"Northern lights" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the mighty crashing elk, the fleet reindeer, the fearless bear, the nimble lynx, the shy wolf, those eagles and swans, and seabirds, those many tones and notes of Nature's voice making distant music through the twilight summer night, those brilliant, flashing, northern lights when days grow short, those dazzling, blinding storms of autumn snow, that cheerful winter frost and cold, that joy of sledging over the smooth ice, when the sharp-shod horse careers at full speed with the light sledge, or rushes down the steep pitches over the ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... light in the east increased, suddenly rosy streamers, almost like northern lights, were flung out across the sky. She could distinguish things quite clearly. She heard the rattle of wheels, and thought it was her father returning with Dr. Williams, but instead it was the milkman in his yellow cart. He carried a bottle of milk around to the south ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the dancing Faun. She had not, could never have his gift of thoughtlessness. For she had intellect, derived from Hermione, and an old truthfulness that was certainly not Sicilian. Often there were what Artois called "Northern Lights" in her sincerity. The strains in her, united, made, he thought, a fascinating blend. But as yet she was undeveloped—an interesting, a charming child, but only a child. In many ways she was young for her age. Highly intelligent, she ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... things as this that make the life of the astronomer one of constant and discouraging toil. I have long contemplated, as I say, the advisability of retiring from this field of science and allowing others to light the northern lights, skim the milky way and do other celestial chores. I would do it myself cheerfully if my health would permit, but for years I have realized, and so has my wife, that my duties as an astronomer kept me up too much at night, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... different sections it presents different appearances. In one place it seems uniformly luminous, shining feebly with a pale and sickly light; in another it exhibits bright flashes; again, it appears composed of brilliants of different sizes and shades, and sometimes, like a grand exhibition of the "northern lights," all these appearances are combined. The most phosphorescent sea seldom exhibits peculiarities by daylight. Nevertheless, sometimes, though rarely, luminous patches and even large tracts of water are seen in the daytime, and at ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Mull of Cantyre; past the Clyde, where the Ayrshire sloops danced like bobbins on the water; past the isles, where overhead drove the wedges of the wild swans, trumpeting as on a battle-field; past the Hebrides, where strange arctic birds whined like hurt dogs; northward still to where the northern lights sprang like dancers in the black winter nights; eastward and southward to where the swell of the Dogger Bank rose, where the fish grazed like kine. Over the great sea he would go as though nothing had happened, not even the snapping of a stay—down to the sea, where the crisp winds of ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... believed in spirits and monsters whom they must appease with gifts and incantations. They thought that after death the soul either goes below the earth to a place always warm and comfortable, or that it is taken up into the cold forbidding brightness of the polar sky. When the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights, streamed across the heavens, the Eskimos thought it the gleam of the souls of the dead visible ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... reflecting system was first adopted under the direction of Borda, at the Corduan Lighthouse, probably about the year 1780. The system was soon introduced into England; and one of the first acts of the Northern Lights' Board, so early as 1786, was to substitute reflectors in place of coast-lights, which till then had been the only beacons on ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... warriors polish their good blades by the bright beams of the morning; and gird them on to their brave sirloins; and watch for rust spots as for foes; and by many stout thrusts and stoccadoes keep their metal lustrous and keen, as the spears of the Northern Lights charging ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... kind that looks like the marble floor in the Boston post-office. They was pretty tolerable seedy, and so was his hat. Oh, he was a last year's bird's nest NOW, but when them clothes was fresh—whew! the northern lights and a rainbow mixed wouldn't have been more'n a cloudy day ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... A. M. About 3 A. M. faint lights appeared in the sky and all rejoiced to see what was supposed to be the coming dawn, but after watching for half an hour and seeing no change in the intensity of the light, the disappointed sufferers realized it was the Northern Lights. Presently low down on the horizon they saw a light which slowly resolved itself into a double light, and they watched eagerly to see if the two lights would separate and so prove to be only two of the boats, or whether these lights would ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... 