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More "Elfin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... answered the princess, and there stepped forward a dainty elfin boy whose face was the image ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... was being hurled toward the south in a condition of the wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the wan, elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing itself into spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... hands to her sisters in an agony of despair. There is the still slighter local strain of irony, which lightens the middle of the third act. Here Ibsen comes not to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of an exhausted age, and will bury it quickly, with sexton's songs and peals of elfin laughter, in some chasm of rock above a waterfall. "It is Will alone that matters," and for the weak of purpose there is nothing but ridicule and six feet of such waste earth as nature carelessly can spare from her rude store of graves. Against the mountain landscape, Brand holds ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... frame-work was of shining stones, and whose firm, but slender bars, were of purest gold.—"Favoured mortal!" (the speaker was beside me)—"favoured beyond even thine own conception, know that thou art permitted to behold the Elfin Paradise—the true, the veritable Fairy Land. Pollute it not by the tone of mortal speech; to us are thy thoughts not unknown, and partially are we permitted to gratify thy desire for information. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... she exclaimed. "Have I dreamed a bad dream? That certainly is my pretty little elfin child lying yonder." And she kissed it and strained it affectionately to her heart; but it struggled, and tried to bite like the kitten of ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... match this winter palace of ice; 'T was as if every image that mirrored lay In his depths serene through the summer day, Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, Lest the happy model should be lost. Sad been mimicked in fairy masonry By the elfin builders of the frost. ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... pointed. The hands would almost have passed inspection as human hands—except for the long, triangular nails curved over the fingertips like the claws of a cat. They wore skin-tight clothes of some metallic silky stuff, and long flowing gleaming silvery capes. They looked unearthly, elfin and strange, and in their own ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... where no sound is heard—the wind which shouted beyond the mountains, "when it sped across the moor it lost its voice, and passed as silently as the dead"—is affected by the fortune of the tale equally with its human and its elfin personages. When the knight arrives at last, "wherever his horse's hoofs struck the ground, grass and flowers sprang up, and great trees with leafy branches rose on every side.... As they rode on ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... to her elfin grot, And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore, And there I shut her wild ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... No storms, no clouds in thy blue sky foreseeing, Play on, play on, My elfin John! Toss the light ball—bestride the stick— (I knew so many ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Elfin towers, Wild morning-glories light the tangled ways, And, like the rosy rockets of the Fays, Burns the ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... with a faint echo of the elfin laughter that had so maddened him a little earlier. "No, I won't promise. But I'll show you where I was hiding ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... "You wonderful, elfin creature, I shall undoubtedly come back—to your real home, and claim you there. Only I don't believe you do live in Aberlin,—you probably live in some great, gnarled oak hereabouts; and at night its bark uncloses to set you free, and you and your sisters dance out the satyrs' ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... once,—if, not with light regard, I read aright that gifted bard, —Him whose school above the rest His loveliest elfin queen has blest;— One, only one, unrival'd[20] fair, 5 Might hope the magic girdle wear, At solemn turney hung on high, The wish of each ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... the briers, Round his holy corse to gre; Elfin-fairy, light your fires, Here my body still shall be. My love is dead, Gone to his ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... eye, with careless glance, Has gallop'd o'er some old romance, Of speaking birds, and steeds with wings, Giants and dwarfs, and fiends, and kings: Beyond the rest, with more attentive care, I've loved to read of elfin-favor'd fair— How if she longed for aught beneath the sky, And suffered to escape one votive sigh, Wafted along on viewless pinions airy, It kid itself obsequious at her feet: Such things I thought ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... the blows of a tall, swarthy woman was a small girl, so fragile as to appear almost elfin. The woman wore the garb of a gipsy, and the presence of some squalid tents and tethered horses showed our young friends at once that it was a gipsy encampment upon which ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... I reach'd a winding of the stream, By hazels overarch'd, whose swollen nuts Hung in rich clusters, from his marginal bank Of yellow sand, ribb'd by receding waves, I scared the ousel, that, like elfin sprite, Amid the water-lilies lithe and green, Zig-zagg'd from stone to stone; and, turning round The sudden jut, reveal'd before me stood, Silent, within that solitary place— In that green solitude so calm and deep— An aged angler, plying wistfully, Amid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... to me, and the closer I watched him the more convinced I became, that this was no optical illusion, that a faint luminosity, a sort of elfin light, played eerily about ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... little time." That evening the Hawthornes spent at Casa Guidi. Mrs Browning is described by the American novelist as if she were one of the singular creatures of his own imagination—no earthly woman but one of the elfin race, yet sweetly disposed towards human beings; a wonder of charm in littleness; with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice; "there is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster into her neck, and make her face look whiter by their sable ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... was a baby-mother; playing with her infant as, not so very long since, she had played with her doll; twisting its tiny fingers, and making them close tightly round her own, which were quite as elfin-like, comparatively. For Mrs. Rothesay's surpassing beauty included beautiful hands and feet; a blessing which Nature—often niggardly in her gifts—does not always extend to pretty women, but bestows it on those who ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... way—not of dulness but of something infinitely worse, so ghastly and unchildlike in its cunning—came back as vividly as if but yesterday had intervened. The room in which they used to be; the spot in which his cradle stood; he, old and elfin-like in face, but ever dear to her, gazing at her with a wild and vacant eye, and crooning some uncouth song as she sat by and rocked him; every circumstance of his infancy came thronging back, and the most ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... of that voluptuous strain, With all the sultry South in it, and all Its importunity of love and pain; And he would wait till the last passionate fall Died on the night, and all was still again, — Then to his upland village wander home, Marvelling whence that flood of elfin song ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... had callers all the day; my last, the wife of the Japanese Consul, who brought with her two children. They were like little butterflies, dressed in their gay kimonas and bright red obis, their straight black hair framing their tiny elfin faces. I was delighted and could scarcely let them go. Their mother says she will send to me their photographs, and I will send them to thee, as they seem children from another world. They are much prettier, in my eyes, than the foreign children, ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... before the door, which she had left ajar, was re-opened, and a light-wheeled chair was pushed into the room. It contained a slight, elfin-like girl, white-faced, flaxen-haired, sharp-featured, and arrayed in gorgeous crimson. The elder sister pushed from behind. The little procession wore an air of triumphant satisfaction, still ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... now the Lily pale Transparent grace thy beauties meek; Yet ere again along the impurpling vale, The purpling vale and elfin-haunted grove, 105 Young Zephyr his fresh flowers profusely throws, We'll tinge with livelier hues thy cheek; And, haply, from the nectar-breathing Rose ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the glare from the candles. The sense of isolation was complete and delicious: the roses smelt very sweet, the soft strains of the waltz sounded like elfin music. ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... in looking at her. But even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow, finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... looked out of the window and saw a corner of the rock lit up with the last ray of the setting sun. She knew it was time to prepare for her journey. She loosened her long black and gray elfin locks, and let them fall dishevelled over her shoulders. Her thin, cruel lips were drawn to a rigid line, and her eyes were filled with red fire as she drew the casket of ebony out of her bosom and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... shyly divested herself of her sables and laid them on a side table. Edna Marvel was the elder of the two by three years, but she was so small that she seemed a mere child. Her sallow little face resembled that of a tired monkey, yet it had an elfin charm, and her hands were beautiful as carved toys of ivory made in the East for a king's son to play with. They might hold a man's heart perhaps, but Mamie did not notice them, her own allurements being ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... I had been congratulating myself on the possession of the buffalo-robe. That would go far towards the disguise; but other articles were wanting to complete my costume. The leggings and moccasins—the plumed head-dress and neck ornaments—the long elfin locks—the bronze complexion of arms and breast—the piebald face of chalk, charcoal, and vermilion—where were all these to be obtained? There was no ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... there were other kinds in Elfin Land; some living in the woods, some in the sand-dunes, but those called Staalkaars, or elves of the stall, were Old Styf's particular friends. These lived in stables and among the cows. The Moss Maidens, that could do anything with leaves, even turning them into money, ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... hands dropped on the keys, and he began playing a sad and infinitely lovely movement, which crept gently over the instrument like the calm flow of moonlight over the dark earth. This was followed by a wild, elfin passage in triple time—a sort of grotesque interlude, like the dance of sprites upon the sward. Then came a swift agitato finale—a breathless, hurrying, trembling movement, descriptive of flight, and uncertainty, and vague impulsive terror, which carried us away on its rustling ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... do the lordly masters wrong By filching fair words from the shining throng Whose music haunts me as the wind a tree! Lo, when a stranger in soft Syrian glooms Shot through with sunset treads the cedar dells, And hears the breezy ring of elfin bells Far down by where the white-haired cataract booms, He, faint with sweetness caught from forest smells, Bears thence, ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... dim light on the grass, like a glowworm, and then Arndt saw the elfin mound open again; but this time the palace looked like a dim, gloomy staircase. On the top stair stood the little Hill-man, holding the glowworm lamp, and making many low bows to his new master. Arndt glanced rather fearfully down the ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... of all, when the feast was over, True Thomas, the host, called for the magic harp which he had received from the hands of the Elfin Queen. When it was brought to him a great silence fell on all the company, and everyone sat listening breathlessly while he sang to them song after ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... funniest little place, this room of Star's, the queerest, quaintest little elfin bower! It was built out from the south side of the tower, almost like a swallow's nest, only a swallow's nest has no window looking out on the blue sea. There was a little white bed in a corner, and ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... airy, elfin animal in these woods, and in all the evergreen woods of the Pacific Coast, that is more influential and interesting than even the beaver. This is the Douglas squirrel (Sciurus Douglasi). Go where ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... direction, and above lights were ascending and descending from landing to landing. I obtained a confused glimpse of vast masses of architecture—columns, arcades, flights of steps, stairways—a royal voluptuousness and elfin magnificence of construction worthy of fairyland. A negro page—the same who had before brought me the tablet from Clarimonde, and whom I instantly recognised—approached to aid me in dismounting, and the major-domo, attired in black ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... beside her as she slept, Jocelyn heard the stream ripple in the shadows like one that laughed soft but very joyously and, as he gazed up at the solitary star with eyes enraptured, this elfin laughter found its echo in ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... people say!— Would I could find that elfin seed! Then should I win your love, indeed, By being near you night and day— There is no other way, my love, There ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... forget the memory of them." In a sense every romancer is a child—such was Ludwig Tieck, such was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. But each is something more—he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows, at least, some of Elfin Land as well as of ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... curiously-wrought chain, wound under and among the bandeaux; on her wrists, plump and dimpled as a baby's, more chain-work of the like precious metal, ending in tinkling fringe that swung, glittering, to and fro, with the restless motion of the elfin hands, she never ceased to clasp and chafe and fret one with the other, while she thus stood and awaited the decision of her companions. But instead of detracting from the charm of her appearance, the seemingly unconscious gesture only heightened it. It was the overflow of the exuberant vitality ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... if yon solid mountain were all gold, And each particular tree a band of jewels, And from its womb the Niebelungen hoard With elfin wardens called me, 'Leave thy love And be our Master'—I would turn away— And know no ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... on the children stealing They stood there hand in hand, For the elfin chimes were pealing Aloud in ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... keep to the same fashions a month. I work for a doll with three daughters. Bless you, she's enough to ruin her husband!' The person of the house gave a weird little laugh here, and gave them another look out of the corners of her eyes. She had an elfin chin that was capable of great expression; and whenever she gave this look, she hitched this chin up. As if her eyes and her chin worked together on the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Karl," added Max. "I may underrate the power of this girl. As you have said, she is a little witch. But beneath her laughter there is a rare show of tenderness and strength, which at times seems pathetic and almost elfin. You are right, Karl. I will devote myself to Twonette hereafter. She is like a feather-bed in that she cannot be injured by a blow, neither can she give one; but Yolanda—ah, Karl, she is like a priceless jewel that ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... the pavements of the capital. There are no noisy and no beseeching runners; there is no sound of life, but the stillness of a catacomb, only as our footsteps fall dull on the deserted sidewalk, and a funeral troop of echoes bump their elfin heads against the dead walls and closed shutters in reply, and this is Richmond. Says a melancholy ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... old Belle, the setter, shaking herself and looking at me reproachfully. She and I had gone to sleep together on the rug, and had naturally wandered to the dream-forest where dogs and little girls hunt wild game and have strange adventures. We encountered hosts of elfin foes, and it required all the dog tactics at Belle's command to acquit herself like the lady and huntress that she was. Belle had her dreams too. We used to lie under the trees and flowers in the old garden, and I used to laugh with delight when the magnolia ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... hop-kilns like stunted and slanting spires. They look like dwarfish churches—in fact, rather like many modern churches I could mention, churches all of them small and each of them a little crooked. In this elfin atmosphere we swung round a sharp corner and half-way up a steep, white hill, and saw what looked at first like a tall, black monster against the sun. It appeared to be a dark and dreadful woman walking on wheels and waving long ears like a bat's. A second glance told me that she was ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... nor maiden may safely lay their hand on the cockatrice's den. The ballad tells us that Lady Janet was happy at last; but she paid dearly through months of sorrow and shame for those three red roses plucked in the Elfin Bower. The precise cause of Keene's forbearance it would be very difficult to explain: more than one feeling probably had to do ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... enlightened flight of the ocean, which that night was one continuous swamp of Jack-o'-lantern phosphorescence, a wild but faint luminosity mingled with stars and flashes of brilliance, the whole trooping unanimously eastward, as if in haste with elfin momentous purpose, a boundless congregation, in the sweep of a strong oceanic current. I could hear it, in my slumbrous lassitude, struggling and gurgling at the tied rudder, and making wet sloppy noises under the sheer of the poop; and I was aware that the Speranza was gliding ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... holy, rich, perfume Makes faint your roses of palest bloom; Soul, as I am, of an orient gem, My aroma's too divine for them; I'm come! but mine odorous, elfin wing Rises from earth, and that one fair thing First Love's first sigh, which ye know to be, More exquisite, and more brief ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... Uptowering like the shaft of some huge gun Through one arched rift of sky. Dark at its base With naked arms, the crew that all day long Had sweated to make ready for this night Waited their captain's word. The switchboard shone With elfin lamps of white and red, and keys Whence, at a finger's touch, that monstrous tube Moved like a creature dowered with life and will, To peer from deep to deep. Below it pulsed The clock-machine that slowly, throb by throb, Timed to the pace of the revolving ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... lovely things! And far off cities, glittering with the pomp Of spire and pennon, laugh their joyance up In the deep flood of light. Sweet comes the tone Of the touch'd lute from yonder orange bow'rs, And the shrill cymbal pours its elfin spell Into the peasant's being! A sublime And fervid mind was his, whose pencil trac'd The grandeur of this scene! Oh! matchless Claude! Around the painter's mastery thou hast thrown An halo of surpassing loveliness! Gazing on thy proud works, we mourn the curse Which 'reft ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... elfin face looked out from a low, rear window of the Candlemakers' Guildhall at the ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... to congratulate himself upon having some elfin inhabitant for his haunted wood, when, on proceeding a few paces, he found a white frill lying in the path, which had evidently fallen from the figure ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... the elfin knight Approached, him seemed that the merry sound Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height, And many feet fast thumping the hollow ground, That through the woods their echo did rebound; He nigher drew to wit what it mote be. There he a troop of ladies dancing ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... it convoyed her slowly up stairs to her own room, where it shut and locked her door. But here her real self resumed control, as she threw herself into an easy chair by the window and stared out at the desolation of December where dead leaves went whirling in elfin eddying clouds. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... indeed. The girl was fair enough in her peaked elfin way; but the fact was that he did not love her—nor anybody. He had nothing to say therefore. She waited a little, and then, with her voice sunk to a ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... With elfin stance I stride the tee And deal my orb an amorous slap In the mid-moonshine's mystery, And Puck preserves the stroke for me From foul mishap; Pan saves me from the casual pot And Dryad nymphs upbear my shot Outstripping James's (James has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 15, 1914 • Various
