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Thule   Listen
Thule

noun
1.
A town in northwestern Greenland; during World War II a United States naval base was built there.
2.
The geographical region believed by ancient geographers to be the northernmost land in the inhabited world.  Synonym: ultima Thule.






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"Thule" Quotes from Famous Books



... family annals (the two newer ones, the glory of their brief and discredited, their flouted and demolished age, the brown Metropolitan and the white St. Nicholas, were much further down) and rising northward to the Ultima Thule of Twenty-third Street, only second then in the supposedly ample scheme of the regular ninth "wide" street. I can't indeed have moved much on that night of revelations and yet of enigmas over which I still hang fascinated; I must have kept intensely still in my corner, all wondering ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... Juvenal: Gallia causidicos docuit facunda Britannos De conducende loquitur iam rhetore Thule, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... object. That object, it is supposed, he meditated as early as the year 1474, though as yet it lay crude and immatured in his mind. Shortly afterwards, in the year 1477, he made a voyage to the north of Europe, navigating one hundred leagues beyond Thule, when he reached an island as large as England, generally supposed to ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith

... first time mentioned by the historians of antiquity in an account of a journey which Pyteas from Massilia (the present Marseille) made throughout Northern Europe, about 300 B.C. He visited Britain, and there heard of a great country, Thule, situated six days' journey to the north, and verging on the Arctic Sea. The inhabitants in Thule were an agricultural people who gathered their harvest into big houses for threshing, on account of the very few sunny days and ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough

... and a considerable extent of land were discovered, to which the name of Sandwich Land, or Southern Thule, was given, as it was the most southern land then known. It showed a surface of great height, everywhere covered with snow. While the Resolution was close in with this coast, the wind fell, and ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston

... wings to fly over to his dear country, which was in his view, from what he calls 'Thule', as being the most western isle of Scotland, except St Kilda; after describing the pleasures of society, and the miseries of solitude, he at last, with becoming propriety, has recourse to the only sure relief of thinking men—Sursum ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... we washed about in the surf of a high, dark coast towards Tunis. We might have been on the windward side of Ultima Thule. Supposing you could have been taken miraculously from your fogs and midday lamps of London, and put with me in the Celestine, and told that that sullen land looming through the murk could be yours, if you could guess ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson

... in your honesty, and am assured of your friendship, I should be offended. But you belong not to the congregation, your notions differing from our faith; the light which illuminates the minds of the chosen remnant which Providence hath planted in this far off land, this ultissima Thule, not yet having penetrated your understanding; Your freedom of speech, therefore, because in favor of mercy, shall not prejudice, though it might injure you were it to reach the ears of some of whom we wot. But know, Sir Christopher, that your zeal makes you unjust, and that you have ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... Monceaux confines his identification to equatorial Africa and to India, he does not omit to state that Pliny and other writers speak of dwarf tribes in other localities, and among these are "the vague regions of the north, designated by the name of Thule." This area, vague enough certainly, is the territory with which Fians and Picts are both associated; as, also, of course, the Fairies ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie

... mountain waves the snowbirds scream, Where more than Thule's winter barbs the breeze, Where scarce, through lowering clouds, one sickly gleam Lights the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... merely a defense mechanism. First Eloise, and then this! Confound it! He was surrounded! He felt trapped. And it wasn't because he'd been away from women too long. A week was hardly that. He grinned as he recalled the blonde from Thule aboard the starship. Now there was a woman, even though her ears were pointed and her arms were too long. She didn't pressure a man. She ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone

... within half a mile's distance. This was the most interesting coup d'oeil that I ever caught in any country. Here, then, after weeks and months of travel on foot, I was at the end of my journey. Through all the days of this period I had faced northward, and here was the Ultima Thule, the goal and termination of my tour. The road to the sea diverged from the main turnpike, which continued around the coast to Thurso. Followed this branch a couple of miles, when it ended at the door of a little, quiet, one-story inn on ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... rigor aeternus caeli? quid frigora prosunt? Ignotumq; fretum? maduerunt Saxone fuso Orcades, incaluit Pictonum sanguine Thule, Scotorum ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (4 of 8) - The Fovrth Booke Of The Historie Of England • Raphael Holinshed

... from Toronto was to Ultima Thule, Penetanguishene, a locality scarcely to be found in the maps, and yet one of much importance, situate and being north-north-west of the city some hundred and eight miles, ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... time my wanderings led me near Montrouge, and I saw that hereabouts lay the Ultima Thule of social exploration—a country as little known as that round the source of the White Nile. And so I determined to investigate philosophically the chiffonier—his habitat, his life, ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker

... the son of Abba Thule, Prince of the Pelew Islands, came over to England with Captain Wilson, died of the small-pox, and is buried in Greenwich churchyard. See Keate's Account of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... older States with a common impulse turned toward this empire of isolation. Europe contributed her quota, more particularly from the south, bringing with them the Mafia and vendetta. Once it was the Ultima Thule of the criminal western world. From the man who came for not building a church to the one who had taken human life, the catalogue of crime ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams

... trusty negro men, and we started for the nearest point on the Ohio River, our destination being the new lands in the West. We embarked on the first boat, drifting down the Ohio, and up the other rivers, reaching the Ultima Thule of our hopes within a month. The land was new; I liked it; we lived on venison and wild turkeys, and when once we had built a log house and opened a few fields, we were at peace with ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams

... Reality that transcends all forms, shrank from returning to the dogmas, the limitations of a definite creed. In her eyes, it seemed a step backward. Belief in a personal God, above and beyond the Universe, was reckoned by her own faith a primitive conception; a stage on the way to that ultima Thule where the soul of man perceives its own inherent divinity, and the knower becomes the Known, as notes become music, as the river becomes the sea. It was this that troubled her ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... annis saecula seris Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum Laxet, et ingens pateat tellus, Tethys que novos detegat orbes, Nec sit terris ultima Thule. ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... the most advanced Socialist, never came up to this. The Grand Old Man himself in his most desperate struggles for place and power, never exactly promised everything that everybody wished. To get all you want is, indeed, the summum bonum, the Ultima Thule, the ne plus ultra of political management. After this the old cries of peace, retrenchment, and reform sound beggarly indeed. Never was there such a succinct and complete compendium of political belief. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... of hay From Baffin's Bay, A johnny-cake from Rome, A man and a mule From Ultima Thule To carry the ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson

... three-thousand "Unities!" What "poetry" we do get is so vague and dim and wistful and forlorn that it makes us want to go out and "buy clothes" for someone. We veer between the abomination of city-reform and the desolation of Ultima Thule. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... of February, and in the year 1477, I navigated as far as the island of Tile [Thule], a hundred leagues; and to this island, which is as large as England, the English, especially those of Bristol, go with merchandise; and when I was there the sea was not frozen over, although there were very high tides, so ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... but it was not until the publication of "A Daughter of Heth," in 1871, that Black secured the attention of the reading public. "The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton" followed, and in 1873 "A Princess of Thule" attained great popularity. Retiring from journalism the next year he devoted himself entirely to fiction. A score of novels followed, the last in 1898, just before his death on December 10 of that year. No novelist has lavished more ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... the unconscious Judge—and there they sat, spellbound. But as they shook off the witchery, there was all at once a babble of voices, and before I quite knew what had happened, I was at the piano again, singing "The King in Thule:" ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark

... for a mason, not for an artist like yourself, who have embellished Caesar's town in Ultima Thule with a masterpiece. ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... mists, for they might be the means of dispersing the haze. There went a rift, a patch of blue sky—and there a bit of green mountain! Then again all was leaden, damp, and cold. We seemed to have reached the Ultima Thule, to be the sole living creatures in some far-away corner of an earth gone back to chaos and mysterious twilight. Again a break, and again appeared a stretch of dark fir-covered mountain tops, an avalanche-riven peak, a bright, green ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... trembling Caledonians to the northern angle of the island; and perpetuated, by the name and settlement of the new province of Valentia, the glories of the reign of Valentinian. [118] The voice of poetry and panegyric may add, perhaps with some degree of truth, that the unknown regions of Thule were stained with the blood of the Picts; that the oars of Theodosius dashed the waves of the Hyperborean ocean; and that the distant Orkneys were the scene of his naval victory over the Saxon pirates. [119] He left the province with a fair, as well as splendid, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule— From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... least noteworthy among social evenements is the departure of Piso (whose tendency to form cabals has for some time been a sore subject in Imperialistic circles) for his estates in Thule, N.B. He has left, according to one account, by ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley

... was known, the south was fast becoming so, the east had been penetrated, but the west was unexplored. Stretching along from Thule, the distant Iceland, to the southern part of the great African continent, thousands of miles, lay the "Sea of Darkness," as the people called it. What lay beyond? The question had been asked before, times enough; times ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot

... the nape of her white neck, he suddenly became aware of the presence of a lady still further ahead in the aisle, whose attire, though of black materials in the quietest form, was of a cut which rather suggested London than this Ultima Thule. For the minute he forgot, in his curiosity, that Avice intervened. The lady turned her head somewhat, and, though she was veiled with unusual thickness for the season, he seemed to recognize Nichola Pine-Avon in ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy

... recruits to his chosen body-guard. These were, in fact, Anglo-Saxons; but, in the confused idea of geography received at the court of Constantinople, they were naturally enough called Anglo-Danes, as their native country was confounded with the Thule of the ancients, by which expression the archipelago of Zetland and Orkney is properly to be understood, though, according to the notions of the Greeks, it comprised either Denmark or Britain. The emigrants, however, spoke a language ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... be the kind tutelar god Of thy own Rome; or with thy awful nod Guide the vast world, while thy great hand shall bear The fruits and seasons of the turning year, And thy bright brows thy mother's myrtles wear; Whether thou'lt all the boundless ocean sway, And seamen only to thyself shall pray, Thule, the farthest island, kneel to thee, And, that thou may'st her son by ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson



Words linked to "Thule" :   Kalaallit Nunaat, geographical area, Greenland, geographic region, geographic area, Gronland, town, geographical region



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