115. The meteors called shooting stars, the lightening, the rainbow, and the clouds, are phenomena of the lower regions of the atmosphere. The twilight, the meteors call'd fire-balls, or flying dragons, and the northern lights, inhabit the higher regions of the atmosphere. See additional ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... The notion of the "fire-flags" "hurried about" was probably suggested to Coleridge by the description of the Northern Lights (aurora borealis) in Hearne's "Journey ... to the Northern Ocean," a book printed in 1795 and known to both Wordsworth and Coleridge before 1798. Hearne says: "I can positively affirm that in still nights I have frequently heard them make a rustling and crackling noise, ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... fires," said Bruce, who had come into the room just in time to hear Ray Martin's remark; "speaking of forest fires, did any of you fellows see the Northern Lights last night up back of Haystack Mountain? Father and I thought first it was a forest fire. The sky was all pink and white. But we concluded it must have been the reflection of the Aurora Borealis. You can see 'em this time of year, you know. ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... inscriptions, rose on all sides. It was before one of these that the lady stopped; the iron figure of a bishop rested on it; the eyes were closed, the hands folded. She touched the figure; it instantly rose, and the eyes sparkled, as you may have seen the northern lights sparkle through the keen air of a winter night. He went to the altar, and standing before the bridal pair, said, in a deep and ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... more beautiful than the fireworks on Fourth of July. Sometimes we see a little of it here, and we say there are northern lights, and we sit at the window watching all the evening to see them march and turn and flash; but in the cold countries they are far more brilliant than ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... in exploding gun-powder, and so making the first forerunner of the electric fuses now so universally used in blasting, firing cannon, and other similar purposes. It was Bose also who, observing some of the peculiar manifestations in electrified tubes, and noticing their resemblance to "northern lights," was one of the first, if not the first, to suggest that the aurora borealis ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... explained how the big cave was used for religious services by her people, who worshiped the northern lights, or magnetic fire that never burned, and she told how they sacrificed to ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... leaders of the free States are dead or in the gloomy retirement of age. Webster and Clay are no more. There are yet men of might to fight under the banners streaming with the northern lights of freedom. Douglas, Bell, Sumner, Seward, and Wade are drawing together. Grave-faced Abraham Lincoln moves out of the background of Western woods into the sunrise glow of Liberty's ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... nights? Most persons left as solitary tenants of an island have dwelt, like Alexander Selkirk, in regions nearer the tropics, where there was at least a softened air, a fertile soil, and the Southern Cross above their heads; but to be solitary in a prolonged winter, to be alone with the Northern Lights,—this offered peculiar terrors. To be ice-bound, to hear the wolves in their long and dreary howl, to protect the very graves of her beloved from being dug up, to watch the floating icebergs, not knowing what new and savage ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... thought that we must be right, now at last, by track or passage, and approaching the conflict, with the sounds of it waxing nearer, suddenly a break of water would be laid before us, with the moon looking mildly over it, and the northern lights behind us, dancing down ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... were knotted over her flaming eyes, her hat was gone, and her thick bands of yellow hair whipped across her face and streamed out in the wind like streamers of the northern lights. As she shouted, gesturing furiously to the men, the loose sleeve of the oilskin coat fell back, and showed her forearm, strong, round, and white as scud, the hand and wrist so tanned as to look almost like a glove. And all the while she shouted aloud, furious with indignation, raging against ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... snow-maiden; "touch not, with thy hand, The frail creation round thee, and beware To sweep it with thy skirts. Now look above. How sumptuously these bowers are lighted up With shifting gleams that softly come and go! These are the northern lights, such as thou seest In the midwinter nights, cold, wandering flames, That float, with our processions, through the air; And here, within our winter palaces, Mimic the glorious daybreak." Then she told How, when the wind, in the long winter nights, Swept the light snows into the hollow dell, ...
