"Elves" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indeed he, shook his head. "Nay, nay, gaffer," he answered. "I am wise; I know my business. I think I have been asleep in the green wood a thousand years and waited upon by elves and fairies and all manner of pygmies, and they taught me the speech of birds, and what the trees whisper to each other from dawn to dusk, and the war-cries of the winds, with other much delectable knowledge which would have made me wiser than the wisest—but now that I am awake ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... enchasing here those warts Which we to others from ourselves Sell, and brought hither by the elves. The tempting mole, stolen from the neck Of some shy virgin, seems to deck The holy entrance; where within The room is hung with the blue skin Of shifted snake, enfriezed throughout With eyes of peacocks' trains, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Christmas fairies stealing Rows of little socks to fill? Are they angels floating hither With their message of good-will? What sweet spell are these elves weaving, As like larks they chirp and sing? Are these palms of peace from heaven That these ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... deserted all that afternoon, for Psyche sat in the orchard drawing squirrels on the wall, pert robins hopping by, buttercups and mosses, elves and angels; while May lay contentedly enjoying sun and air, sisterly care, and the "pretty things" she loved so well. Psyche did not find the task a hard one; for this time her heart was in it, and if she needed any reward she ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... laid myself down on haunted ground; and I am willing to imagine that what I then experienced was rather connected with the world of spirits and dreams than with what I actually saw and heard around me. Surely the elves and genii of the place were conversing, by some inscrutable means, with the principle of intelligence lurking within the poor uncultivated clod! Perhaps to that ethereal principle the wonders of the past, as connected ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... and how they came out of Scania Insula. Sweden is often, naturally, an island with the early chroniclers; only the south was known to them. The north was magical, unknown, Quenland, the dwelling-place of Yotuns, Elves, Trolls, Scratlings, and all other uncanny inhumanities. The Winils find that they are growing too many for Scanland, and they divide into three parties. Two shall stay behind, and the third go out ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... Were shaven and sheared, And mingled in with holy mead, And sent upon wide ways enow; Some abide with the Elves, Some abide with the Aesir, Or with the wise Vanir, Some still hold the ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... killing avenged by sovran God for slaughtered Abel. Ill fared his feud, {1f} and far was he driven, for the slaughter's sake, from sight of men. Of Cain awoke all that woful breed, Etins {1g} and elves and evil-spirits, as well as the giants that warred with God weary while: but ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... of the King Arthour, Of which that Britons speken greet honour, Al was this land fulfild of fayerye. The elf-queen, with hir joly companye, Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede; This was the olde opinion, as I rede. But now can no man see none elves mo. For now the grete charitee and prayeres Of limitours ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... up in cloud-land Trail their fringes over all, Shifting shadows gray and purple, Which aerial elves let fall. ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... she shall live with me in my island home in the lake. As for you, because you tried to do evil to your good sister, you shall sit at the bottom of the lake forever, combing out the seeds you have hidden in your hair." Then, she clapped her hands and a number of elves appeared and carried the ...
— Philippine Folklore Stories • John Maurice Miller
... appear in the names of the days of the week,—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Sunday is the day of the sun, and Monday the day of the moon. Saturday alone is a name of Latin origin. Among the minor beings in the German mythology were fairies, elves, giants, and dwarfs. There were festivals to the gods. Their images were preserved in groves. Lofty trees were held sacred to divinities. The oak and the red ash were consecrated to Donar. Sacrifices, and among them human sacrifices, were offered to the gods. Their will was ascertained by means ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the dewy ground, The quivering moonbeams stray; And the light and shade, By the branches made, Give motion and life to the silent glade, Like fairy elves ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... Ygaerne for queen; Ygaerne was with child by Uther the king, all through Merlin's craft, before she was wedded. The time came that was chosen, then was Arthur born. So soon as he came on earth, elves took him; they enchanted the child with magic most strong, they gave him might to be the best of all knights; they gave him another thing, that he should be a rich king, they gave him the third, that he should live long; they gave to him the prince virtues most good, ...
— Brut • Layamon
... or sturdy and straight like Tom; but he was a very happy little boy all the same, after a strange, quiet fashion of his own, and he liked best of all to be alone with Norah in the woods or by the river, when they would make up all sorts of fancies about queer little elves and fairies who, they said, lived in the trees or bushes, and in the sticklebacks' ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle
... back nursery for borrowing her scissors and losing them; but I'd got 'Grimm' inside one of my knickerbockers, so when she locked the door, I sat down to read. And I read the story of the Shoemaker and the little Elves who came and did his work for him before he got up; and I thought it would be so jolly if we had some little Elves to do ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... wherever they have been sheltered from the north. They will grow bolder as the days go by, and spread and come all down the slopes of sunny hills. Then the anemones will come, like a shy pale people, one of the tribes of the elves, who dare not leave the innermost deeps of the wood: in those days all the trees will be in leaf, the bluebells will follow, and certain fortunate woods will shelter such myriads of them that the bright fresh green of the beech trees will flash between two blues, the blue of the sky and the deeper ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... pray let me die In the right way, nor shed such tears." Not at all, the consolers, With many a tear, and many a sigh, Had come resolved by him to lie; And when they left they helped themselves Upon his lands, the greedy elves! And drank from out his brook, And every one of them such suppers took, That when the stag revived, He found his meals reduced; So that while his friends had thrived, He had to fast or die ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... wonder that the spirits of the elder world should not yet have been effectually dislodged from their ancient solitudes.... The Pixies, thoroughly mischievous elves, who delight to lead all wanderers astray, dwell in the clefts of broken granite, and dance on the green sward by the side of the hill streams; ... sometimes, but very rarely, they are seen dancing by ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... come into this wood to find her lost sheep, should be the means of my gaining my own form again. You are that pretty maid, and I will take you to a spot where you will find your sheep, but without their tails. The elves will play with them for this night, but in the morning every sheep will have its tail again, except the stupid Bell-wether. You must then wave his tail three times over my head, and I shall resume my ...
— My First Picture Book - With Thirty-six Pages of Pictures Printed in Colours by Kronheim • Joseph Martin Kronheim
... thee, but a name, And from thy hall of clouds descend? Nor find a Sylph in every dame, A Pylades [1] in every friend? But leave, at once, thy realms of air [ii] To mingling bands of fairy elves; Confess that woman's false as fair, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... "I'd never go back—I might be frightened, but I'd be ashamed to run. Going to aunt Mirandy's is like going down cellar in the dark. There might be ogres and giants under the stairs,—but, as I tell Hannah, there MIGHT be elves and fairies and enchanted frogs!—Is there a main street to the village, ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... may loosen the black braced helmlets For the wild elves' heads of the wild waves wrought. As flowers on the sea are her small green realmlets, Like heavens made out of a child's heart's thought; But these as thorns of her desolate places, Strong fangs that fasten and hold lives fast: And the vizors are framed as for formless faces ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... tales, and on stormy days, with Sir Mortimer purring in her lap, would sit for hours reading stories of elves, and dwarfs, of splendor ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks
... with the elves to-day," said Elaine, bringing the little fellow back, if not to absolute reality, at least to a less visionary world than the dream-country he was picturing. "Look! I've brought a mug with a robin on it for your milk. May you eat bread and honey? Honey is fairy food, you know. Here's ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... spirit," he replied. "I was one of the large company of the Men of the Sun who used to inhabit the Earth under the names of oracles, nymphs, woodland elves, and fairies. But we abandoned our world in the reign of the Emperor Augustus; your people then became so gross and stupid that we could no longer delight in their society. Since then I have stayed on the Moon. I find its inhabitants ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... many spectral trees outlined against the lighter sky to wave their branches, the leaves rustling as though swept by rain. There was a faint moaning among the distant rocks as if hidden caverns were filled with elves at play. It was weird, lonely, desolate,—straining eyes beholding everywhere the same scene of ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... they must have been all over the world in all this time that the rolling and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about his ears; shut up in the dark, he began to remember all the tales that had been told in Yule round the fire at his grandfather's good house at Dorf, of gnomes and elves and subterranean terrors, and the Erl King riding on the black horse of night, and—and—and he began to sob and to tremble again, and this time did scream outright. But the steam was screaming itself so loudly that no one, had there been any one nigh, would have heard him; and ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... make one long for the more varied circumstances of confessed winter, when the deep blue shadows in the crisp snow suggest the glory of southern skies, and the sparkle of the sun on the delicate tracery of the frosted branches has a mimicry of life, such as we imagine strange elves and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... style these emerald circles 'Hagtracks.' Why, we care not to enquire. Enough for us, the fairies are not altogether gone. A smooth soft carpet is here spread out for Oberon and Titania and their attendant elves, to dance upon by ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... lovely, as delicate, as dainty as cyclamens that wave in the woods in the early days of an Italian spring. Their garments were so white, so transparent, so filmy and clinging, that they looked like elves robed in mountain-vapor rather than human creatures, . . there were fifty of them in all, and as they tripped forward, they, like the doves that had heralded their approach, surrounded Lysia flutteringly, saluting her ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Raggedy Man, he knows most rhymes An' tells 'em, ef I be good, sometimes: Knows 'bout Giunts, an' Griffuns, an' Elves, An' the Squidgicum-Squees 'at swallers therselves! An', wite by the pump in our pasture-lot, He showed me the hole 'at the Wunks is got, 'At lives 'way deep in the ground, an' can Turn into me, er 'Lizabuth Ann! Aint he a funny old Raggedy Man? ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... avenues, clipped hedges, and other topiarian adjuncts which comport so well with the starch prudery of things Elizabethan; but they are still replete with grotto, fountain, labyrinth, and alcove—a very paradise for the more court-bred rank of sylphs, and the gentler elves of Queen Titania. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there, 25 My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair; And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves, Go dancing round the china plates that stand ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... 'An Artist's Studio,' and No. 131, 'Christmas Eve,' are by J. F. Weir. Both are well conceived and executed, the latter being especially interesting. The old wall, the great bell, the moonlight, and the elves set the fancy musing over many things in heaven and earth rarely dreamed of in ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Allathurion; and there was peace between the people of that village and all the folk who walked in the dark ways of the wood, whether they were human or of the tribes of the beasts or of the race of the fairies and the elves and the little sacred spirits of trees and streams. Moreover, the village people had peace among themselves and between them and their lord, Lorendiac. In front of the village was a wide and grassy space, and beyond this the great wood again, but at the back the trees ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... which wound into a little suburb peopled by Polish quarry-workers. It was essentially an alien community in whose straggling streets and lanes one heard English but seldom. Tow-headed children, shy elves peeping from odd hiding-places, swarmed a half-dozen and upward to a house. Work was the key-note of Little Poland, as it was called. While the men toiled in the sandstone quarries the women did a man's stint in the fields of the outlying ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of elfs and fays: Who says that with the dreams of myth, These imps and elves disport themselves? Ah no, along the paths of song Do all the tiny ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... lads of the harbour loved him very much, for his good-humour and for his tenderness—never more so, however, than when, by night, in the glow of the fire, he told us long tales of the fairies and wicked elves he had dealt with in his time, twinkling with every word, so that we were sorely puzzled to know whether to take him in jest ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... Sir Bedivere and spake: "O me, my King, let pass whatever will, Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field; But in their stead thy name and glory cling To all high places like a golden cloud For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass. Light was Gawain in life, and light in death Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man; And care not thou for dreams from ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... story of elves, and was quite sure that her head was filled with them, for she felt as if she wanted to shake Millicent, and at the thought that her dear "Martha" was really ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis
... tingled a chime, sweet almost playful music for the elves of midnight and a challenge to baser intruders. Jane must have dozed when she suddenly became ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... the beach!" cried Cousin Frank, with a vehement show of enthusiasm. "Now, then, Aunt Melissa, prepare for the great enjoyment of the day. In a few moments we shall be of the elves ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... with voice most cordial, It does one good to hear; For all the little children He asks each passing year: His heart is warm and gladsome, Not like your griping elves, Who, with their wealth in ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... her. "She is invulnerable," he said to himself; "her power to wish is invincible, her fulness of life complete." He felt that she bore a certain resemblance to his Eva; that she was one of those elves of light in whose cheerfulness there is occasionally a touch of the terrible. He decided then and there not to let mischievous chance have its own way: he was going to put out his hand when ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... hand is elfin land, And faery gifts are falling; Across the world, a twinkling band, The elves are calling—calling. ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... distant, dark, chaotic land, of which Utgard was the chief seat. Midgard, or the earth, the abode of man, was represented as a disk in the midst of a vast ocean; its caverns and recesses were peopled with elves and dwarfs, and around it lay coiled the huge Midgard Serpent. Muspelheim, or Flameland, and Nifelheim or Mistland, lay without the organized universe, and were the material regions of light and darkness, the antagonism of which had produced the universe with its ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... his name should really be spelled, Aelfred, [Footnote: That is, the rede or councel of the elves. A great many Old-English names are called after the elves or fairies.] was the youngest son of King Aethelwulf, and was born at Wantage in Berkshire in 849. His mother was Osburh daughter of Oslac the ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... a change; My book seemed all traditions, Old legends of profoundest range, Diablery, and stories strange Of goblins, elves, magicians. 