... to understand how deeply it has interested me to meet you," he said. "Allow me, from the bottom of my heart, to wish you success." Whereupon, before Maurice could say "damn!" he was gone again, leaving his elfin laugh behind him ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... drops still glittering in her ears; and with the movement of her coming, one small breast showing and hiding among the ragged covert of the laces. At that ambiguous hour, and coming as she did from the great silence of the forest, the man drew back from the Princess as from something elfin. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pronounced it perfect with gay little pats of quaint panniered costumes, fitting of banded sailor hats o'er white coifs, recurling of ringlets, and dainty polishing of slippers. The graceful little figures seemed elfin and fairy-like in the half sleeves and low corsages of tight bodices from which depended enormously full skirts set ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... of all sorts of humanlike creatures, such as fishermen and sailors meet and marvel at on the sea, and landsmen see outside the elfin mounds. ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... which she related to me—she surpassed Croker; the other, less versed, still knew a great deal, and told me how her own father, Jackey Mooney, had seen the fairies with his own eyes. Both of these sincerely and seriously regarded me as "gifted" or elfin- favoured, and the latter said in proof thereof, "Only listen to his voice; sure whin he spakes he'd while a burred aff a tree." For my uncanny ways made a deep impression on them, as also on ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... rangy and well-conditioned Elfin of the Young Unmarried Set, yclept Loretta, emerged into the Sunlight and hit the Concrete Path with ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... grotesque-looking stones, strangely linked together by creeping plants and ferns of curious growth. And as the Snarling Princess looked at them, it seemed to her that the stones took dwarf-like shapes, and glared about them with weird elfin faces. The princess seemed rooted to the spot. An invisible power appeared to draw her towards the group, and to attract her by a beautiful flower, whose calyx opened at her approach. Unable to resist the impulse, she stepped into the circle ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... lassie's wants when she knocks on it. Dun, or blue, or mouse-colour, is the favourite colour for fairy kine. Thus the cow which Guy of Warwick killed was dun. The Huldror in Norway have large flocks of blue kine. In Scotland runs the story of the mouse-coloured Elfin Bull. In Iceland the colour of such kine is apalgrar, dapple grey. This animal has been an object of adoration and respect from the earliest times, and we need only remind our readers of the sanctity ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... with you in a minute, papa, dear," was the response, in a sweet, childlike voice, as the speaker ran up the broad staircase with elfin grace and gaiety. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... reliefs. Carpeaux is at all events nearer to us, and if he has not the classic detachment of Clodion he substitutes for it a quality of closer attachment and more intimate appeal. He is at his best perhaps in the "Danse" of the Nouvel Opera facade, wherein his elfin-like grace and exuberant vitality animate a group carefully, and even classically composed, exhibiting skill and restraint as well as movement and fancy. Possibly his temperament gives itself too free a rein in the group of the Luxembourg Gardens, in which he has ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... heard the fingers of the prying rain busy at her windows; the ticking of the small French clock, very dull, very far away—or was it her heart? And, faintly ringing in the receiver pressed against her ear, millions of tiny stirrings, sounds like instruments of an elfin orchestra tuning, echoes as of steps passing through the halls of fairy-land, a faint ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... was, however, drawn back, and Wyllard, who lay facing the opening, could see a triangular patch of dim blue sky with a sharp sickle moon hanging low above a black fir branch. The night was clear and still, but now and then there was a faint elfin sighing among the stunted trees that died away again. He was then, while still determined, moodily discouraged, for they had seen no sign of human life during the journey, and his reason told him that he might search for years before he found the bones of the last survivor of the party. Still, ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... weary the road would be for just such a one as the fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, Dexter Allison's daughter. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... guess it seems awful foolish to you." He moved his cracked patent-leather pump in a sort of pattern on the floor. Again he looked up, this time with a freakish, an almost elfin flicker of his extravagant eyelashes. "There's something I could be real well," he said. "Only, I guess Poppa's got there ahead of me. I could be a ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... no hand hath sown Bloom white as foam upon the sea, And elfin bells to earth unknown Hold ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... leaned her fair head on his breast, and through her sobs she spoke "Oh, take me from this evil place, and from the elfin folk, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... un-Saxon it was! I only know that his mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came the intense glowing imagination of the Brontes—so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm of their predecessors? Again, I only know that their mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came this huge elfin creature, George Borrow, with his eagle head perched on his rocklike shoulders, brown-faced, white-headed, a king among men? Where did he get that remarkable face, those strange mental gifts, which place him by himself in literature? Once more, his father was a Cornishman. Yes, there is something ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... (decrease) 36, (contract) 195. Adj. little; small &c (in quantity) 32; minute, diminutive, microscopic; microzoal; inconsiderable &c (unimportant) 643; exiguous, puny, tiny, wee, petty, minikin^, miniature, pygmy, pigmy^, elfin; undersized; dwarf, dwarfed, dwarfish; spare, stunted, limited; cramp, cramped; pollard, Liliputian, dapper, pocket; portative^, portable; duodecimo^; dumpy, squat; short &c 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... tiny snake, green as the grass blades that it stirred, slipped from a pool of moonlight into a lake of shadow. Somewhere a small owl, tremulously melodious, called and called: and from the salt meadows, distantly, the elfin whistle of plover answered. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... all his energy, and fixing himself with the points of his elbows on the table, and his long, wiry hands, which looked like talons, stretched up into his elfin hair at each side of his face, while his eyes, shooting out their malignant fires, were riveted upon me to scan the effect of what he was about to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... the blue hose and the pretty bronze slippers, then, with elfin grace, she caught the edge of her skirt, and with rosy, bare feet, tripped across the floor in a graceful, gliding ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks
... tower, whither his charmed footsteps had brought him, swarming with dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the Bells. He saw them leaping, flying, dropping, pouring from the Bells without a pause. He saw them, round him on the ground; above him, in the air; clambering from him, by the ropes below; looking ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... within his narrower range as Herrick) to-day, it is his own native land only which he sees and paints: even the fairy world in which, at whatever inevitable interval, he is second to Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live in an elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity. Within that greater circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and Ariel and their fellows move, aiding or injuring mankind, and reflecting human life in a kind of unconscious parody, Herrick cannot walk: and it may ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... even a more familiar refuge of the elfin race, (if tradition is to be trusted,) is the glen of the river, or rather brook, named the Allen, which falls into the Tweed from the northward, about a quarter of a mile above the present bridge. As the streamlet finds its way behind ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... that, do what she would, she could not get them back into their box. If she chased them in the meadow they fled into the wood, and if she pursued them into the wood they dodged round trees and behind sprigs of moss, and with peals of elfin laughter scampered back ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... us as though she were seeing for the first time beings of her own kind. She spoke—and her voice was elfin distant, chimingly sweet like hidden little golden bells; filled with that tranquil, far off spirit that was part of her—as though indeed a tiny golden chime should ring out from the silences, speak for them, find tongues for them. The words were hesitating, ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... so, monsieur the colonel, because I myself have something to say." The little elfin voice disregarded Wachique and the page. They were part of the furniture of the room, and did not ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek for shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... well as its appearance. Its movements, its individuality, its posing as a little furry mass of concealed mysteries, its elfin-like elusiveness, all combined to justify its name; and a subtle painter might have pictured it as a wisp of floating smoke, the fire below betraying itself at ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... him the Puritan, the man of the world, and the vagabond. There was something too of the obsolete soldier of fortune, with the cocked and feathered hat, worn audaciously on one side. There was also a touch of the elfin, the uncanny—the mysterious charm that belongs to the borderland between the real and the unreal world—the element so conspicuous and so indefinable in the art of Hawthorne. Writers so different as Defoe, Cooper, Poe, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... question he asked and the answer he received were heard only by the elfin sprites dancing in the brook beside them, so we will leave it to those fairies to tell if they choose. Suffice it to say it was such as filled his heart so full of happiness it could no longer hold a secret, and there, where the moonlight fell in little ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... to Lea and wiped her face clean of dirt and perspiration. The dark shadows under her eyes were almost black now and her elfin face seemed even thinner. But she was alive—that was ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... night. In the morning, when Laird Macharg went to the door, he found standing against one of the pilasters a piece of black ship oak, rudely fashioned into something like human form, and which skilful people declared would have been clothed with seeming flesh and blood, and palmed upon him by elfin adroitness for his wife, had he admitted his visitants. A synod of wise men and women sat upon the woman of timber, and she was finally ordered to be devoured by fire, and that in the open air. A fire ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... observation, viewing the matter at close range, that nearly always fat, like old age or a thief in the dark, steals upon one unawares. I take my own case. As a youngster and on through my teens and into my early twenties—ah, those romping elfin twenties!—I was, in outline, what might be termed dwindly, not to say slimmish. Those who have known me in my latter years might be loath to believe it, but one of my boyhood nick-names—I had several, and none of them was ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... of the last descendant, Jean. She bore the name of the Rutherfords, but she was the daughter of their trembling wives. At the first she was not wholly without charm. Neighbours recalled in her, as a child, a strain of elfin wilfulness, gentle little mutinies, sad little gaieties, even a morning gleam of beauty that was not to be fulfilled. She withered in the growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her mothers) came to her maturity depressed, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... introductions and appendices to Scott's works are stored with material for novels of terror. The notes to Marmion, for instance, contain references to a necromantic priest whose story "much resembles that of Ambrosio in the Monk," to an "Elfin" warrior and to a chest of treasure jealously guarded for a century by the Devil in the likeness of a huntsman. In The Lady of the Lake there is a note on the ancient legend of the Phantom Sire, in Rokeby there is an allusion to the Demon Frigate wandering under a ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... natural connotation, than the one which includes these cypresses of Monterey. Yet this same mordant area holds Point Lobos, a headland which displays in moss and lichens all the minute delicacy of a gleeful, elfin world. I challenge the earth to produce a region more beautiful, yet also more gay and debonair in natural connotation, than the one which enfolds San Francisco. For here the water presents gorgeous, plastic color, alternating ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... once—-if not with light regard I read aright that gifted bard (Him whose school above the rest His loveliest Elfin Queen has blest)— One, only one, unrivalled fair Might hope the magic girdle wear, At solemn tourney hung on high, The wish of each love-darting eye; Lo! to each other nymph in turn applied, As if, in air unseen, some hovering hand, Some chaste and angel ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... finger-tip caress in rhythmic vibrations that became whisperings and rustlings and mutterings of sound—but of sound so different; so elusively thin that it was shimmeringly sibilant; so mellow that it was maddening sweet, piping like an elfin horn, which last was just what Bassett decided would be like a peal from some bell of the gods reaching earthward from ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... or the chances of the Carlist war. It was all wonderful. It had seemed perfect. And yet—and yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some straying angel—some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had ever realised. She cared for him—how could he doubt it? But was the indefinable, indispensable ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... language to the supposed intelligence of the seaman, the elfin youth stood listening with intense eagerness and expectation as the other went into the passage, and, by sundry kicks and bumps against wooden walls, gave evidence that he found the channel intricate. ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... the beach of sand, Where the water bounds the elfin land; Thou shalt watch the oozy brine Till the sturgeon leaps in the ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... I be in the dust ere then, I know where you will be." And shouldering suddenly his spear He faded like some elfin fear, Where the tall pines ran up, tier ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... potency. That thus ye rest, in sweet wood-hardiness, Ready to learn of all and utter naught? What breath may move ye, or what breeze invite To odorous hot lendings of the heart? What wind-but all the winds are yet afar, And e'en the little tricksy zephyr sprites, That fleet before them, like their elfin locks, Have lagged in sleep, nor stir nor waken yet To pluck the robe ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... of Erceldoun is not dead, but that he is sleeping beneath the Eildon Hills, in Scotland. One day, he met with a lady of elfin race beneath the Eildon tree, and she led him to an under-ground region, where he remained for seven years. He then revisited the earth, but bound himself to return when summoned. One day, when he was making merry with his friends, ...