— The Little People of the Snow • William Cullen Bryant
... and since; and we must be content to be pleased without too curiously analyzing the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is not just what it seems. The cloud-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and northern lights are not quite so spheral as our childhood thought them; and the part our organization plays in them is too large. The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of. Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary. In admiring the sunset, we do not yet deduct ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the Isles, the last of the great quintet, appeared in December 1814. Scott had obtained part of the scenery for it in an earlier visit to the Hebrides, and the rest in his yachting voyage (see below) with the Commissioners of Northern Lights, which also gave the decor for The Pirate. The poem was not more popular than Rokeby in England, and it was even less so in Scotland, chiefly for the reason, only to be mentioned with all but silent amazement, that ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... Whatever had an idea had a soul. Therefore the Wabanaki mythology is strangely like that of the Rosicrucians. But it created spirits for the terrible Arctic winters of the north, for the icebergs and frozen wastes, for the Northern Lights and polar bears. It made, in short, a mythology such as would be perfectly congenial to any one who has read and understood the Edda, Beowulf, and the Kalevala, with the wildest and oldest Norse sagas. But it is, as regards spirit and meaning, utterly and ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... mighty veteran, the patriarch of the pack, for his effort was so thrilling and awe-inspiring that it always sent the gooseflesh rushing up and down my back. Many a time, night after night, beneath the Northern Lights, I have gone out to the edge of a lake ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... their blazing tails, were long regarded, and still are by many, as harbingers of divine vengeance, presaging famines and inundations, or the downfall of princes and the destruction of empires. The northern lights have been frequently gazed at with similar apprehensions, whole provinces having been thrown into consternation by the fantastic coruscations of these lambent meteors. Some pretend to see in these harmless lights armies mixing in fierce encounter ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... said the counsellor, becoming quite cheerful at the sight of this antique drawing. "Where did you get this singular sheet? It is very interesting, although the whole affair is a fable. Meteors are easily explained in these days; they are northern lights, which are often seen, and are no doubt ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... gods and demons, we have spirits of the whirlwind and the Northern Lights; gnomes; and a host of inferior demons, as well as various grades of sorcerers, especially Wind-sorcerers, Word-sorcerers, or soothsayers, and Death-sorcerers, or necromancers. The Tont, or House-Spirit, goes by various names; among others Kratt or ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... lighthouse of La Heve the same light flashes across the sea. These are Faraday's sparks exalted by suitable machinery to sun-like splendour. At the present moment the Board of Trade and the Brethren of the Trinity House, as well as the Commissioners of Northern Lights, are contemplating the introduction of the Magneto-electric Light at numerous points upon our coasts; and future generations will be able to refer to those guiding stars in answer to the question, what has been the practical use of the labours of Faraday? But I would ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... you afraid of, I should like to know! every blade of grass, every flower is rejoicing now, while we try to get away and are as frightened as if it were a disaster! The storm kill us indeed! It's not a storm to be dreaded, it's a blessing! Yes, a blessing! Everything's dreadful to you. If the Northern Lights shine in the heavens—you ought to admire and marvel at "the dawn breaking in the land of midnight!" But you are in terror, and imagine it means war or flood. If a comet comes—I can't take my eyes from it! a ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... notes on the remainder of the journey have not been found, and it is idle to speculate how he would have concluded the volume if he had lived to complete it. But no one will read the fascinating description of the Northern Lights without feeling a poetical appropriateness in the fact that his last work ends with a portrayal of the auroras—one of those phenomena which elsewhere he described as "the most glorious of all the ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... lovely creature, whose name was Gerda, and who is considered as a personification of the flashing Northern lights, vanished within her father's house, and Frey pensively wended his way back to Alfheim, his heart oppressed with longing to make this fair maiden his wife. Being deeply in love, he was melancholy and absent-minded in the extreme, and began to behave so strangely that his father, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... just little flights at a time, so you must keep them moving or they will swarm and fly away in a panic. If a flock panic on you, you might as well quit, for every bird in the canyon will follow. You see this is the game: snowbirds live on little bugs that are found in great numbers around the great Northern Lights. When they see those candles flickering there in the great white quiet, the snow reflecting the long rays out between the dark tree trunks, they think it's the northern lights, and fly straight toward the candle. All the trapper has to do, then, is to take them in his hand ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... the stars to light them, and bright flashing colors in the sky, such as we call the 'Northern Lights.' When the sun comes back, he makes them a long visit; but never gets so high in the sky as he does with us, and ...
