold, but that the hearts of her sons are susceptible of tropic warmth is shewn by a large proportion of her lyric treasures. Heroism, pathos, satire, and a peculiar quaint humour, present little more than an equal division, and the attributes of the wholly embodied Scottish ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... 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 ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... spins onward faster and more furiously. I see the faint outlines of purple hills breaking the vacant curve of the horizon. A delicious fragrance from tropic flowers fills the air—the perfumes of the jessamine, the magnolia, the cereus. A sweet, delicious languor creeps over me. I feel a vague sense of rest and happiness, which, to my onlooking self, seems almost unaccountable; for, there am I, still all alone on the ocean, swept ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... of striding in two or three evenings in a week,—a big, fair, broad-shouldered six-footer, with sun-narrowed eyes of arctic blue, a short blond moustache, and skin permanently burned by the unshadowed glare of many and tropic days. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... close of one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars that even Spain ever waged with her own colonists, the United States intervened, and in a brief summer campaign destroyed the last vestiges of the mediaeval Spanish domain in the tropic seas alike of the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

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

... out it will be made plain why "Shorty" O'Day, of the Columbia Detective Agency, resigned his position. And, for a lighter pastime, it shall be a duty and a pleasing sport to wander with Momus beneath the tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere. Now to cause laughter to echo from those lavish jungles and frowning crags where formerly rang the cries of pirates' victims; to lay aside pike and cutlass ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry



Words linked to "Tropic" :   parallel of latitude, parallel, line of latitude, tropics, equatorial, latitude, tropic bird, tropical, Tropic of Capricorn



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