— 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.
... looking younger, if possible, than when he had first known her. Time, experience, even the pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on that alabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she had accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an elfin youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly elusive than when she had worn ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... dreamed your face, one night, when Heaven seemed resting, Against the troubled fever of the earth; I dreamed that vivid throated birds were nesting, In trees that shook with elfin-hearted mirth. I dreamed that star-like purple flowers were springing A-throb with perfume all about the place, And that there was a far-off sound of singing— ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... maun hold your tongue, Whatever ye may hear or see; For if ye speak word in Elfin land Ye'll ne'er get ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... the path wound through a forest of fir, where a wood wind wove its murmurous spell and a wood brook dimpled pellucidly among the shadows—the dear, companionable, elfin shadows—that lurked under the low growing boughs. Along the edges of that winding path grew banks of velvet green moss, starred with clusters of pigeon berries. Pigeon berries are not to be eaten. They are woolly, tasteless things. But they are to be looked at in their glowing scarlet. ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... delighted with Peveril, though there is too much of the dwarfs and the elfie. Scott cannot deny himself one of these spirits in some shape or other; I hope that we shall find that this elfin page, who has the power of shrinking or expanding, as it seems, to suit the occasion, is made really necessary to the story. I think the dwarf more allowable and better drawn than the page, true to history, and consistent; but Finella ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... runs in there is a wide triangular spread, and this, gentle friends, is Finn Park, named for a New York boy who was killed in France. The name reminded us also of Elfin Finn, the somewhat complacent stage child who poses for chic costumes in Vogue. We were wondering which was a more hazardous bringing up for a small girl, living on Thompson Street or posing for a fashion magazine. ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... look back upon it, the life here has been all a ballad from first to last. Like the elfin Tam Lin, ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood 10 To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... saw her as plainly as I see you now: a girl in a red cloak, with such an elfin face I shall never forget it; such small piercing black eyes; such black eyebrows, depressed towards the nose, and raised high towards the temples, giving such an eldritch, mischievous, even dangerous expression to the whole dark countenance; and ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... swung in Elfin towers, Wild morning-glories light the tangled ways, And, like the rosy rockets of the Fays, Burns the sloped ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... ear-drops still glittering in her ears; and with the movement of her coming, one small breast showing and hiding among the ragged covert of the laces. At that ambiguous hour, and coming as she did from the great silence of the forest, the man drew back from the Princess as from something elfin. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eager, hungry and noisy; and over all, with moonlight calmness and steadiness, Mary Pitkin ruled and presided, dispensing to each his portion in due season, while Diana, restless and mischievous as a sprite, seemed to be possessed with an elfin spirit of drollery, venting itself in sundry little tricks and antics which drew ready laughs from the boys and reproving glances from the deacon. For the deacon was that night in one of his severest humors. As Biah Carter afterwards ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... lips with a small red triangle of tongue, and taught English—commercial college English—in a bombastic voice of finicky correctness, and always smelled of cigar smoke. An active young Jewish New-Yorker of wonderful black hair, elfin face, tilted hat, and smart clothes, who did something on the side in real estate. Finally, a thin widow, who was so busy and matter-of-fact that she was no more individualized than a street-car. Any one of them was considered competent to teach any "line," and among them they ground out instruction ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... speckled toad hopped and hobbled and scrambled from their path; a tiny snake, green as the grass blades that it stirred, slipped from a pool of moonlight into a lake of shadow. Somewhere a small owl, tremulously melodious, called and called: and from the salt meadows, distantly, the elfin whistle of plover answered. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... produce a strip of country more beautiful, also more poignant and catastrophic in natural connotation, than the one which includes these cypresses of Monterey. Yet this same mordant area holds Point Lobos, a headland which displays in moss and lichens all the minute delicacy of a gleeful, elfin world. I challenge the earth to produce a region more beautiful, yet also more gay and debonair in natural connotation, than the one which enfolds San Francisco. For here the water presents gorgeous, plastic color, alternating blue and gold. Here Mount Tamalpais lifts its long straight slopes out ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... like it. Many a time the little girl, who looked up to and admired the big boy who could compel her to anything when he was so minded, would, for her own ends, work on his sense of responsibility, taking an elfin ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... British song Scorned not such legends to prolong: They gleam through Spenser's elfin dream, And mix in Milton's heavenly theme; And Dryden, in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald king and court Bade him toil on, to make them sport; Demanded for their niggard pay, Fit for their ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... in the companion bed belonged of right to the moonlight, for it was of quite elfin-like beauty. The child had dropped her cover on the floor, and the moonlight looked in at the naked little limbs. Presently she opened her eyes and looked at the moonlight that ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... youth with the slowness of his labors and the little progress he had made since she last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall, and condemned, like herself, to reproduce the past and bring ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... like the girl. Helen was a good, honest woman who liked everything that was good and honest. Ellice Brand might be good and honest, but there was something about the girl that was beyond Helen's ken. She was so elfin, so gipsy-like, so different from most girls Helen ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... the moonlight!" looking up thoughtfully to the sky and stars—then his hands dropped on the keys, and he began playing a sad and infinitely lovely movement, which crept gently over the instrument like the calm flow of moonlight over the dark earth. This was followed by a wild, elfin passage in triple time—a sort of grotesque interlude, like the dance of sprites upon the sward. Then came a swift agitato finale—a breathless, hurrying, trembling movement, descriptive of flight, and uncertainty, and vague impulsive terror, which carried ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... ragged overall which made the only garment of the men he had hitherto seen, the dress of this person was characterized by all the trappings of Calabrian bravery. Upon his raven hair, the glossy curls of which made a notable contrast to the matted and elfin locks of the savages around, was placed a cloth cap with a gold tassel that hung down to his shoulder; his mustaches were trimmed with care, and a silk kerchief of gay lines was twisted round a well-shaped but sinewy throat; a short jacket of rough cloth was decorated ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the city's tumult and the beat Of hurrying feet, Those whom the god loves hear Pan's pipe, insistent, clear; Echoes of elfin laughter, high and sweet; Catch in the sparrows' cries Those tinkling melodies That sing where brooklets meet, And the wood's glamour ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... mine eye, with careless glance, Has gallop'd o'er some old romance, Of speaking birds, and steeds with wings, Giants and dwarfs, and fiends, and kings: Beyond the rest, with more attentive care, I've loved to read of elfin-favor'd fair— How if she longed for aught beneath the sky, And suffered to escape one votive sigh, Wafted along on viewless pinions airy, It kid itself obsequious at her feet: Such things I thought we might not hope to meet, Save in the dear delicious ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... "Whaur?" The lassie's elfin face looked out from a low, rear window of the Candlemakers' Guildhall at the top of ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... not with light regard I read aright that gifted bard (Him whose school above the rest His loveliest Elfin Queen has blest)— One, only one, unrivalled fair Might hope the magic girdle wear, At solemn tourney hung on high, The wish of each love-darting eye; Lo! to each other nymph in turn applied, As if, in air unseen, some hovering hand, Some chaste and angel friend to virgin fame, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... winding streets. So that, entering it, one seems to have stepped suddenly into some such fairy town as exists in the pages of Grimm or Hans Andersen; and, half ashamed, one peers curiously at the dwellers in this goblin town, as though expecting to find that they have pointed ears and narrow elfin feet. They never seem to move about, and, sitting at almost every doorstep, watch one intently from weird nooks and crannies. Hurry and bustle are here unknown, and though they will reply to you in the best of French, yet to each other ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... the earth. Strangely must have sounded the horns of the Northern Elfland, "faintly blowing" in the woods of Hellas, as Oberon and his grotesque court glanced along, "with bit and bridle ringing," to bless the nuptials of Theseus with the bouncing Amazon. Strangely must have looked the elfin footprints in the Attic green. Across this Shakspearean plank, laid between Olympus and Asgard, or more strictly Alfheim, we gladly pass from the sunny realm of Zeus into that of his Northern counterpart, Odin, who ought to be dearer and more familiar to his descendants ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... in dew! Flower in dew! Whisper to me thy dreams, thine own. Does in them lie the same strange air The same wonderful elfin air, As in mine own? Are they filled with whispers and sobbing and sighing Amid radiance slumbering and fragrances dying, Amid trembling ringing, amid rising singing: In ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... Remon's face and, laughing with such bright and elfin mirth as never any other woman showed, thought Wycherley, she broke into another song. She would have spared Mr. Wycherley that had she but known him to be within earshot. . . . Oh, it was only Lady ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... through in good shape, making rampant growths and carrying a heavy crop. These include: 2 Walters, 4 O.K. Heart, 1 Canoka, 1 Slioka, 1 Rover, 2 Calendar, 1 Westoka, 1 Nursoka, 1 Aloka, 1 Symoka, 15 select unnamed bearing seedlings, yet on trial. All are promising. Also we have three of the Elfin paper shell heartnut hybrids. I have failed to find a good pollinator for these Elfins, so they are shy croppers, although producing plenty of the female blooms. All of the above trees are 6 inches in diameter and up ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... become small &c (decrease) 36, (contract) 195. Adj. little; small &c (in quantity) 32; minute, diminutive, microscopic; microzoal; inconsiderable &c (unimportant) 643; exiguous, puny, tiny, wee, petty, minikin^, miniature, pygmy, pigmy^, elfin; undersized; dwarf, dwarfed, dwarfish; spare, stunted, limited; cramp, cramped; pollard, Liliputian, dapper, pocket; portative^, portable; duodecimo^; dumpy, squat; short &c 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... round to the stables, in which stood ten fine horses. These, the count ordered to be removed at once to a place which he called the Elfin Grotto, giving instructions that the three which were considered to be the fleetest were to be saddled and bridled ready for instant use, Francesca's saddle being required for one of them. He also hunted out Giaccomo—who looked a smart honest fellow enough—and ordered him to go with the ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... the haunt of the spirits of the past; no human voice, no human footstep, was heard; and the stranger instinctively pressed the hand he held more tightly; for he was not sure but that he was standing on the boundary of dream-land, and some elfin maiden had reached him her hand to lure him into her mountain, where he should live with her forever. But the illusion was of brief duration; for Aasa's thoughts had taken a widely different course; it was but seldom she had found herself under the necessity of ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the play that I have stolen. For all the many pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in it—dramatic inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like—you must bless the original author: of these things I have only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic conscience that makes a man of me and (incidentally) ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... other men to look at him. They followed his gaze, which passed across them to the main rigging, and saw what he saw, a brown hand and arm, muscular and wet, being joined from overside by a second brown hand and arm. A head followed, thatched with long elfin locks, and then a face, with roguish black eyes, lined with the marks of ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... I know the joys that ring Through the green deeps of leafy spring; I know the elfin cups and domes That are their ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... all, when the feast was over, True Thomas, the host, called for the magic harp which he had received from the hands of the Elfin Queen. When it was brought to him a great silence fell on all the company, and everyone sat listening breathlessly while he sang to them song ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... onward to its close, through heat, dust, thirst, and relentlessly rapid marching. In the late afternoon occurred a monstrous piling up of thunder clouds, a whistling of wind, and a great downpour of rain. It beat down the wheat and pattered like elfin bullets on the forest leaves. Through this fusillade the army came down to the west fork of the Shenandoah. Pioneers laid a bridge of wagons, and, brigade by brigade, the army crossed. High on the bank in the loud wind and dashing rain, Jackson on Little Sorrel ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... her room she heard the fingers of the prying rain busy at her windows; the ticking of the small French clock, very dull, very far away—or was it her heart? And, faintly ringing in the receiver pressed against her ear, millions of tiny stirrings, sounds like instruments of an elfin orchestra tuning, echoes as of steps passing through the halls of fairy-land, a faint confusion ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... life—into this little maid of eleven years old. She grew quite womanly, as it were; tried to help her mother in a thousand little ways, and especially by her own solitary branch of feminine industry—poor darling! She set on a pair of the daintiest elfin socks that ever were knitted. I found them, years after—one finished, one with the needles (all rusty) stuck through the fine worsted ball, just as the child had laid it out of ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... carried upon his shoulder a ridiculous pair of elfin skates, was much too small a boy, his brother thought, to embark upon the ice, wherefore he stood like a sentinel upon the shore and drummed and ate incessantly, until an orange catapulted from an overcrowded pocket, when he ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... Dream" is the most wonderful fairy story in the world, but Shakespeare did not create it out of hand; he found the fairy part of it in the traditions of the country people. One of his most intelligent students says: "He founded his elfin world on the prettiest of the people's traditions, and has clothed it in the ever-living flower ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... being! No storms, no clouds, in thy blue sky foreseeing, Play on, play on, My elfin John! Toss the light ball, bestride the stick,— (I knew so many cakes would make him sick!) With fancies buoyant as the thistle-down, Prompting the face grotesque, and antic brisk, With many a lamb-like frisk! (He's got the scissors snipping at ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... (April) touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... helm of gold is a bonny thing, But I dare not tread the elfin ring." Gaily they ...