— The Nursery, March 1878, Vol. XXIII. No. 3 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... had to be given up. Later, there was a French astronomer, Bailly, who said that the lost people mentioned by Plato, the Atlantides, lived here. Finally, it has been asserted in our own time that there was an immense opening at the poles, from which came the Northern Lights, and through which one could reach the inside of the earth; since in the hollow sphere two planets, Pluto and Proserpine, were said to move, and the air was luminous in consequence of the ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... are equally, or still more, exposed to the same fate. See that very interesting work, Hearne's Journey from Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean. In the high Northern Latititudes, as the same writer informs us, when the Northern Lights vary their position in the air, they make a rustling and a crackling noise. This circumstance is alluded to in the first ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... thread God took her. Next day buried her on a rising bit of ground overlooking the pond. What a mother she was I alone can know. I shall never forget her. Last evening there was to us a marvellous display of northern lights. When daylight faded pink clouds appeared in the sky mixed with long shooting rays of white light. The clouds changed shape continually, but the color was always a shade of red. At times the clouds filled the ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... cosmopolitan ability and her willingness to deal with lives widely diverse. At least three rank high in the estimation of her fellow-committeemen. "Aurore," by its terseness and poignant interpretation of the character of the woman under the Northern Lights touches poetry and is akin to music in its creative flight. The Committee voted to include it in Volume III, under the author's protest and under her express stipulation that it should not be regarded as a candidate for either prize. That another of her stories ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... comet of 1807. "In less than one second, streamers shot forth, to two and a half degrees in length; they as rapidly disappeared, and issued out again, sometimes in proportions, and interrupted, like our northern lights. Afterward the tail varied, both in length and breadth; and in some of the observations, the streamers shot forth from the whole expanded end of the tail, sometimes here, sometimes there, in an instant, two and a half degrees long; so that within a single second ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... with horror, I stared at it; there could be no doubt about it, the letters burned and glared and reddened before my very eyes, and seemed to wave like the northern lights, and bicker into angrier flame as I looked at them. They fascinated me as I stood there dumb and stupefied, when suddenly I saw the dark and massive form of a hand, over which hung the skirt of a black robe, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... figuring to the eye the fluctuations of solar and magnetic activity, as to leave no reasonable doubt that all three rise and sink together under the influence of a common cause. As long ago as 1716,[366] Halley had conjectured that the Northern Lights were due to magnetic "effluvia," but there was no evidence on the subject forthcoming until Hiorter observed at Upsala in 1741 their agitating influence upon the magnetic needle. That the effect was ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... and at the moment not much. But at night, when sleep would not come, when John lay staring at the chink in the doorway beyond which the northern lights flickered, then the wound would revive and ache with the aching silence. Once, only once, he had started out of sleep to feel his whole body flooded with happiness; in his dream the curtains of the lodge had parted ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... rays projected by the orb of light above its horizon in his spiral ascent. Then, so soon as he has disappeared, the long night sets in, a night which is frequently illumined by the polar aurora or Northern Lights. ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... to be seen, but northern lights shot up into the dark blue sky, and just over the fir-tree shone a bright, ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... natural causes not understood by the parties. Thus, anciently the northern lights were mistaken for armies fighting; meteors and comets for flaming swords, portending destruction or pestilence; the electrified points of swords to the favour of heaven; the motions of the planets to attractive effluvia; and ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... chronometers and several pocket-chronometers. For magnetic observations, for taking the declination, inclination, and intensity (both horizontal and total intensity) we had a complete set of instruments. Among others may be mentioned a spectroscope especially adapted for the northern lights, an electroscope for determining the amount of electricity in the air, photographic apparatuses, of which we had seven, large and small, and a photographometer for making charts. I considered a pendulum apparatus with its adjuncts to be of special ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... it!" the old man cried, leaping up and catching at a rugged cord of trunk, with his other hand pointing up the hill. From the base of the castle a broad blaze rushed, showing window and battlement, arch and tower, as in a flicker of the Northern lights. Then up went all the length of fabric, as a wanton child tosses his Noah's ark. Keep and buttress, tower and arch, mullioned window and battlement, in a fiery furnace leaped on high, like the outburst of a volcano. Then, with a roar ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... the explanation? Where was the story of heartache and tragedy—I asked myself, as we stood in our tent door watching the York boat come in with provisions for the year under a sky of such diaphanous northern lights as leave you dumb before their beauty and their splendor? How often he must have stood beneath those northern lights thinking out the heartbreak that has ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... Pierre and His People Romany of the Snows Northern Lights Mrs. Falchion Cumner & South Sea Folk Valmond Came to Pontiac The Trail of the Sword Translation of a Savage Pomp of the Lavilettes At Sign of the Eagle The Trespasser March of White Guard Seats of the Mighty Battle Of The Strong Lane Had No Turning Parables Of A Province ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and by no means least, had he not the morning he had left for New York, his holiday being over, taken Ruth in his arms and putting his lips close to her ear, whispered something into its pink shell that had started northern lights dancing all over her cheeks and away up to the roots of her hair; and had she not given him a good hug and kissed him in return, a thing she had never done in her whole life before? And had he not stopped on his way to the station for a last hand-shake with Jack ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith |
