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Tropic   Listen
noun
Tropic  n.  
1.
(Astron.) One of the two small circles of the celestial sphere, situated on each side of the equator, at a distance of 23° 28', and parallel to it, which the sun just reaches at its greatest declination north or south, and from which it turns again toward the equator, the northern circle being called the Tropic of Cancer, and the southern the Tropic of Capricorn, from the names of the two signs at which they touch the ecliptic.
2.
(Geog.)
(a)
One of the two parallels of terrestrial latitude corresponding to the celestial tropics, and called by the same names.
(b)
pl. The region lying between these parallels of latitude, or near them on either side. "The brilliant flowers of the tropics bloom from the windows of the greenhouse and the saloon."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tropic" Quotes from Famous Books



... West Virginia and Wales produce reactions in the cotton mills of Madras. And the American girl in high school, in college, in business, in society, in a profession, is producing her double under tropic suns, in far-off streets where speech and dress and manners are strange, but the heart of life is one. That time is past; we cannot let them alone; we can only choose what shall be the shape and fashioning done by hands that reach across ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren

... bathed in tears; they had left the house over a row, which I have not time or spirits to describe. This matter dashed me a good deal, and the first decent-looking day I mounted and set off to see if I could not patch things up. Half-way down it came on to rain tropic style, and I came back from my second outing drenched like a drowned man—I was literally blinded as I came back among these sheets of water; and the consequence was I was laid down with diarrhoea and threatenings of Samoa colic for the inside of another week. Meanwhile up came Laulii,[34] ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... they are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is gold hair more beautiful than black any more, or black than gold. They are differently beautiful, that is all. Nor is thy white skin, O Saxon lady, more beautiful than hers of tropic bronze. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... 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

... the largest room on the steamer—a cabine de luxe indeed, that for a week's voyage on an Atlantic liner would have cost a small fortune, while here for a sea sojourn of more than double the time, under tropic skies, and while other and worthier women were sweltering three in a stuffy box below, it had cost but a smile. The captain had repented him of his magnanimity before the lights of Honolulu faded out astern. The General began to realize that he had been made a cat's-paw of and, ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King

... hellebore and drachm of salt; make a 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

... 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 perfection ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith

... wind, still bearing in his garments the odors of the tropic bowers where he had slept, the fair day descended softly in his arms to earth, and, seating herself upon the hills, wove a drapery of golden mist, bright as love, and tender as maidenhood. Then, wrapped in this bridal veil, she floated, still in ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin

... many millions of square miles of surface, and a single human installation on a whole world will not be easy to find by random search. But there were clues to this one. Men hunting for sport would not choose a tropic nor an arctic climate to hunt in. So if they found a mineral deposit, it would have been in a temperate zone. Cattle would not be found deep in a mountainous terrain. The mine would not be on a prairie. The settlement on ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster

... to be put aside. The tornadoes which sweep the tropic seas seem for a time to reverse the course of Nature. The waters become turbid with the sands of the ocean's bed. The air strikes and smites down with a solid force. The heaviest stones and beams of massy buildings fly like feathers on the blast. Vessels are found far ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... we, (my friends and I,) Beneath a tranquil tropic sky, Bestrode our mules and onward rode, Behind the guide who swiftly strode Up the dark mountain side; while we With many a jest and repartee— With jingling swords, and spurs, and bits— Made trial of our youthful wits. Ah! we were gay, for we were young And care had never ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope

... steamer "The India," in May 1844. The view from the Point de Galle is striking. The town is shaded by trees, which give it the look of richness and freshness that contributes such a charm to the Oriental landscape. On the left of the bay is a headland clothed with tropic vegetation. In front are two islands, giving variety to the bay. Behind is the esplanade, shut in by hills covered with cocoa-nut trees. At the foot of those hills is the native town and bridge, also shaded by trees. Crowds of canoes, of various shapes and colours, moored ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... 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 sight ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... continued 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 the heat of ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster

... Tropic tree, itself a wood, That crests its head with clouds, beneath the flood Feeds its deep roots, and with the bulging flank Of its wide base controls the fronting bank— (By the slant current's pressure scoop'd away The fronting bank becomes a foam-piled ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... delightful—is a season when continued cold weather and chilly rains hold back all but the hardiest birds, until—like the dammed-up piles of logs trembling with the spring freshets—the tropic winds carry all before them, and all at once winter birds which have sojourned only a few miles south of us, summer residents which should have appeared weeks ago, together with the great host ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same equinoxes call out the flowers of spring, and send the husbandman to the harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic as he did when his course began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star and constellation and galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom, and the love, which placed them in the heavens ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett

... me to it. How about that lovely, untootered savage that you lures into your foul clutches so's you can make yourself king of Aranuka? Hey? Hey? How about that little tropic wild flower you carelessly plucked an' thrun away? Oh, I'll admit she was a savage, but she was sweet an' human for all that an' she had feelin's. She had a heart to bust an' you busted ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne

... at ease upon the brown carpet of pine needles, warm and aromatic after the tropic day's sunshine. "The child has divined me already, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... the 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

... ardour of the explorers. The landing of Frobisher and his men on Meta Incognita was carried out with something of the pomp, dear to an age of chivalrous display, that marked the landing of Columbus on the tropic island of San Salvador. The captain and his men moved in marching order: they knelt together on the barren rock to offer thanks to God and to invoke a blessing on their queen. Great cairns of stone were piled high here and there, as a ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock

... the point which our ancestors had reached 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 ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt

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

... in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached withal; he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a cheek like .. Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western slope, to show ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... 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 hotels after the siege were not tolerable, ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... 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 and riding-breeches and unstained leather leggings. Sometimes ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... soul," because he found in it little more than a "record of crimes and miseries." A map of the globe, coloured crimson as to those countries where blood has flowed in armed conflicts between men, would present a circling splash of red; but the vast island which is balanced on the Tropic of Capricorn, and spreads her bulk from the tenth parallel of south latitude to "the roaring forties," would show up white in the spacious diagram of carnage. No foreign foe has menaced her thrifty progress ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott

... my lad. The country has been too big, the army too small, and the invading tribes from the south too warlike a fighting race to be withstood. There is the consequence—a smiling land, irrigated by the mighty river which brings down the rich tropic mud from the highlands of the south, utterly depopulated, and strewn ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn

... 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 of coral islands, and suppose ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... he murmured thoughtfully, "what's to become of these four million black children of the tropic jungles if we win now and set them free! Their fathers and mothers were but yesterday eating human ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon

... of the way, but forest broken by open spaces; they had crossed two great swards of park-like country where the antelope herds moved like clouds, marvellous natural preserves that might have been English but for the tropic haze and heat and the great n'sambya trees with their yellow bell-like blossoms, the m'binas with their bursts of scarlet bloom, the tall feather-palms, and the wild ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... opal-coloured—and BARE. There were wreaths of tropic seaweed, there were rich tropic shells of the kind you would not buy in the Kentish Town Road under at least fifteen pence a pair. There were turtles basking lumpily on the water's edge—but no cook, no ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... existed between Spain and the Netherlands, and the depredations carried out from Providence were sure ultimately to provoke Spanish reprisals. It was moreover almost an accepted maxim that there was "No peace beyond the Line", i.e., west of the prime meridian and south of the Tropic of Cancer.] ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various

... of a tropic island, fighting together for the flag of the nation, both Blue and Gray gained a new and happier viewpoint; and looking back across the warm and shining waters of the Gulf Stream, each knew that ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott

... And loves her for her coldness not the less— But fain would win her to that warmer sky Where love lies waking with the fragrant stars— Lo I—a languisher for sunnier climes, Where fruit, leaf, blossom, on the trees forever Image the tropic deathlessness of love— Have met, and long'd to win thee, fairest lady, To a more ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... Yet more than tropic's soft abundance thralling, My stormy North-land wilderness is calling! Her snowflake flocks, her gleaming midnight frosts, The glory of grim forests on her coasts, Green tinted Steppes with distant bluish rim— The trooping clouds in heaven's spaces dim. Unto the heart how the familiar cries! The ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi

... 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 ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... grateful that your love is overlooked thus early, before it can claim any affinity to passion. An hour's fret, a pang of envy, suffice to express what you feel. Jealousy hot as the sun above the line, rage destructive as the tropic storm, the clime of ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

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

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

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

... with a ribbon and an artificial flower and everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and most men will swear they've seen a quill pen. So you saw that map among tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific Islands. It was ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

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

... 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. A warm breath of flowers, damp moss, ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson

... a man alone on a wide, wide sea? The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the mariner really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. Nay, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... bein's,' he answered, puffing lazily at his pipe with a dead calm in his voice and manner that I have never seen equalled except in a tropic sea. ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller

... one-third larger than all Europe, and that if the United States and 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 of arable ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... tropic night, when the wake's a welt of light That holds the hot sky tame, And the steady forefoot snores through the planet-powdered floors Where the scared whale flukes in flame. Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass, And her ropes are taut with ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... hissing, rustling and squawking noises of a tropic night, he heard the unmistakable 'chuff-chuff-chuff' of a marching column of barefoot men. He made out a single-file column moving rapidly across a field, off the road. He made out the silhouetes of shouldered rifles. Far ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... is borne on the zephyr at eventide's hour; It falls on the heart like the dew on the flower,— An infinite essence from tropic to pole, The promise, the home, and the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... American continent is the range of the black bear. He can live, and no doubt enjoy life, in all climates. He is equally at home in the icy regions of Canada and the tropic swamps of Louisiana. He is found from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific. He inhabits thick forests, and ranges in rocky desert regions, where scarcely any timber grows. He prefers wooded districts, however; and in these is most commonly ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid

... as the South American tiger, and is by far the most powerful and dangerous of tropic beasts of prey. It is swift enough to capture horses on the open pampas and strong enough to drag them away after the kill. In some of the countries south of the Isthmus the jaguar is a menace to the inhabitants, and settlements have been ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson

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

... plain deal one. But the driftwood burned with flames whose forked tongues sang silently but eloquently of wanderings under many skies, of rainbow isles in sunny seas, of vivid golden days and the black wonders of tropic nights, of storms and calms, and all the untold ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... to which yon Ship must go? Festively she puts forth in trim array; As vigorous as a Lark at break of day: Is she for tropic suns, or polar snow? What boots the enquiry? Neither friend nor foe She cares for; let her travel where she may, She finds familiar names, a beaten way Ever before her, and a wind to blow. Yet still I ask, what Haven ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth

... 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

... federal offering and sacrifice." Among the Hindoos of Southern India the eating of the new rice is the occasion of a family festival called Pongol. The new rice is boiled in a new pot on a fire which is kindled at noon on the day when, according to Hindoo astrologers, the sun enters the tropic of Capricorn. The boiling of the pot is watched with great anxiety by the whole family, for as the milk boils, so will the coming year be. If the milk boils rapidly, the year will be prosperous; but it will be the reverse if the milk boils slowly. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... custom, we Ducked those that had never passed the Tropic before. The manner of doing it was to reeve a Rope in the Mainyard, to hoist 'em about half-way up to the Yard, and let 'em fall at once into the Water; they being comfortably Trussed by having a Stick 'cross through their Legs, and well fastened to the Rope, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... the good wet earth" came to him it came "with a kind of Highland tone." A tropic shower found him in a "frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland." And when he turned to write the chronicle of his grandfather's life and work, the beautiful words in which he described the old gentleman's farewell to "Sumbraugh and the wild ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton

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

... outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon. Yet loud as when he first showed War's effete Their Schoolman off his eagre mounted high, And summoned to subject who dared compete, The cannon in the name Napoleon Discoursed of sulphur earth to curtained sky. So through a tropic day a regnant sun, Where armies of assailant vapours thronged, His glory's trappings laid on them: comes night, Enwraps him in a bosom quick of heat From his anterior splendours, and shall seem Day instant, Day's own lord in the furnace gleam, The virulent quiver on ravished ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... 10' N. at which time we were beyond Ras-al-nef about three leagues, whence the latitude of that cape is 24 deg. N. From this it appears that the ancient city of Berenice was built upon this cape Ras-al-nef as Ptolomy places it on this coast under the tropic of Cancer, making the greatest declination of the sun at this place almost 23 deg. 50'. Likewise Pliny says that at Berenice the sun at noon in the summer solstice gives no shadow to the gnomon, by which that city appears to have stood ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr

... at two 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

... the 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 of Germany were filled with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... also an ornament used by both sexes. The most ordinary kind are made of the fibres of the cocoa-nut, tied loose in bunches to the top of a smooth polished handle. The tail-feathers of the cock, and of the tropic-bird, are also used in the same manner; but the most valuable are those which have the handle made of the arm or leg bones of an enemy slain in battle, and which are preserved with great care, and handed down from father to son, as ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr

... swiftly. Before it had disappeared Jack saw swarms of the dreaded mosquitoes begin to thicken in the air, like flights of gnats on a summer evening in England. The swift tropic dark swept over swamp and hill-side, and almost at once the framework which covered each of the captives was literally hidden with the vast masses of the venomous insects, which knew that a ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... 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 or ophthalmia the misery reached the limit of human ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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

... been turned into a hospital for the wounded Tagalogs left by their comrades on the field. Beneath a broad thatched shed behind the church lay the bodies of the dead, stiff and still under the coverings of cocoanut-fibre cloth thrown hastily over them. The light of a full tropic moon threw the shadow of the roof over them like a soft, brown velvet pall. They were to be buried between day-break and sunrise, that the men who buried them might escape the ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme

... 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 ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... iron collar of the serf about my neck in cold climes; and I have loved princesses of royal houses in the tropic-warmed and sun-scented night, where black slaves fanned the sultry air with fans of peacock plumes, while from afar, across the palm and fountains, drifted the roaring of lions and the cries of jackals. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... would say that I was mad; that the linnet in the hand is better than all the birds of paradise which ever flew in fabled tropic seas. ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard

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

... before me in the iridescent glamor of fancy, for I have seen them. But something of the boyish thrill that filled me when I pored over the pages of Melville long ago returned while I stood on the deck of the Morning Star, plunging through the surging Pacific in the driving tropic rain. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... the New World, unclouded by the climacteric episode of the publishing of his journal and his subsequent arrogant bearing before the Holy Father, which had provoked his fate. Under the beneficent influences of the soft climate and the new interests of this tropic land he began to feel a budding of something like confidence, and the suggestions of an unfamiliar ambition to retrieve past failure and yet gratify, even if in small measure, the parental hope which had first directed him as a child into the fold of the Church. The Bishop had assigned him ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... great breakers of emerald that fell in a snowy smother upon a white coral beach. Beyond the beach, green plantations of sugar-cane undulated gently upward to steeper slopes, which, in turn, became jagged volcanic crests, drenched with tropic showers and capped by stupendous masses of trade-wind clouds. At any rate, it was a most beautiful dream. The Snark turned and headed directly in toward the emerald surf, till it lifted and thundered on either hand; ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... 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 ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell

... declination, and warms the lower half of the great African continent, the current of heated air ascending from the equatorial belt leaves a comparative vacuum, towards which the less rarefied atmospheric fluid is drawn down from the regions north, of the tropic, bringing with it the cold and dry winds from the Himalayan Alps, and the lofty ranges of Assam. The great change is heralded as before by oppressive calms, lurid skies, vivid lightning, bursts of thunder, and tumultuous ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... parallel ranges lying in a general north and south direction, and they subside only in the foothills west of the great level bottom land bordering the Rio Grande de Cagayan. The Cordillera Central is as fair and about as varied a mountain country as the tropic sun shines on. It has mountains up which one may climb from tropic forest jungles into open, pine-forested parks, and up again into the dense tropic forest, with its drapery of vines, its varied hanging orchids, and its graceful, lilting fern trees. It has mountains forested to the upper rim on ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... 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 ...
— Fairy Prince and Other Stories • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... bright, Little Nell; Hide that vision out of her sight— Those dark dark eyes with their tender light— Uplift your pure face, can it be She will bid farewell to heaven and thee, Little Nell? No; your mute lips plead with eloquent power, Her tears fall like a tropic shower; All is well, ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley

... gaunt, wild, hungry, avenging mob which rose against aristocratic oppression; and in like manner, Sojourner, singing this hymn, seemed to impersonate the fervor of Ethiopia, wild, savage, hunted of all nations, but burning after God in her tropic heart, and stretching her scarred hands towards the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various

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

... shells of Indian seas. Half concealed were the fawns that drew it by the floating mists that went before it in pomp. But the mists hid not the lovely countenance of the infant girl that sate wistful upon the ear, and hid not the birds of tropic plumage with which she played. Face to face she rode forward to meet us, and baby laughter in her eyes saluted the ruin that approached. 'Oh, baby,' I said in anguish, 'must we that carry tidings of great joy to every people be God's messengers of ruin to thee?' In horror I rose at the thought. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... off for a week, until the 20th of November. The month of November in this latitude corresponds to the month of May in the northern zones. It was, therefore, the fine season. The sun was entering the tropic of Capricorn, and gave the longest days in the year. The time was, therefore, very favorable for the projected expedition, which, if it did not accomplish its principal object, would at any rate be fruitful in discoveries, especially of natural productions, since Harding ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne

... their grand lessons some other day; and let us look now at the 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

... attacked, 421. X. Buds and Flowers expanded by Warmth, Electricity, and Light. Drawings with colourless sympathetic Inks; which appear when warmed by the Fire, 457. XI. Sirius. Jupiter and Semele. Northern Constellations. Ice-islands navigated into the Tropic Seas. Rainy Monsoons, 497. XII. Points erected to procure Rain. Elijah on Mount-Carmel, 549. Departure of the Nymphs of Fire like sparks from ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... 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 ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... W.S.W. until he reached the tropic of Capricorn,* and this direction was kept until ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge

... 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 ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey

... that land, And Summer's lap spilled o'er with fruits and flowers, And tropic trees cast shade on every hand, And ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... each other, and the trade-wind always blowing, the state of affairs after daylight was much like that which prevailed in England when King Alfred invented lanterns, while in the latter end of June the days were, of course, as short as they could be on the tropic of Capricorn, so that Patteson got up in the dark at ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... sea. I said "Time" again, but he paid no attention; so I stole upon him, with the stealth of a wild Indian, and smote him behind. This action was unsportsmanlike, but conclusive. He shot out into the ocean, where probably some not over-particular tropic fish attempted ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... frolic was on. Through the long hall, lighted to pleasant dusk by real Jack-o'-lanterns, stray couples strolled, with subdued murmurs and soft laughter. In the big white and gold parlour, in the dining-room, billiard-room, and in the tropic jungle of the immense palm-garden the party had bestowed itself in congenial groups, ever intersecting and forming anew. Little flutters of high laughter now and then told of tests that were being ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... of idiots! They will have a glorious life. Such harmony, such congeniality! Such incomparable sweetness on her part, such equable spirits on his! Not the surpassing repose of a windless tropic night can approach to the divine serenity of their future. Ha! by the Furies! he will have an enviable companion; a matchless Griselda!" Laughing scornfully, he started up and strode across the floor. As Beulah caught the withering ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... the Mambookei chain of mountains, and in the central portion of Africa, below the tropic, are the Bechuanas, who inhabit an extent of country as yet imperfectly known to us. These may be termed the ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat

... lands whose names are made of spice and tar, Old painted empires that are ever fair, From Cochin-China down to Zanzibar! O Beauty simple, soul-less, and bizarre! I would take Danger for my bosom-wife, And light our bed with some wild tropic star— O how I long to run ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... purpose in London and Bristol, took care to supply with yearly recruits of provisions, utensils, and new inhabitants. About 1609, Argal discovered a more direct and shorter passage to Virginia, and left the track of the ancient navigators, who had first directed their course southwards to the tropic, sailed westward by means of the trade winds, and then turned northward, till they reached the English settlements. The same year, five hundred persons, under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, were ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... children sleep. And then came blue twilight, and lamps were lit in the green spaces, and into the odorous night would come the golden rounded women with smiles like honey, and the graceful feline men.... A woman's laughter, a man's song.... And the moon rising on tropic seas, while a guitar hummed with a deep vibrant note.... And the perfume of ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... guarantee in writing from the viceroy of security for Hawkins while dismantling the English ships. In order to avoid clashes among the common soldiers, the fortified island was assigned for the English to {137} disembark. It was the 12th of August, 1568. Darkness fell with the warm velvet caress of a tropic sea. Half the crew had landed, half the cannon been trundled ashore for the vessels to be beached next day, when Hawkins noticed torches—a thousand torches—glistening above the mailed armor of a thousand Spanish soldiers marching down from the fort and being swiftly transferred to ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... smoothed by the footfalls of centuries, winding patiently round every obstacle and never breaking through after the brutal manner of civilization. The fire-flies gleamed in the brushwood on either hand, and from every side rose that all-pervading hum of busy insects through which the tropic forest ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... Dutchman's-breeches, Quaker-ladies, and trailing arbutus, that smells as divinely as the true May. Autumn has golden-rod and all the tribe of asters, pink, lilac, and creamy white, by the double armful. When these go the curtain comes down, and whatever Powers shift the scenery behind, work without noise. In tropic lands you can hear the play of growth and decay at the back of the night-silences. Even in England the tides of the winter air have a set and a purpose; but here they are dumb altogether. The very last piece ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... said he 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 my authority.... I am the first of ...
— 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.

... attired in a garb proper to her historic and queenly state, as a daughter of the Ptolemies, and yet such as the beautiful woman would have put on as best adapted to heighten the magnificence of her charms, and kindle a tropic fire in the cold ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... years, too wild for song, Then rolled like tropic storms along, Where, though the garish lights that fly Dying along the troubled sky, Lay bare, through vistas thunder-riven, The blackness of the general Heaven, That very blackness yet doth fling Light ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... 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

... follow his whole orbit his story would be more intelligible: it would be easier to convince a chance idler in the street than the trained intelligence hampered by a sense of his antecedents. This idea shot up in him with the tropic luxuriance of each new seed of thought, and he began to walk the streets, and to frequent out-of-the-way chop-houses and bars in his search for the impartial stranger to whom he should ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

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

... with by hostile onlookers and disbelievers. Here came the home-seekers of the earlier day, when California was still a province of Mexico; those who had been lured by the glowing stories of the Land of the Sun Down Sea, where orange and lemon, vine and fig flourished and indicated the semi-tropic luxuriance and fruitfulness of ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, and the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry fingerpoints the Almighty marks the ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing

... nature of his calling as a tamer of ferocious denizens of the tropic jungle, Mr. Riley, upon wakening, proved to be a person of a fairly amiable disposition. He made it snappy but not unduly burdensome as he initiated Red Hoss into the rudimentary phases of the new employment. As the forenoon wore on the conviction became fixed in Red Hoss' mind that ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... high, white, barren-looking point was passed, which being found by observation to be directly under the tropic was named Cape Capricorn, and soon after the mouth of the Fitzroy was crossed, with the remark from Cook that from general appearances he believed there was a river in the immediate vicinity. Soundings becoming very irregular, ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson

... a fine southerly breeze to-day, and we crossed the equinoctial line this forenoon, without observing the usual custom of shaving, having gone through that ceremony on passing the tropic, before we arrived at Sierra Leone, not expecting, at that time, the Eden would have occasion to cross the equinoctial line. Latitude, at noon, 0 deg. 6'. S. steering W. by S. with the wind south. There have been numberless flying-fish, with a ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman

... as 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 also prevail in ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... hours every day in the boat. Sometimes we row in front of the town, which literally stands in the water, in some places, musing on the quaint old walls, and listening to the lore of honest John, who moves two crooked oars as leisurely as a lady of the tropic utters, but who has seen great events in his time. Sometimes even this lazy action is too much for the humour of the moment, and we are satisfied with drifting along the shore, for there is generally current enough to carry ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper

... in every muscle as a deep rage at these blasphemies spread throughout his frame. As tropic storms strike languid forests, swaying, threshing, rending trees this way and that, so a mighty rush of fury swept him. Slowly at first, then faster, the almost forgotten taper flame of manliness that flickered on the altar of his inmost being leaped higher, until it blazed as a consuming fire. ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... know the country from the crockery. I'll try her once more. Name the limits of the Tropic of Capricorn, and tell me where Asia ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... 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 that scored her palms from ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... 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 of ...
— Options • O. Henry

... that in 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 ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... frantic for the loss of her son—then look at Lear, maddened by the ingratitude of his daughters: why it is the west wind bowing those aspen tops that wave before our window, compared to the tropic hurricane, when forests crash and burn, and ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... 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 ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... I 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

... is the home of the Pygmy, as in all probability it was of the man-ape. He dwells in its deepest recesses, its moist and sultry depths, and pines when removed from his native realm in the heart of the tropic woods. In truth, he is almost as fully arboreal as was his tree-dwelling ancestor and as are his forest relatives, the anthropoid apes of to-day; not inhabiting the limbs of trees, indeed, but living under their shade, and forming ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... Country was then like the equatorial regions of earth—a dense, tropic jungle, hotter than most temperatures we have to bear, but still, by reason of its thick enveloping atmosphere of clouds, capable of supporting life in comparative comfort. Its inhabitants were dark-skinned, but rather more like our Indians ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings

... The Mantchoo, and indeed all the other Tartar tribes bordering upon China, are scarcely distinguishable from the Chinese. The same colour, except in a few instances as I have elsewhere observed, the same eyes, and general turn of the countenance prevail, on the continent of Asia, from the tropic of Cancer to the Frozen Ocean[36]. The peninsula of Malacca, and the vast multitude of islands spread over the eastern seas, and inhabited by the Malays, as well as those of Japan and Lieou-kieou, ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... moved through the amazing collection of tropic and near tropic growths that is the Botanical Garden until he came at once to Paula and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... the lily, the turquoise eyes 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 should return the gift of the Fairy Cordis, and let Maya live ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... at the piano, with her head thrown back, her long fair hair hanging to the floor. Her dark eyes were blank, but her fingers shook from the keys the music of a Tropic night. It was a music that Hamilton had not sent a thought after since the day he landed in America, thirty-one years ago. It had come to her, with other memories, by ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... leaped up the next morning, and the tropic night flashed suddenly into the tropic day, Amyas was pacing the deck, with dishevelled hair and torn clothes, his eyes red with rage and weeping, his heart full—how can I describe it? Picture it to yourselves, picture it to yourselves, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... Gertrude and Lady Macbeth, he gives us the beautiful, faithful, loving characters of Isabella, Juliet, Desdemona, Perdita, Helena, Miranda, Imogen, Ophelia and Cordelia, whose love-lit words and phrases shine out in the firmament of purity and devotion like morning stars in tropic skies. ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... the sides of the rocks. The sea birds, allured by the stillness of those retreats, resorted thither to pass the night. At the hour of sunset we perceived the curlew and the stint skimming along the sea shore; the cardinal poised high in air; and the white bird of the tropic, which abandons, with the star of day, the solitudes of the Indian ocean. Virginia loved to repose upon the border of this fountain, decorated with wild and sublime magnificence. She often seated herself beneath the shade of ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre

... to multiply citations upon this subject; from all which it follows, that we have the strongest reasons to believe that the country neighboring to the tropic was the cradle of the sciences, and of consequence that the first learned nation was a nation of Blacks; for it is incontrovertible, that, by the term Ethiopians, the ancients meant to represent a people of black complexion, thick lips, and woolly hair. I am therefore ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney



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



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