— The Serpent Knight - and other ballads - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... possessions were known as the Honour of Peverel. In 1155 the younger Peverel was disinherited for poisoning the earl of Chester, and his estates forfeited to the crown. Few Englishmen retained estates of any importance after the Conquest, but one, Elfin, an under-tenant of Henry de Ferrers, not only held a considerable property but was the ancestor of the Derbyshire family of Brailsford. The families of Shirley and Gresley can also boast an ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... chins as they sat and watched and listened with their pointed ears lifted alertly, watching with soft gray eyes, or the way they handled objects with their little four-fingered hands. They were so remarkably human-like in their elfin way that the colonists couldn't help but be ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... shrouded, sad, and still ... Stillness, fogged brakes, and fog on high. Only in me the waters cry Who mourn the hours now slipped for ever, Hours of boding, joy, and fever, When we loved, by chance beguiled, I a boy and you a child— Child! but with an angel's air, Astonished, eager, unaware, Or elfin's, wandering with a grace Foreign to any fireside race, And with a gaiety unknown In the light feet and hair backblown, And with a sadness yet more strange, In meagre cheeks which knew to change Or faint or fired more swift than sight, And forlorn hands and lips pressed white, And fragile ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... all! The true shamrock is the delicate little wood-sorrel, Oxalis acetosella, which has a beautifully formed three-split or trefoil leaf of the most vivid green colour, and a white flower like that of a geranium. It is called "fairy-bell" by the Welsh, and was believed to ring chimes for the elfin folk. It was also greatly esteemed for its acid flavour and for various reputed medicinal and magical properties by the Druids and among the early inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland. Pliny says it never shelters a snake, and is an antidote to ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... realized how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... Must dive in storm-vext seas, if but one pearl Of art or beauty therefrom may be wrung. No pure-browed pensive nymph his Muse shall be, An amazon of thought with sovereign eyes, Whose kiss was poison, man-brained, worldly-wise, Inspired that elfin, delicate harmony. Rich gain for us! But with him is it well? The poet who must ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... and his elfin errand boy (in the "Old Curiosity Shop"), enjoying the agonies of Sampson Brass as he essays to smoke a long churchwarden. Behold Quilp upon his back taunting the large fierce dog with hideous grimaces, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... was agreed; and the Elfin King went to a golden chest whence he took a phial that was filled with a blood-red liquor. And with this liquor he anointed the ears and the eyelids, the nostrils, the lips, and the finger-tips of the bodies of Burd Helen's two brothers that lay as ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... mortal eyes see not the goblin train Whose bells sound faintly on the passer's ear,— Who dares attempt a secret sight to gain Feels the sharp prick of many an elfin spear, And hears, too late, the low, malicious jeer, As long thorn-javelins his body gore, Until, defeated, breathless, bruised, and sore, He turns him from the haunted ground to flee, And murmurs low, ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... thought they would wander along the brink of the stream, and in doing this they discovered all sorts of wonderful things in what Florence called the Fairy Dell: moss-grown rocks from which sprung tiny bell-shaped flowers; a circle of wee pink toadstools, which indeed seemed fit for the elfin folk; a wild grapevine with a most delightfully arranged swing on which the two girls "teetered" away in great joy; shining pebbles, bits of rose-colored quartz, a forest of plumy ferns, and all such like things, over which the city child exclaimed ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... beneath a knotted look, That held as if for grain the summing sieve. Her judge now brightened without pause, as wakes Our homely daylight after dread of spells. Lips sugared to let loose the little snakes Of slimy lustres ringing elfin bells About a story of the naked flesh, Intending but to put some garment on, Should learn, that in the subject they enmesh, A traitor lurks and will be known anon. Delusion heating pricks the torpid doubt, Stationed for index down an ancient ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... kingfisher broods, A sentinel among the solitudes; And faints the breeze beneath the heavy sky, Nor bends the bulrush, as it loiters by Thro' long green walls of forest trees, that throw Unwavering shadows in the flood below; And droops from topmost boughs (like garlands dight By elfin hands) the gaudy parasite: Crowning the wave with flow'rs; and high above, The tall acacia moves, or seems to move Its feathery foliage in the enamor'd air, That seems, tho' all unheard, to linger there: Might'st fancy all, the earth, the air, the stream, Still unawaken'd from Creation's ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... and saddle Bevis! I cannot rest. The air must cool my brow. I fain would ride to view the elfin scene of chivalry of which we heard to-night. Rouse none from their slumbers, for I would not have those prating knaves know that I could credit so wild a tale as ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... lights were ascending and descending from landing to landing. I obtained a confused glimpse of vast masses of architecture—columns, arcades, flights of steps, stairways—a royal voluptuousness and elfin magnificence of construction worthy of fairyland. A negro page—the same who had before brought me the tablet from Clarimonde, and whom I instantly recognised—approached to aid me in dismounting, and the major-domo, attired in black velvet with a gold chain about his neck, advanced ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... it expedient to escape detection by assuming invisibility, and for this object sought the assistance of certain plants, such as the fern-seed[17]. In Sweden, hazel-nuts were supposed to have the power of making invisible, and it may be remembered how in one of Andersen's stories the elfin princess has the faculty of vanishing at will, by putting a wand in her mouth.[18] But these were not the only plants supposed to confer invisibility, for German folk-lore tells us how the far-famed luck-flower was endowed with the same wonderful property; ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... the ten-year-old twins, in a somersault mood, Have measured their length from the barn to the wood. A dozen times, yes, or it may be a score, Till their cheeks are as red as the roses, and more; Then the elfin of twelve and the boy of fifteen, Are pelting each other with snowballs so keen, That we, who are older, forget to be staid, {245} And shout, each with each, as the youngsters, arrayed In feathery garments, press on or retreat, Determined to win, nor acknowledge defeat, ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... the west bank both above and below Johnsonville, one of the Union army's bases of supplies and a railway terminus, thus blockading the water approach and isolating there eight transports, with barges, and three light-draughts, the Key West, Elfin, and Tawah. Nevertheless, the three boats went down and engaged the lower battery, and though they found it too strong for them they retook one of the transports. Meantime Shirk had telegraphed the Admiral and Fitch, and the latter came to his assistance ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... Hannah Croneen was seen approaching. Hannah wore her bedgown and her short blue serge petticoat; her legs and feet were bare; the breezes had caught up her short gray locks, and were tossing them wildly about. She looked very elfin and queer ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... paynim foe Armed with fate the mighty blow: For when he fell, the Elfin queen, All in secret and unseen, O'er the fainting hero threw Her mantle of ambrosial blue, And bade her spirits bear him far, In Merlin's agate-axled car, To her green isle's enamelled steep, Far in the navel of the deep. O'er his wounds she sprinkled ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to herself, the serpent now began To change; her elfin blood in madness ran, Her mouth foam'd, and the grass, therewith besprent, Wither'd at dew so sweet and virulent; Her eyes in torture fix'd, and anguish drear, Hot, glaz'd, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear, Flash'd phosphor and sharp sparks, without ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... opened the pantry-door and put an end to this mysterious conversation, which had already so affected Miss Prissy, that, in the eagerness of her interest, she had rubbed up her cap border and ribbon into rather an elfin and goblin style, as if they had been ruffled up by a breeze from the land of spirits; and she flew around for a few moments in a state of great nervous agitation, upsetting dishes, knocking down plates, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... miss in looking at her. But even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow, finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And from the very outset, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... I to the festival Thou holdest in the regions of romance, Where dragons lurk and elfin spirits dance, And pearls lie hid within each rose petal. What magic changes in life's crystal ball Shall thus transform earth's dullness at thy glance! Ride then the wind, a feather for thy lance, A pool thy sea, thy heaven ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... throng, She led the dancing group along Through tangled brakes and fretted bowers, Where grew the richest, rarest flowers, That wooed the bee to banquet there, Or yielded sweets to Summer air. But she who moved with elfin pace, And taught the infant throng to play, Raised to heaven her cherub face, While that bright celestial ray, Which halos the throne of glory round, Illumed her azure, orient eye, That seemed to penetrate ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... you know, that all the millions of pins which are lost every year are picked up by fairies and hammered out on elfin anvils into notes of music. There are some who say that this statement must be received with caution, although they admit that the half and quarter notes do bear a ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... the sweet, bewildered murmur of purple martins grew into sustained melody; thrush and mocking bird, thrasher and cardinal, sang from every leafy slope; and through the rushing music of bird and pouring waterfall the fairy drumming of the cock-o'-the-pines rang out in endless, elfin reveille. ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... quietly; but this outlandish belief in fairies was altogether an overtask for Yankee credulity. As might have been expected, the little strangers, unable to breathe in an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, soon took their leave, shaking off the dust of their elfin feet as a testimony against an unbelieving generation. It was, indeed, said that certain rude fellows from the Bay State pulled away a board from the ceiling and disclosed to view the fairies in the shape of the landlady's three slatternly daughters. But the reader ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sly, elfin grin crept over the little con-man's face. "Well, at any rate, I'm glad they sent you over," he said weakly. "Nothing like a good lawyer ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... the colonel, because I myself have something to say." The little elfin voice disregarded Wachique and the page. They were part of the furniture of the room, and did not count ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... was, after she was rolled in the blankets and fixed comfortably for sight seeing! The breezes fiddled through the twigs, making elfin music, and the tree-house swayed gently. It was too beautiful to sleep through, and Migwan lay awake hour after hour in wonder and delight, watching the moon steer her placid course across the sky. She saw Jupiter culminate and incline to westward; saw Arcturus sink behind ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... long, triangular nails curved over the fingertips like the claws of a cat. They wore skin-tight clothes of some metallic silky stuff, and long flowing gleaming silvery capes. They looked unearthly, elfin and strange, and in their own ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the morn, When equipped with spear and shield, Oberon, the elfin-born, Winding on his wizard horn, Calls the fairies to the field— ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... fields the sky shone like blue glass, and across the east were two long vermilion clouds. Behind the black hill the sun had shouldered up, molten, and the shadow of Vessons, standing monkey-like on the lowest bar of the gate, lay on the stretch of wet clover behind him—a purple, elfin creature, gifted with a prehensile dignity. The cows did not appear after his first call. He lifted his head and called again in a high plaintive tone, as one reasons with a fretful child. 'Come o-on, come o-on!' Then he sank into the landscape again. After an interval, ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... whose frame-work was of shining stones, and whose firm, but slender bars, were of purest gold.—"Favoured mortal!" (the speaker was beside me)—"favoured beyond even thine own conception, know that thou art permitted to behold the Elfin Paradise—the true, the veritable Fairy Land. Pollute it not by the tone of mortal speech; to us are thy thoughts not unknown, and partially are we permitted to gratify thy desire for information. Thinkest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... buzzing and a rumbling there is in the elfin hill," said one of the lizards; "I have not been able to close my eyes for two nights on account of the noise; I might just as well have had the toothache, for that ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... of the metropolis is obtained, in a clear day, from the gallery at the foot of the lantern. The diminutive appearance of the passengers and other objects beneath is extremely amusing, and resembles the Elfin Panorama of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... unconventionally in the bass under elaborate arpeggiations in the right hand. The coda, as in the other sonata, is simply a strong passage of climax. Arthur's supernatural nature doubtless suggested the second movement, with its elfin airs, its flibbertigibbet virtuosity, and its magic of color. The third movement might have been inspired by Tennyson's version of Arthur's farewell to Guinevere, it is such a rich fabric of grief. The finale seems to me to picture ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... or mouse-colour, is the favourite colour for fairy kine. Thus the cow which Guy of Warwick killed was dun. The Huldror in Norway have large flocks of blue kine. In Scotland runs the story of the mouse-coloured Elfin Bull. In Iceland the colour of such kine is apalgrar, dapple grey. This animal has been an object of adoration and respect from the earliest times, and we need only remind our readers of the sanctity of cows and bulls among the Indians and Egyptians, of 'the Golden Calf' ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... sail is on the wide And moving waters, and it draweth nigh Like a sea-cloud. The elfin billows fly Before it, in their armories enthrall'd Of radiant and moon-breasted emerald; And many is the mariner that sees The lone boat in the melancholy breeze, Waving her snowy canvass, and anon Their stately vessel with a gallant run Crowds by in all her glory; but the cheer ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... in the tiny rhythm of an elfin bass-drum. "O.S. O.S." Click. Click. Click-click-click. Mechanically responsive to his office he answered, and for a moment was concerned with some message about a local freight. When he raised his face again, Miss Van Arsdale read there a ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... for big flights and sweeping outlooks, had up to now neglected. They found a miniature cascade that purled over a mossy log; a cave, so small and clean and regular that it seemed not the work of the big Nature about them, but of delicate, elfin hands; and then, on the edge of forest and grass, a flower, a trembling white chalice upon the virginal bosom of which one small touch of color burned like a flame. And thus, little step after little step, ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... see their prayers ascending like thin gold chains, for that was but an elfin fancy, but she imagined clear in her new soul the seraphs passing in the ways of Paradise, and the angels changing guard to watch the World ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... "Collegians" has not realized all the perils of the windy night and the stormy sea with trepidation and horror scarcely surpassed by the occupants of the little craft tossing amid the boiling breakers—Eily, the hapless runaway, Danny, the elfin hunchback, and Hardress, the conscience-stricken victim of conflicting thoughts and passionate impulses? How much more tragic the finding of the dead body of Eily, the "pride of Garryowen," since it occurs on the hunting ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... element of life, and which might well follow the time of turmoil in Shelley's career. May not this poem have been his self-vindication as exhibiting what he might have become had he not followed the dictates of his heart? "Pecksie" and the "Elfin Knight" were the names which still stand written at the end of the first journal, ending with Claire's departure. Mary added some useful receipts for future use. One is: "A tablespoonful of the spirit of aniseed, with a small quantity of spermaceti;" to which ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... and I go in from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn to deal with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in connecting up, minute voices in Folkestone and Dover and London call to one another and are submerged by buzzings and throbbings. Then in elfin tones the real message comes through: "Bleriot has crossed the Channel.... An article ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... find my way by strange means back to those hazy fields that all poets know, wherein stand small mysterious cottages through whose windows, looking westwards, you may see the fields of men, and looking eastwards see glittering elfin mountains, tipped with snow, going range on range into the region of Myth, and beyond it into the kingdom of Fantasy, which pertain to the ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... the tops of the trees, from which the call of the red-headed woodpecker sounded as faint as the memory of a sound and the bark of the squirrels was elfin-thin. A hot crowded land, crammed with undergrowth and overgrowth wherever a woodland stood; and around every woodland dense cornfields; or, denser still, the leagues of swaying hemp. The smell of this now lay heavy on the air, seeming to be dragged hither ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... favourable mention of the 'Fairy Legends' in the collected edition of the 'Waverley Novels' published in 1830. In a note on Fairy Superstitions to Chapter XI. of 'Rob Roy,' speaking of the elfin traditions peculiar to the wild scenery where Avon Dhu or the River Forth has its birth, he observes: "The opinions entertained about these beings are much the same with those of the Irish, so exquisitely well narrated by Mr. Crofton Croker." Again, in his 'Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft,' ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... indulgence of a gorgeous taste in colouring and costume. It represented Thomas the Rhymer in Fairyland, at the moment when its glamour is falling from his eyes, when its magic lustre is dying out on all that glittering pageantry and the elfin is fading to a gnome. The handsome wizard turns from a crowd of phantom shapes, half lovely, half grotesque—for their change is even now in progress—to look wistfully and appealingly ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... thus beside her as she slept, Jocelyn heard the stream ripple in the shadows like one that laughed soft but very joyously and, as he gazed up at the solitary star with eyes enraptured, this elfin laughter found ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Geraldine had gained in strength, and though still white, and with features too large for her face, startlingly searching grey eyes, and brows that looked strangely thick, dark, and straight, in contrast with the pencilled arches belonging to all the rest, she was less weird and elfin-like than when she had been three inches shorter, and dressed more childishly. As Edgar said, she was less Riquet with a tuft than the good fairy godmother, and her twin sisters might have been her princess-wards, so far did they tower above her—straight as fir-trees, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the subject of my reflections. I had been congratulating myself on the possession of the buffalo-robe. That would go far towards the disguise; but other articles were wanting to complete my costume. The leggings and moccasins—the plumed head-dress and neck ornaments—the long elfin locks—the bronze complexion of arms and breast—the piebald face of chalk, charcoal, and vermilion—where were all these to be obtained? There was no costumerie ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... have had good reason to execrate the wearer of the wreath; for she alone, not Lienhard, was the sole cause of her misfortune. Her prayer on the rope that the saints would destroy the hated child, and the idea which then occupied her mind, that she was really a grown maiden, whose elfin delicacy of figure was due to her being one of the fays or elves mentioned in the fairy tales, had made a deep impression ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... himself out; but then he stood still for a minute on the terrace, arrested by the exquisite shock of the wonderful early air: the wonderful light, keen air, a fabric woven of elfin filaments, the breathings of green lives: an aether distilled of secret essences, in the night, by the earth and the sea,—for there was the sea's tang, as well as the earth's balm, there was the bitter-sweet of the sea ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... Rockett's, the foot of Richmond. A few minutes' walk and we tread the pavements of the capital. There are no noisy and no beseeching runners; there is no sound of life, but the stillness of a catacomb, only as our footsteps fall dull on the deserted sidewalk, and a funeral troop of echoes bump their elfin heads against the dead walls and closed shutters in reply, and this is Richmond. Says a melancholy voice: "And this ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... glance All coming time she saw. A weird romance Wherein she traced great peoples yet unborn, New springing cycles, strange lands cleft with tarn Or pleasant vale, and green plains stretching far, And quiet bays, and many a shingly bar, And troubled seas, with bitter perils past, And elfin shapes that jeering flitted fast With scornful faces, leering lips that smiled, Or bursts of laughter through that vision wild. Uncertain, then, she stood, half loth to turn. "Against yon deepening sky, how dimly burn The stars, new-lit. Dear home, thou art so fair!" ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... brought forth a torment of mosquitoes. As day died, the woods awoke to sounds of bird and insect life; strange, raucous calls pealed forth, some familiar, others strange and unaccustomed. There were thin whistlings, hoarse grunts and harsh cacklings, high-pitched elfin laughter. Moving bodies disturbed the leaves overhead; from all sides came the rustle and stir of unseen creatures; sudden disputations were followed by startled silences. Sitting there in the dark, bedeviled by a pest of insects, mocked at by these mysterious ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... When we took them all three back to Torquay with us, squashed in anyhow, she talked about running over to Paris and buying a balloon or an aeroplane! We came by way of the Buckland Chase, as it is called—private property; and an elfin glen of beauty, for mile after mile, with the Dart singing below, and the Lover's Leap so close that it seemed painfully realistic—especially after the adventure of the car which leaped ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... she cried, "thou young Rhine-sprite, thou water-imp, run to the wood for another bundle of fagots! Away, haste thee, or I 'll give thee back to thy elfin kinsfolk, who are ever ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... hold. I found dear old Belle, the setter, shaking herself and looking at me reproachfully. She and I had gone to sleep together on the rug, and had naturally wandered to the dream-forest where dogs and little girls hunt wild game and have strange adventures. We encountered hosts of elfin foes, and it required all the dog tactics at Belle's command to acquit herself like the lady and huntress that she was. Belle had her dreams too. We used to lie under the trees and flowers in the old garden, and ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... hath sown Bloom white as foam upon the sea, And elfin bells to earth unknown Hold ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... that I can follow. I cannot leave my hold upon the rocks and enter the place to which their late and aerial spirits are native. It is plain the earth is not a solid body. As their bodies, moving over the bright vacuity, grow unsubstantial and elfin with distance, and they approach that line where the surf glimmers athwart the radiant void, I have a sudden fear that they may vanish quite, and only their laughter come at me mockingly from the near invisible air. They will have gone back ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Rivers May—I'm not an elfin prince,' said the boy, with a moment's hurt feeling. 'Papa sent me.' By that time the boy was fast in his grandfather's embrace, and was only enough released to give him space to answer ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the transition to a type of tale wherein one special characteristic of elfin gifts is presented. For in this case, when the mannikin asked the midwife what her charge was, she modestly replied: "Oh, nothing; the little trouble I have had does not call for any payment." "Now then, lift up thy ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... Thomas of Erceldoun is not dead, but that he is sleeping beneath the Eildon Hills, in Scotland. One day, he met with a lady of elfin race beneath the Eildon tree, and she led him to an under-ground region, where he remained for seven years. He then revisited the earth, but bound himself to return when summoned. One day, when he was making merry with his friends, ...
— 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.
... of the country party," said the King. "I am much minded to secure the lad for an elfin page," he added aside to Killigrew. "There's a fund of excellent humour and drollery in those queer eyes of his! So, Sir Hobgoblin, if you are proof against cold steel, I know not what is to be done with you. Get you back, and devise some other ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... affect him, for he supposed his elfin friends had taken the opportunity to rest themselves, but after minutes lengthened into hours he began to be uneasy. What should he do if they never came back? How would he ever find his way out of these caverns? The thought was ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... elderly gourmand who excited her disgust, and a neighboring party, one member of which at least aroused her interest and caused her to cast cautious side glances in the direction of the next table. This center of attraction was a small girl about eight or nine years of age, a dainty elfin little person with bewitching blue eyes and a mop of short, flaxen curls. She was evidently well used to traveling, for she would lift a tiny finger to summon the waiter, and gave him her orders with all the savoir-faire ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... mine Utterly, utterly, with clinging arms And quick, caressing fingers, warm red lips, Where vows, half uttered, drowned in kisses, died; Mine, with the starlight in her passionate eyes; The wild wind of the woodland breathing low To wake the elfin music of the leaves, And free the prisoned odours of the flowers, In honour of young Love come to his throne! While we under the stars, with twining arms And mutual lips insatiate, gave our souls - Madly forgetting ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... long procession, Formless, countless of their kind Circle us in flying coveys Like the leaves in Autumn wind. Now in ghastly silence deathly, Now with shrilling elfin cry— Is it some mad dance of bridal, Or a ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... the Lily pale Transparent grace thy beauties meek; Yet ere again along the impurpling vale, The purpling vale and elfin-haunted grove, 105 Young Zephyr his fresh flowers profusely throws, We'll tinge with livelier hues thy cheek; And, haply, from the nectar-breathing Rose Extract a Blush ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... moor, riding homeward, he saw before him Jarvis Barrow. Dismounting, he met the old man beside a cairn, placed there so long ago that there was only an elfin story for ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... irregular wild flash of their sudden movements. Would it not be wonderful? One black night I stood in a garden with fireflies in my hair like darting restless stars caught in a mesh of darkness. It gave me a strange sensation, as if I were not human at all, but an elfin spirit. I wonder why these little things move me so deeply? It is because I have a most "unbalanced intellect," I suppose.' Then, looking out on Florence, she cries, 'God! how beautiful it is, and how glad I am that I am ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... wind which shouted beyond the mountains, "when it sped across the moor it lost its voice, and passed as silently as the dead"—is affected by the fortune of the tale equally with its human and its elfin personages. When the knight arrives at last, "wherever his horse's hoofs struck the ground, grass and flowers sprang up, and great trees with leafy branches rose on every side.... As they rode on beneath the leafy trees from every tree the birds sang ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... of Felixstowe, as seen by the local prophet from the neighbouring mountain-peak, does not strike the eye as having anything uncanny about it. At least I imagine that it requires rather careful scrutiny before the eerie curl of a chimney pot, or the elfin wink of a lonely lamp-post brings home to the startled soul that it is really the City of a Fearful Folk. That the inhabitants are not human in the ordinary sense is quite clear, yet it has only just begun ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... one can see it who will simply read "Grimm's Fairy Tales" or the fine collections of Mr. Andrew Lang. For the pleasure of pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy. Touchstone talked of much virtue in an "if"; according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an "if." The note of the fairy utterance always is, "You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word 'cow'"; or "You may live happily with the King's daughter, if you do not show ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... he stalks, a sable shade Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train, In silver samite knight and dame and maid Ride to the tourney on the barrier'd plain; And he must bow in humble mute disdain, And that worst woe of baffled souls endure, To see the evil that they ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... dame had ever set eyes on; her skin was as fine as a rose leaf, her hair like spun gold, her lips like coral, and her eyes as bright as stars. The babe, also, from being a very ordinary looking child, had become the most exquisite little elfin creature that ever ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... now that they had these gifts from Odin. I taught them how to fashion the tales of old into rich melodious songs, and with music and sweet-mouthed eloquence to move the minds of their fellow-men. But they say that Bragi taught them this; and they remember me only as Regin, the elfin schoolmaster, or at best as Mimer, the master of smiths. At length my heart grew bitter because of the neglect and ingratitude of men; and the old longing for Andvari's hoard came back to me, and I forgot much of my cunning and lore. But I lived on and on, and generations of short-lived ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... same elfin revelry, the same masks, the same music. We seat ourselves, as before, under a gauze tent and sip odd little drinks tasting of flowers. But this evening we are alone, and the absence of the band of mousmes, whose familiar little faces formed a bond of union between this ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... smile crossed his grim, hard-featured face. He sat down in a low chair near his guest and drew to his side a small table that bore a tray of refreshments. He poured out a glass of wine and held it towards the queer, elfin ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... "He talked," Hawthorne goes on, "a wonderful quantity in a little time." That evening the Hawthornes spent at Casa Guidi. Mrs Browning is described by the American novelist as if she were one of the singular creatures of his own imagination—no earthly woman but one of the elfin race, yet sweetly disposed towards human beings; a wonder of charm in littleness; with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice; "there is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... and the grass was lush and long like fine green hair, and crept up the hillside and over the roots of the maple and basswood trees. Here lived the elves; she knew them well, and often lay with her head among the violets, listening for the thin sound of their elfin fiddles. Often she had drowsed the summer noon in the coolness, unheeding the dinner call, until busy Martha roused her with the sisterly scolding she knew she deserved and took in ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... wandered in the beautiful moonlight through the wood. Two of my friends and I hastened toward the hill, took hold of each other's hands and danced in a ring. The day after, two persons of the congregation told the preacher about three elfin-maidens, clad in white, who had danced upon the hill in the moonlight. The elfin-maidens were we; but that our backs were hollow as baking-troughs, and that the hill glanced like silver, was ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... most rare device Could match this winter-palace of ice; 'Twas as if every image that mirrored lay In his depths serene through the summer day, Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, Lest the happy model should be lost, Had been mimicked in fairy masonry By the elfin builders of the frost. ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... and among the bandeaux; on her wrists, plump and dimpled as a baby's, more chain-work of the like precious metal, ending in tinkling fringe that swung, glittering, to and fro, with the restless motion of the elfin hands, she never ceased to clasp and chafe and fret one with the other, while she thus stood and awaited the decision of her companions. But instead of detracting from the charm of her appearance, the seemingly unconscious gesture only heightened it. It was the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... Airs! that creep between The rigid stems of heath and bitten furze, Within whose scanty shade, at summer-noon, The mother-sheep hath worn a hollow bed— Ye, that now cool her fleece with dropless damp, Now pant and murmur with her feeding lamb. Chase, chase him, all ye Fays, and elfin Gnomes! With prickles sharper than his darts bemock His little Godship, making him perforce Creep through a ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... when she reached the Cove. In the crystal cup of the sky over her the stars were blinking. Flying flakes of foam were scurrying over the sand like elfin things. A soft little wind was crooning about the eaves of the little gray house where David Spencer was sitting, alone in the twilight, his violin on his knee. He had been trying to play, but could not. ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... German castle-walls, in apt masquerade. There they were grave. Here, we have already said, that they are merry. There their office was to feel and to think. Here, if there be any trust in apparitions, they drink, and what is more critical for an Elfin lip—they eat! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... arrives, neither child nor maiden may safely lay their hand on the cockatrice's den. The ballad tells us that Lady Janet was happy at last; but she paid dearly through months of sorrow and shame for those three red roses plucked in the Elfin Bower. The precise cause of Keene's forbearance it would be very difficult to explain: more than one feeling probably had to do ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... the modern Fairy, were, supernatural wisdom and prescience, and skill in the mechanical arts, especially in the fabrication of arms. They are farther described, as capricious, vindictive, and easily irritated. The story of the elfin sword, Tyrfing, may be the most pleasing illustration of this position. Suafurlami, a Scandinavian monarch, returning from hunting, bewildered himself among the mountains. About sun-set, he beheld ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... and on. The blue, sunlit arch overhead, the waving trees that sent dancing shadows like troops of elfin sprites over the water, the fret in one place where a rock broke the murmurous lapping, the swish somewhere else, where grasses and weeds and water blooms rooted in the sedge rocked back and forth with the slow tide—how ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Miss Willis, for she possessed a quiet sense of humor as a sort of east-wind supplementary to the sentimental and poetic properties of her nature. She had a way of poking fun at herself, which, when exercised, sent the elfin figures scattering with a celerity suggestive of the departure of her own pupils at the tinkle of the bell for dismissal. Then she was left alone with her humor and her New England conscience, that stern adjuster of real values and enemy of spiritual dissipation. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... waters cry Who mourn the hours now slipped for ever, Hours of boding, joy, and fever, When we loved, by chance beguiled, I a boy and you a child— Child! but with an angel's air, Astonished, eager, unaware, Or elfin's, wandering with a grace Foreign to any fireside race, And with a gaiety unknown In the light feet and hair backblown, And with a sadness yet more strange, In meagre cheeks which knew to change Or faint or fired more swift than sight, And forlorn hands and lips pressed ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... trwm yg kessevin Ef diodes gormes ef dodes fin Ergyr gwayw rieu ryvel chwerthin Hut effyt y wrhyt elwry elfin Eithinyn ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... midst of an elfin rally Sudden I stood alone; Far away over the distant valley Fairies and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... Listen well! Like a fairy silver bell In the distance ringing, Lightly swinging In the air; 'Tis the water in the dell Where the elfin minstrels dwell, Falling in a rainbow sprinkle, Dropping stars that brightly twinkle, Bright and fair, On the darkling pool below, Making music so; 'Tis the water elves who play On their lutes of spray. Tinkle, tinkle! Like a fairy silver ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... light regard I read aright that gifted bard (Him whose school above the rest His loveliest Elfin Queen has blest)— One, only one, unrivalled fair Might hope the magic girdle wear, At solemn tourney hung on high, The wish of each love-darting eye; Lo! to each other nymph in turn applied, As if, in air unseen, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... so vast a mass! Yet did it quiver under the finger-tip caress in rhythmic vibrations that became whisperings and rustlings and mutterings of sound—but of sound so different; so elusively thin that it was shimmeringly sibilant; so mellow that it was maddening sweet, piping like an elfin horn, which last was just what Bassett decided would be like a peal from some bell of the gods ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... powerfully-built fellow, with a handsome figure and face, though the latter was very dark, and he walked with a stoop and an awkward slouching gait. He wore his long black hair in straight elfin locks; those in front having been cut across the forehead just above the eyebrows, as being the simplest method of clearing the way for vision. He was clad in a very dirty soiled hunting-shirt and leggings of leather, with moccasins of the same, ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... exhausted on this subject, as upon most others, a profusion of learning, found the first idea of the elfin people in the Northern opinions concerning the duergar, or dwarfs.[23] These were, however, it must be owned, spirits of a coarser sort, more laborious vocation, and more malignant temper, and in all respects less propitious to humanity, than the fairies (properly ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... bed belonged of right to the moonlight, for it was of quite elfin-like beauty. The child had dropped her cover on the floor, and the moonlight looked in at the naked little limbs. Presently she opened her eyes and looked at the ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... below the white snake he saw the bright body of a girl, who lay asleep in the soft grass. She lay without any other covering than a light, web-like veil, just as if she had thrown herself down there after having taken part the whole night in some elfin dance; but the long blades of grass and the trembling flower-clusters stood high over the sleeper, so that Reor could scarcely catch a glimpse of the soft lines of her body. Nor did he go nearer in order to see better. He drew his good knife from its sheath and threw it between ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... as plainly as I see you now: a girl in a red cloak, with such an elfin face I shall never forget it; such small piercing black eyes; such black eyebrows, depressed towards the nose, and raised high towards the temples, giving such an eldritch, mischievous, even dangerous expression to the ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... sword That rose from out the bosom of the lake, And Arthur rowed across and took it—rich With jewels, elfin Urim, on the hilt, Bewildering heart and eye—the blade so bright That men are blinded by it—on one side, Graven in the oldest tongue of all this world, "Take me," but turn the blade and ye shall see, And written in the speech ye ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... light which poured upon it. The Gothic spires, the Moorish domes, the weird and mysterious caves, which last night had given more than a touch of awe to her majestic bedchamber, now looked a good deal less like the ruins of mediaeval castles and the homes of elfin sprites and gnomes. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... the metropolis is obtained, in a clear day, from the gallery at the foot of the lantern. The diminutive appearance of the passengers and other objects beneath is extremely amusing, and resembles the Elfin Panorama of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... dreams and rambles Through his own elfin air, Knows that the street's a prison, Knows that the gates are there: Still he that scorns or struggles, Sees frightful and afar All that they leave of rebels Rot high ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... Lilliputian monarchy of ardent patriots. There had been a flaming sunset behind the turrets of a castle and he had climbed up—up—up to the gabled kingdom, seeking, away from the track of the tourist, relief from the exotic gayety of his rocketing over Europe. And high above the elfin kingdom on a wooded ravine where a silver rivulet leaped and sang along the mountain, a gray and lonely monastery had offered him ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... Maid! though now the Lily pale Transparent grace thy beauties meek; Yet ere again along the impurpling vale, The purpling vale and elfin-haunted grove, 105 Young Zephyr his fresh flowers profusely throws, We'll tinge with livelier hues thy cheek; And, haply, from the nectar-breathing Rose Extract a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... snow as they run, And laughing and shouting, so brimful of fun; While the ten-year-old twins, in a somersault mood, Have measured their length from the barn to the wood. A dozen times, yes, or it may be a score, Till their cheeks are as red as the roses, and more; Then the elfin of twelve and the boy of fifteen, Are pelting each other with snowballs so keen, That we, who are older, forget to be staid, {245} And shout, each with each, as the youngsters, arrayed In feathery garments, press on or ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... as fine as a rose leaf, her hair like spun gold, her lips like coral, and her eyes as bright as stars. The babe, also, from being a very ordinary looking child, had become the most exquisite little elfin creature ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... floor: Coldness awoke me; through the waning darkness I heard far hounds give shivering aery tongue, Remote, withdrawing, suddenly faint and near; I leapt and saw a pack of stretching weasels Hunt a pale coney in a soundless rush, Their elfin and thin yelping pierced my heart As with an unseen beauty long awaited; Wolf-skin and cloak I buckled over this night-gear, And took my honoured spear from my bed-side Where none but I may touch its purity, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... his little domicile across the hall. A shabby, disreputable, out-at-elbows office coat was worn over his ultra-smart street clothes, and he was puffing at a freakish little pipe in the shape of a miniature automobile. He eyed me a moment from the doorway, a fantastic, elfin little figure. I thought that I had never seen so strange and so ugly a face as that of this little brown Welshman with his lank, black hair and his deep-set, uncanny black eyes. Suddenly he trotted over to me with a quick little step. In the doorway he had looked ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... who is utterly friendless and parentless, or whose parents are worse than dead to him—he is received into the Home, and the work of transformation—both of body and soul—commences. First he is taken to the lavatory and scrubbed outwardly clean. His elfin locks are cropped close and cleansed. His rags are burned, and a new suit, made by the old women workers, is put upon him, after which, perhaps, he is fed. Then he is sent to a doctor to see that he is internally ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... were open, and from the crowded court below rose the shrill babel of many children's voices, elfin shrieks and cries accompanied by the jingle of a barrel-organ, very wiry and very much out of tune; but Ravenslee, deep-plunged in thought, heard nought of it nor heeded the fact that the pipe, tight-clenched between his strong, white teeth, was out. For Geoffrey ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... making rampant growths and carrying a heavy crop. These include: 2 Walters, 4 O.K. Heart, 1 Canoka, 1 Slioka, 1 Rover, 2 Calendar, 1 Westoka, 1 Nursoka, 1 Aloka, 1 Symoka, 15 select unnamed bearing seedlings, yet on trial. All are promising. Also we have three of the Elfin paper shell heartnut hybrids. I have failed to find a good pollinator for these Elfins, so they are shy croppers, although producing plenty of the female blooms. All of the above trees are 6 inches in diameter and up ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... his knee; his legs were bare. Around his sombrero, or shadowy hat, was tied a large quantity of the herb called in English rosemary, in Spanish romero, and in the rustic language of Portugal ellecrin, which last is a word of Scandinavian origin, and properly signifies the elfin plant. [It was probably] carried into the south by the Vandals or the Alani. The [man seemed] frantic with terror, and said that the witches had been pursuing him, and hovering over his head, for the ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... know the joys that ring Through the green deeps of leafy spring; I know the elfin cups and domes That are their small ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... in Elfin towers, Wild morning-glories light the tangled ways, And, like the rosy rockets of the Fays, Burns the sloped ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... which the Avon-Dhu, or River Forth, has its birth, are still, according to popular tradition, haunted by the Elfin people, the most peculiar, but most pleasing, of the creations of Celtic superstitions. The opinions entertained about these beings are much the same with those of the Irish, so exquisitely well narrated by Mr. Crofton Croker. An eminently beautiful little ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of a tall, swarthy woman was a small girl, so fragile as to appear almost elfin. The woman wore the garb of a gipsy, and the presence of some squalid tents and tethered horses showed our young friends at once that it was a gipsy encampment upon which ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... and it was not till Gilbert had nearly lost his temper that he could be induced to explain the cause of his mirth, and then he said: "Why, man, you have gone clean mad, and no wonder, as this fine lady of yours has been drugging you with Elfin wine to make a fool of you. If you don't mind she'll keep you here like a horse in a mill all the days of your life, running after clouds you mistake ...
— Up! Horsie! - An Original Fairy Tale • Clara de Chatelaine
... as hungry for its delicate and almost spiritual tokens as the cattle are for the first bite of its fields. How it touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the campfire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... sport among them. Lucky is it for those timid few who, frightened at the long tail, scamper away from the intruder; for, when allowed to mingle in the sport, he suddenly seizes the fairest child, and hurries away to make a dainty meal off him with his little wives in elfin-land. To the Indian men the fairies profess a real friendship; and when they meet one near their dwellings they invite him in and feast him, and press him to stay all night. He invariably declines the polite invitation with his thanks, and his regrets that he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... last descendant, Jean. She bore the name of the Rutherfords, but she was the daughter of their trembling wives. At the first she was not wholly without charm. Neighbours recalled in her, as a child, a strain of elfin wilfulness, gentle little mutinies, sad little gaieties, even a morning gleam of beauty that was not to be fulfilled. She withered in the growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her mothers) came to her maturity depressed, and, as it were, defaced; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bowls, linking that lonely palm to the remote horizon, a thousand elfin fires arose—blue-tongued and spirituous. Grey pencilings of smoke stole straightly upward to the sky, so that look where she would Rita could discern nothing but these countless thin, faintly ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... were crossing the courtyard in every direction, and above lights were ascending and descending from landing to landing. I obtained a confused glimpse of vast masses of architecture—columns, arcades, flights of steps, stairways—a royal voluptuousness and elfin magnificence of construction worthy of fairyland. A negro page—the same who had before brought me the tablet from Clarimonde, and whom I instantly recognised—approached to aid me in dismounting, and the major-domo, attired in black velvet with a gold chain about his neck, advanced ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... with moonlight calmness and steadiness, Mary Pitkin ruled and presided, dispensing to each his portion in due season, while Diana, restless and mischievous as a sprite, seemed to be possessed with an elfin spirit of drollery, venting itself in sundry little tricks and antics which drew ready laughs from the boys and reproving glances from the deacon. For the deacon was that night in one of his severest ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... light Uptowering like the shaft of some huge gun Through one arched rift of sky. Dark at its base With naked arms, the crew that all day long Had sweated to make ready for this night Waited their captain's word. The switchboard shone With elfin lamps of white and red, and keys Whence, at a finger's touch, that monstrous tube Moved like a creature dowered with life and will, To peer from deep to deep. Below it pulsed The clock-machine that slowly, throb by throb, Timed to the pace of the revolving ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... face of the plains was being hurled toward the south in a condition of the wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the wan, elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing itself into spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom presented a ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... glittering in her ears; and with the movement of her coming, one small breast showing and hiding among the ragged covert of the laces. At that ambiguous hour, and coming as she did from the great silence of the forest, the man drew back from the Princess as from something elfin. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... uneven lanes of the country. Ursula nestled near him, into his constant warmth, and watched the pale-lit revelation racing ahead, the visible night. Sometimes it was a wide old road, with grass-spaces on either side, flying magic and elfin in the greenish illumination, sometimes it was trees looming overhead, sometimes it was bramble bushes, sometimes the walls of a crew-yard and ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... cradle it was, after she was rolled in the blankets and fixed comfortably for sight seeing! The breezes fiddled through the twigs, making elfin music, and the tree-house swayed gently. It was too beautiful to sleep through, and Migwan lay awake hour after hour in wonder and delight, watching the moon steer her placid course across the sky. She saw Jupiter culminate ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... flower-bell on the wind, And let each insect louder sing; Let elfin "joy be unconfined;" And let the laughing fairies bring A wreath enchanted, and to bind Upon the Poet's worthy brow Heartsease and laurel, and a kind Of valley lily, white as snow; And fresh May-roses, branching long— Braid all ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... seemed, for the oat-fields stretched before them in unbroken silvery sheen; and the straight young corn dared to rustle its green ribbons boastfully. Fowls still uncaptured crowed lustily in adjacent barnyards; and now and again, sweet as echoes from elfin horns, came the tinkling music of cow-bells. Here and there, the little shock-headed boys who were driving their charges afield paused knee-deep in rosy clover to watch ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... me up, they teach me how to fly! Deprived now of their human props, how the angry fragments leap and tumble and chase one another through the echoing abyss below! These reverberations seem freighted with elfin voices that jeer the insensate rocks for their baffled ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... gates of Faerie There bends a wild witch-hazel tree. The fairies know its elfin powers. They wove a garland of the flowers, And on a misty autumn day They crowned their queen—and ran away! And by that gift they made you free Of all the roads ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... about the geraniums in the convent garden or the chances of the Carlist war. It was all wonderful. It had seemed perfect. And yet—and yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some straying angel—some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had ever realised. She cared for him—how could he doubt it? But was the ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... every flying thing doth seem to be Instinct with sweetly sensuous melody; Where hills and dales assume their warmest phase, With here and there a scarf of opal haze To soften their luxuriant attire; Where one can almost hear the elfin choir Across the meadow-land, down in the wood, In songs of gladness—there are all things good. Ah! ye who seek the spot where joys abide, Awake! Awake! Seek out the country-side, And through the blue-gray July haze see life All free from care, ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... and through its mazy ringlets, Titania may have led her elfin rout, Or Ariel fanned it with his gauzy winglets, Or Puck danced in the ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... postulates of elfin annals,—that the fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; and the like,—I find them true in Concord, however they might be in ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... I cannot rest. The air must cool my brow. I fain would ride to view the elfin scene of chivalry of which we heard to-night. Rouse none from their slumbers, for I would not have those prating knaves know that I could credit so wild a tale ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... to the ugly brown spiders, and in gentle words told them, how in Fairy Land their kindred spun all the elfin cloth, and in return the Fairies gave them food, and then how happily they lived among the green leaves, spinning garments for their neighbors. "And you too," said she, "shall spin for me, and I will give you better food than helpless insects. You shall live in peace, and spin your ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... brass was dark, and there was no other light than a solitary bulb, whose hooded rays were concentrated upon the crystal ball, so that the latter shone with a dead-white glare, somehow baleful, like an elfin moon deeply lost in ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... all the day; my last, the wife of the Japanese Consul, who brought with her two children. They were like little butterflies, dressed in their gay kimonas and bright red obis, their straight black hair framing their tiny elfin faces. I was delighted and could scarcely let them go. Their mother says she will send to me their photographs, and I will send them to thee, as they seem children from another world. They are much prettier, in ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... in bed. Nothing could be more picturesque than her general appearance. She was in the red frock that she usually wore; her wild hair curled in elf-locks all over her head; her eyes, bright as stars, shone in the middle of her little elfin face; her charming lips pouted just for a moment. Then she said in a clear tone, "What if I get up and strike you right across the face? Will you lock the door in preference ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... to the supposed intelligence of the seaman, the elfin youth stood listening with intense eagerness and expectation as the other went into the passage, and, by sundry kicks and bumps against wooden walls, gave evidence that he found the channel intricate. Presently a terrible kick occurred. This was the seaman's toe against the step, of ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... illumined by the awakened soul within, as some rosy lamp might shine through a flawless vase of alabaster. There were hours when Anne's eyes seemed to ache with the splendor of her. As for Owen Ford, the "Margaret" of his book, although she had the soft brown hair and elfin face of the real girl who had vanished so long ago, "pillowed where lost Atlantis sleeps," had the personality of Leslie Moore, as it was revealed to him in those halcyon days at Four ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that I have stolen. For all the many pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in it—dramatic inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like—you must bless the original author: of these things I have only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic conscience that makes a man of me and ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... little maid, Come to the rocky shade I love to sing; Live with us, maiden rare— Come, for we "want" thee there, Thou elfin thing, To work thy spell, In some ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... indeed now I could draw her, and show a hundred little delicate things you would miss in looking at her. But even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow, finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... his harp, and demanding as recompense to be allowed to carry the king's banner in an approaching battle. Being refused on account of his blindness he vanished, and the king of Brittany mentioned his suspicions that this was one of Merlin's elfin tricks. Arthur was disturbed, for he had promised to give the child anything except his honor, his kingdom, his wife, and his sword. However, while he continued to fret, there entered the hall a poor child about eight years old, with shaved head, features of livid tint, eyes of light gray, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... evades it. It is conscious and abhors the touch of man. Follow it up in the pellucid water, and make of your hand a scoop, and you will find that you have captured, not a phantom but a prawn, compact of one bewildering blotch—and that is a word of doubtful propriety in connection with so elfin an organism—a mere shadow tinted the palest violet, and transparencies, with legs and antennae frail as ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... traversing the coil of the latter they reinforce or weaken the magnetism of the pole, and thus make the disc armature vibrate so as to give out a mimesis of the original voice. The sounds are small and elfin, a minim of speech, and only to be heard when the ear is close to the mouthpiece, but they are remarkably distinct, and, in spite of a disguising twang, due to the fundamental note of the disc itself, it is easy ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... Rip, where have you been all day? We feared some of the [Elfin](9) goblins of the Catskill had ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... the sunburnt grass, Fifer in the dun cuirass, Fifing shrilly in the morn, Shrilly still at eve unworn; Now to rear, now in the van, Gayest of the elfin clan: Though I watch their rustling flight, I can never guess aright Where their lodging-places are; 'Mid some daisy's golden star, Or beneath a roofing leaf, Or in fringes of a sheaf, Tenanted as soon as bound! Loud thy reveille ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... in the clutches of the ogre! If only fairy tales might be true! If only some gracious spirit of elfin lore might really come at such a time with its magic wand of healing! Then there would be no more little desolate hearts, no more grieved little faces with undried tears upon them in all the earth. Over every threshold where a child's wee feet ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... yards they ran, and then the swordsman slashed again, and Bert could hear across the waters a little sound like the moo of an elfin cow as the fat little man fell forward. Slash went the swordsman and slash at something on the ground that tried to save itself with ineffectual hands. "Oh, I carn't!" cried Bert, near blubbering, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... the children stealing They stood there hand in hand, For the elfin chimes were pealing ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... Sound." The rest of the work is mainly enchantments and the like. More fairy-like music has never entered a musician's dreams than Philidel's "Hither this way," and the chorus which alternates with the solo part is as elfin, will-o'-th'-wispish, as anything of Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn is Purcell's only rival in such pictures. At the beginning of the celebrated Frost Scene, where Cupid calls up "thou genius of the clime" (the clime being Arctic), we get a specimen ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... with the slowness of his labors and the little progress he had made since she last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall, and condemned, like herself, to reproduce the past and bring out in fresh colors the staring ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... whole table with his big hand. The surface of the table was covered with powdered chalk that the baronet had dusted over it in the hope of developing criminal finger prints. Now under the drumming of his palm the particles of white dust whirled like microscopic elfin dancers. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... he asked and the answer he received were heard only by the elfin sprites dancing in the brook beside them, so we will leave it to those fairies to tell if they choose. Suffice it to say it was such as filled his heart so full of happiness it could no longer hold a secret, ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... a tiny and perfect figure of a man. He was arrayed in a beautifully fitting dress-suit such as a doll might have worn, and he was posed as if in the act of playing a violin, although no violin was present. At the elfin black hair and Mephistophelian face of this horrible, wonderful image, I ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... heathenism antagonistic to Christianity. Before that holy rite was performed, the child lay exposed to all their machinations. Baptism was the armour of the infant against the assaults of Satan and his angels, against the cunning of the wanderers from elfin-land, the fairy-sprites, with their ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... saw, wonder-whist, How from the atmosphere a mist, So it seemed, slow uprist; And, looking from those elfin swarms, I was 'ware How the air Was all populous with forms Of the Hours, floating down, Like Nereids through a watery town. Some, with languors of waved arms, Fluctuous oared their flexile way; Some were borne half resupine On ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... his charmed footsteps had brought him, swarming with dwarf phantoms, sprites, elfin creatures of the Bells. He saw them leaping, flying, dropping, pouring from the Bells without a pause. He saw them, round him on the ground; above him in the air; clambering from him by the ropes below; looking down upon him ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... his hand she came down, not upon the step beside him as he meant, but upon her knees before him, with her two little hands upon his knees and her face of elfin beauty upheld ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... wonderful? One black night I stood in a garden with fireflies in my hair like darting restless stars caught in a mesh of darkness. It gave me a strange sensation, as if I were not human at all, but an elfin spirit. I wonder why these little things move me so deeply? It is because I have a most "unbalanced intellect," I suppose.' Then, looking out on Florence, she cries, 'God! how beautiful it is, and how glad I am that I am alive to-day!' And she tells me that she is drinking ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... wrong that let so many of them see the thing that was of chief interest to me, yet left me out. It clearly promised a real fairy, an elfin bird, a wonderful messenger from the land I ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... the river until the two walls of the canon meet in the perspective. In a small way you know how it would feel to hear the rumble of an approaching seismic shock. Only there was no terror in this. It was the laughter of the sunbeam fairies as they loosened the architecture of "the elfin ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... is on the wide And moving waters, and it draweth nigh Like a sea-cloud. The elfin billows fly Before it, in their armories enthrall'd Of radiant and moon-breasted emerald; And many is the mariner that sees The lone boat in the melancholy breeze, Waving her snowy canvass, and anon Their stately vessel with a gallant run Crowds ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... the Strand he stalks, a sable shade Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train, In silver samite knight and dame and maid Ride to the tourney on the barrier'd plain; And he must bow in humble mute disdain, And that worst woe of baffled souls endure, To see the evil that they ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... the shepherd's purse, that lank intruder that not only is a weed but looks like one? Why not bee-orchises for wartwort, and gentians for chickweed? I have no fault to find with the foxgloves under the apple-tree or with the ivy-leaved toad-flax that hangs with its elfin flowers from every cranny in the wall. But I protest against the dandelions and the superfluity of groundsel. I undertake that, if rest-harrow and scabious and corn-cockle invade the garden, I shall never use a hoe on them. More than this, if only the ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... an evening of excitement. Edith sang, and Margaret played some of her elfin strains, and Mr. Regulus made music leap joyously from the sounding violin. There was one in the lonely library who might have made sweeter music than all, whose spirit's chords were all jangled and tuneless, and whose ear ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... day died, the woods awoke to sounds of bird and insect life; strange, raucous calls pealed forth, some familiar, others strange and unaccustomed. There were thin whistlings, hoarse grunts and harsh cacklings, high-pitched elfin laughter. Moving bodies disturbed the leaves overhead; from all sides came the rustle and stir of unseen creatures; sudden disputations were followed by startled silences. Sitting there in the dark, bedeviled by a pest of insects, mocked ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... were oddly swathed in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to the fingers and feet: I have never seen men so wrapped up before, and women so only in the East. They wore turbans too, and thereunder peered out their elfin faces at me,—faces with protruding lower-jaws and bright eyes. They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen. The white-haired man, who I knew was a good six feet in height, sat a head below ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... in consequence, never more complete than when they were roaming the woods. In them Easter was at home, and her ardent nature came to the surface like a poetic glow from her buoyant health and beauty. Then appeared all that was wayward and elfin-like in her character, and she would be as playful, wilful, evanescent as a wood-spirit. Sometimes, when they were separated, she would lead him into a ravine by imitating a squirrel or a wild-turkey, and, as he crept noiselessly along with bated breath ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... rumbling there is in the elfin hill," said one of the lizards; "I have not been able to close my eyes for two nights on account of the noise; I might just as well have had the toothache, for that ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... me to her elfin grot, And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... true shamrock is the delicate little wood-sorrel, Oxalis acetosella, which has a beautifully formed three-split or trefoil leaf of the most vivid green colour, and a white flower like that of a geranium. It is called "fairy-bell" by the Welsh, and was believed to ring chimes for the elfin folk. It was also greatly esteemed for its acid flavour and for various reputed medicinal and magical properties by the Druids and among the early inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland. Pliny says it never shelters ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... cultivation the columbine nearly doubles its size, it never has the elfin charm in a conventional garden that it possesses wild in Nature's. Dancing in red and yellow petticoats to the rhythm of the breeze, along the ledge of overhanging rocks, it coquettes with some Punchinello as if daring him to reach ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... island. Thine that King World-famed, who led to fifty war-fields forth 'Gainst Saxon hosts his sinewy, long-haired race Unmailed, yet victory-crowned; that King who left Tintagel, Camelot, and Lyonnesse, Immortal names, though wild as elfin notes From phantom rocks echoed in fairy land— Great Arthur! Year by year his deeds were sung, While he in Glastonbury's cloister slept, First by the race he died for, next by those Their children, exiles in Armoric Gaul, By Europe's minstrels then, from age to age; ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... filching fair words from the shining throng Whose music haunts me as the wind a tree! Lo, when a stranger in soft Syrian glooms Shot through with sunset treads the cedar dells, And hears the breezy ring of elfin bells Far down by where the white-haired cataract booms, He, faint with sweetness caught from forest smells, Bears ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... red, black, and gold, on narrow suspended tablets, under which flowed the same current of pig-tailed men in blue and dirty white. From every shop, the same yellow faces stared at him, the same elfin children caught his eye for a half-second to grin or grimace, the same shaven foreheads bent over microscopical tasks in the dark. At first, Rudolph thought the city loud and brawling; but resolving this impression to the hideous shouts of his coolies ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... light regard, I read aright that gifted bard, —Him whose school above the rest His loveliest elfin queen has blest;— One, only one, unrival'd[20] fair, 5 Might hope the magic girdle wear, At solemn turney hung on high, The wish ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... Whereto its nameless waters go: O! I shall always, when I shut mine eyes, See that weird sight again; The lights from anchored vessels hung; The phantom moon, that sprung Suddenly up in dim and angry wise, From the rim o' the moaning main, And touched with elfin light The two long oars whereby we made our flight, Along the reaches of the night; Then furrowed up a lowering cloud, Went in, and left us darker than before, To feel our way as the midnight watches wore, And lie in HER ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... inn, arising from Anty's arrival and Martin's return, was gradually subsiding. These two important events, both happening on the same day, sadly upset the domestic economy of Mrs Kelly's establishment. Sally had indulged in tea almost to stupefaction, and Kattie's elfin locks became more than ordinarily disordered. On the following morning, however, things seemed to fall a little more into their places: the widow was, as usual, behind her counter; and if her girls did not give her as much assistance as she desired of them, and as much as was usual ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... an elfin prince,' said the boy, with a moment's hurt feeling. 'Papa sent me.' By that time the boy was fast in his grandfather's embrace, and was only enough released to give him space to answer the eager question, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... something in her, Nicholas, that one doesn't find in other women, isn't there? An elfin strangeness. [He sighs] Although she is without doubt the richest girl in the country, her mother is so stingy that no one will have her. After her mother's death Sasha will have the whole fortune, but until ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... through her hair the sunshine In showers; it touches, see, Her high bright cheeks in turning; Ah, Elfin Company, ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... you to understand how deeply it has interested me to meet you," he said. "Allow me, from the bottom of my heart, to wish you success." Whereupon, before Maurice could say "damn!" he was gone again, leaving his elfin laugh behind him in ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... carries with him the wayward elfin spirit, if we may so term it, throughout his career. His fairy gifts are of no avail at school, academy, or college: they unfit him for close study and practical science, and render him heedless of everything ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... romances. In it, and in much else that he wrote, he finds a congenial escape from the mere middle-class respectability of his time, and ranges himself with the splendid chivalry both of the past and of the present. There is an elfin element in him as there was in Chaucer, which now and again twinkles forth in a quaint touch of humour, or escapes from the merely spiritual into an ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... softly, softly; and the bare trees shook their branches in the keen air. The pleasant glow of the blazing logs lighted up the circle of happy faces, and peopled the distant corners with elfin shadows. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... through heat, dust, thirst, and relentlessly rapid marching. In the late afternoon occurred a monstrous piling up of thunder clouds, a whistling of wind, and a great downpour of rain. It beat down the wheat and pattered like elfin bullets on the forest leaves. Through this fusillade the army came down to the west fork of the Shenandoah. Pioneers laid a bridge of wagons, and, brigade by brigade, the army crossed. High on the bank in the loud wind and dashing ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... gazing through a roof of glass. The moment they got underneath the trees the light rays of the sun continued to come through—white, savage, and blazing—but they were gelded of heat. Then it was not hard to imagine that they were wandering through cool, bright elfin glades. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... the pleasing smile, And Care's stern brow of every frown beguile. These magic favours graced the infant-maid, Whose more enlivening smile the charming gifts repaid. Now Fortune changed, who, were she constant long, Would leave us few adventures for our song. A wicked elfin roved this land around, Whose joys proceeded from the griefs he found; Envy his name: —his fascinating eye From the light bosom drew the sudden sigh; Unsocial he, but with malignant mind, He dwelt with man, that he might curse mankind; Like the ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... The moor sloped slightly for a mile or so below it, and it was not so much a genuine hollow as made to seem like one by the semi-circle of huge boulders that backed it. Set below and almost within them, the curving ground showed a more vivid green than the rest of the moor, as of some elfin lawn held in an ancient enchantment by the hoar rocks. They towered above, piled on and against each other as though flung by freakish gods; from the fissures sprang wind-wilted thorns, now in young leaf of a pure rich green, with thickly-clustered buds just breaking ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... among them had a bottom; owing to which cause the property within was merely, as it were, extinguished. The chest of drawers having been originally made to stand upon the top of another chest, had a dwarfish, elfin look, alone; but in regard of its security it had a great advantage over the bandboxes, for as all the handles had been long ago pulled off, it was very difficult to get at its contents. This indeed was ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... you see," insisted Joyce, "that he must have hidden in some strange place,—and one he must have known about, too, for he went straight to it! I'm just curious to find out his 'bunk.'" Joyce was slim and dark and elfin, full of queer pranks, sudden enthusiastic plans, and very vivid of imagination, a curious contrast to the placid, slow-moving Cynthia. Joyce also, as a rule, had her way in matters, and she ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... and for this object sought the assistance of certain plants, such as the fern-seed[17]. In Sweden, hazel-nuts were supposed to have the power of making invisible, and it may be remembered how in one of Andersen's stories the elfin princess has the faculty of vanishing at will, by putting a wand in her mouth.[18] But these were not the only plants supposed to confer invisibility, for German folk-lore tells us how the far-famed ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... though it is quadruple its size, and far the most brilliant insect of its kind known to naturalists. They float in phosphorescent clouds over the vegetation, emitting a lurid halo, like fairy torch-bearers to elfin crews. One at first sight is apt to compare them to a shower of stars. They come in multitudes immediately after the wet season sets in, prevailing more or less, however, all the year round. Their advent is always hailed with delight by the slave children, as well as by children ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... with his chance, might some day achieve greatness, suddenly realized how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, Dexter ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... foot of Richmond. A few minutes' walk and we tread the pavements of the capital. There are no noisy and no beseeching runners; there is no sound of life, but the stillness of a catacomb, only as our footsteps fall dull on the deserted sidewalk, and a funeral troop of echoes bump their elfin heads against the dead walls and closed shutters in reply, and this is Richmond. Says a melancholy voice: "And this ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... down in the valley—a cuckoo called. Out of the depths floated the elfin halloo, the gaily malicious challenge of spring herself, shouted up melodiously from the plains of Alsace—Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!—You poor, sullen, frozen foreigner up there on the snowy ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... Could match this winter palace of ice; 'T was as if every image that mirrored lay In his depths serene through the summer day, Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, Lest the happy model should be lost. Sad been mimicked in fairy masonry By the elfin builders ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... ringlets. The great charm was the minuteness and refinement of the mould containing the energetic spirit that glanced in her eyes, quivered on her lips, and pervaded every movement of the elastic feet and hands, childlike in size, statue-like in symmetry, elfin in quickness and dexterity. 'Lucile la Fee,' she might well have been called, as she sat manipulating the gorgeous silk and feathers with an essential strength and firmness of hands such as could hardly have been expected from such ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... swift glance All coming time she saw. A weird romance Wherein she traced great peoples yet unborn, New springing cycles, strange lands cleft with tarn Or pleasant vale, and green plains stretching far, And quiet bays, and many a shingly bar, And troubled seas, with bitter perils past, And elfin shapes that jeering flitted fast With scornful faces, leering lips that smiled, Or bursts of laughter through that vision wild. Uncertain, then, she stood, half loth to turn. "Against yon deepening sky, how dimly burn ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... Opposite the elfin planet, the monster ceased to climb. It hung there in the violet ray, an inch from the surface of ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... said. "You wonderful, elfin creature, I shall undoubtedly come back—to your real home, and claim you there. Only I don't believe you do live in Aberlin,—you probably live in some great, gnarled oak hereabouts; and at night its bark ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... colonel, because I myself have something to say." The little elfin voice disregarded Wachique and the page. They were part of the furniture of the room, and did not count ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... that day, that Neykia, she of woodland grace and beauty, was strolling in the sunshine with her Little Pine; while on every side the trees were shaking their heads and it seemed gossiping about the hunting plans of that reckless little elfin hunter, Hymen, who was hurrying overland and shooting his joyous arrows in every direction, till the very air felt charged with the whisperings of countless lovers. It made me think of the shy but radiant Athabasca, and I wondered—was her lover ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... face, one night, when Heaven seemed resting, Against the troubled fever of the earth; I dreamed that vivid throated birds were nesting, In trees that shook with elfin-hearted mirth. I dreamed that star-like purple flowers were springing A-throb with perfume all about the place, And that there was a far-off sound of singing— And ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... long since. To whom the house belonged now I did not know. But I recognised pictures and statuary and a conservatory with palms. And the place shimmered with brilliant ghosts and was haunted by hot perfumes and by the echo of human voices and by elfin music. And the cripple forgot that he was being carried up the stairs in the grip of the old soldier. He was mounting them with heart beating high and the presence of a beloved hand on his arm.... You see, it was all ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... within the German castle-walls, in apt masquerade. There they were grave. Here, we have already said, that they are merry. There their office was to feel and to think. Here, if there be any trust in apparitions, they drink, and what is more critical for an Elfin lip—they eat! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... she?" asked Jennie, gazing intently at the odd figure, for as ever Mary wore white, and her heavy braids fell into the big pocket made of her up-turned skirt. She looked like some elfin sprite painted in pastels, with all the soft greens of foliage, and the wonderfully mellow tints of crimsoned gold shed from the sunset, surrounding the picture and forming ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... and the closer I watched him the more convinced I became, that this was no optical illusion, that a faint luminosity, a sort of elfin light, played eerily ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
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