20 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... to feel thy breath upon my cheek; I vainly searched for words I long'd to speak, But could not utter lest the sound thereof Should scare away the elves that wait on love. And when I spoke to thee 'twas of the spot Where we were seated,—things that matter'd not,— Uncared for things,—the weather,—the new laws! And, sudden-loud, ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... dress barred with grey fur, which I should have called artistic, but that she hated all the talk about art; and she had an attractive face, which I should have called elvish, but that she hated all the talk about elves. But what was arresting and almost blood-curdling about her, in that social atmosphere, was not so much that she hated it, as that she was entirely unaffected by it. She never knew what was meant by being "under the influence" of Yeats or Shaw or Tolstoy or anybody ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... must be stunned because of a surging in his ears, and because all the voices of the people about him had become small and remote. They were shouting like elves inside ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... our children laugh at him who slew Babylon's winged bulls and smote great numbers of the elves and fairies, when he is shorn of ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... was going to have at her house in honour of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, her elderly patron, and she also gave me back the manuscript of Lohengrin, with the assurance that it had appealed to her very much, and that while she was reading it she had often seen the little fairies and elves dancing about in front of her. As in the old days I had been heartily encouraged by the warm and friendly sympathy of this naturally cultured woman, I now felt as if cold water had been suddenly poured down my back. I soon took my leave, and never saw her again. Indeed, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... wood elves dwell," whispered Anne. "They are impish and malicious but they can't harm us, because they are not allowed to do evil in the spring. There was one peeping at us around that old twisted fir; and didn't you ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... I ever remember, as we wandered in the park-lands, she began to say—half unthinking—that it was truly an elves-night. And she stopped herself immediately; as though she thought I should have no understanding; but, indeed, I was upon mine own familiar ground of inward delight; and I replied in a quiet and usual voice, that the Towers of Sleep would grow that night, and I felt ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... the idea of protection against divers kinds of malicious spirits, including the demons of disease, ghosts, fairies, and evil-minded sprites, surly elves, fiends, trolls, pixies, bogies, kelpies, gnomes, goblins, witches, devils, imps, Jinn, et id omne genus. Amulets served as preventives against bodily ailments or injuries, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... its wings and pruned its feathers, and seemed thoroughly to enjoy itself alone in the shady nook which it had chosen—a place overshadowed by broad leaves of ferns and Heliconiae. I thought, as I watched it, that there was no need for poets to invent elves and gnomes while Nature furnishes us with such marvellous little sprites ready ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... back to my cabin in the woods," she said, solemnly, and with her finger up, "I shall whistle all the fairy folk into a ring, all the elves and the pixies, and the little brown gnomes who burrow in the leaves and look for all the world like pine cones, and I shall tell them what you did, and to-night they will come to your cabin, and will pinch you black and blue, and stick thorns into you, and rub you with the poison ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... queen of sprites there happened, at this time, a sad disagreement; they never met by moonlight in the shady walk of this pleasant wood but they were quarreling, till all their fairy elves would creep into acorn-cups and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... is a very singular and interesting string of fragments handed down from times long anterior to the Reformation, when they had been employed as armour of proof by the credulous vulgar against the Robin Goodfellows, urchins, elves, hags, and fairies of earlier superstition. I regret that I cannot throw more light upon it. The concluding lines are not deficient ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... the strong boughs with flowers and leaves spread themselves out, whilst the sun of poetry shall shine among them, and show the colors, odor, and singing-birds. But the tree of reality cannot shoot up so soon as that of fancy, like the enchantment in Tieck's "Elves." We must seek our type in nature. Often may there be an appearance of cessation; but that is not the case. It is even so with our story; whilst our characters, by mutual discourse, make themselves worthy of ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... gnomes do fly, Drenched across yon rainy sky, With the vex'd moon-mother'd elves, And the clouds do weep ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... smaller canvases, some unfinished. Most were of nymphs and winged elves, but there were three landscapes. One of these, a stream reflecting a high spring sky between banks of young meadow grass, showed a little faun skipping merrily in the distance. The atmosphere was indescribably light-hearted. Mary ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... time for company, being much alone. An Indian would have told me that it was the Un a games- suk—the spirit-fairies of the rock and stream. These beings enter far more largely, deeply, and socially into their life or faith than elves or fairies ever did into those of the Aryan races, and I might well have been their protege, for there could have been few little boys living, so fond as I was of sitting all alone by rock and river, hill and greenwood ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... imagery. Shall we mention the remonstrance of Helena to Hermia, or Titania's description of her fairy train, or her disputes with Oberon about the Indian boy, or Puck's account of himself and his employments, or the Fairy Queen's exhortation to the elves to pay due attendance upon her favourite, Bottom; or Hippolita's description of a chace, or Theseus's answer? The two last are as heroical and spirited as the others are full of luscious tenderness. The reading of this play is ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... herself was dressed all in white, so that the whole scene made up of pale, soft tints looked weird and ghostly in the twilight and Crystal like an ethereal creature come down from the land of nymphs and of elves. ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... seconds, scarcely touching the foam-crested seas, and then sunk quickly again beneath the surface. "How beautiful and blue are the reflections on their glittering wings, how transparent their tiny bodies, how light their movements!" observed Emily; "they look like ocean elves, as they float through the air. What a happy life they must lead—now in the pure ocean, now getting an uninterrupted sight of the glorious sun and the ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... holes the boys could catch glimpses of the outer world—glimpses worth catching, too, for all around stood the great forest, the playground of boys and girls during noon-hour and recesses; an enchanted land, peopled, not by fairies, elves, and other shadowy beings of fancy, but with living things, squirrels, and chipmunks, and weasels, chattering ground-hogs, thumping rabbits, and stealthy foxes, not to speak of a host of flying things, from the little gray-bird that twittered its ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... necessity following. Her nerves were screwed up to the highest pitch of uneasiness by the grotesque habits of these men and maids, who were quite unlike the country servants she had known, and resembled nothing so much as pixies, elves, or gnomes, peeping up upon human beings from their shady haunts underground, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill—sometimes doing heavy work, sometimes none; teasing and worrying with impish laughter half suppressed, and vanishing ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... miscreated scarecrow, dare you shake, Or strike in jest, a natural man like me?— You cursed lump, you chaos of a man, To buffet one whom Heaven pronounces good! [Bells ring.] There go the bells rejoicing over you: I'll change them back to the old knell again. You marry, faugh! Beget a race of elves; Wed a she-crocodile, and keep within The limits of your nature! Here we go, Tripping along to meet our promised bride, Like a ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... never," he falter'd, "I know, Reach'd the heart of Matilda." "Matilda? oh no! But reflect! when such thoughts do not come of themselves To the heart of a woman neglected, like elves That seek lonely places,—there rarely is wanting Some voice at her side, with an evil enchanting To conjure them to her." "O lady, beware! At this moment, around me I search everywhere For a clew ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... hence, dull raven; when I bid thee croak, 'Twill be when frogs sing ditties on an oak; When hopping toads like winged skylarks fly; When limping elves are ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... safety. The greatest of his physical fears—greater even than that of drowning which sometimes whelmed him in dreams and on ships—was the dread of empty space; a touch of vertigo seized him; the enemy gathered round the torch beneath suddenly seemed elves, puny impossible things far off, and he almost slipped into their midst. But he dragged back his senses. "We must all die," he gasped, "but we need not be precipitate about the business," and shut his eyes as he stood up, and with feet upon the moulding stretched to gain grip of the other window. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... golden water; and beyond the red line of the fence at the end of the garden, where the rich pomegranate bloom tried to blush the roses down, the hot air danced merrily above the rough stone wall like a million microscopic elves at play. Peace! everywhere was peace! and in it the full heart of Nature beat out in radiant life. Peace in the voice of the turtle-doves among the willows! peace in the play of the sunshine and the murmur of the wind! peace in the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... Merlin old that ministered to fate, The tales of visiting ghosts, or fairy elves, Or witchcraft, are no fables. But his task Is ended with the night;—the thin white moon Evades the eye, the sun breaks through the trees, And the charmed wizard comes forth a mere man From out his circle. Thus ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... solemn Night, When Earth is bound with her silent zone, And the spangled sky seems a temple wide, Where the star-tribes kneel at the Godhead's throne; O the Night, the Night, the wizard Night, When the garish reign of day is o'er, And the myriad barques of the dream-elves come In a brightsome fleet from Slumber's shore! O the Night for me, When blithe and free, Go the zephyr-hounds on their airy chase; When the moon is high In the dewy sky, And the air is ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... what to tell you," I answered. "I was hoping that you would tell me one of yours, all about the fairies and the elves in the park, as you used to when you ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... be a wonderful play, depicting Elf-land with fairies, water nymphs, elves and witches, goblins, and gnomes, with exquisite scenery, beautiful costumes, and graceful dancing that held them entranced, from the time that the curtain went up until the grand march of the fairies at ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... mind at all," said Mary. "You're entirely mistaken, Ben. You are thinking of elves. The fairies are kind little people who ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... homely unscenic scenery—this Lincolnshire quality—that accounts for Tennyson's freshness of vision. But it is not so. Tennyson is fresh also in scenic scenery; he is fresh with the things that others have outworn; mountains, desert islands, castles, elves, what you will that is conventional. Where are there more divinely poetic lines than those, which will never be wearied with quotation, beginning, "A splendour falls"? What castle walls have stood ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... province, Nordland, some of the grim tales on which he himself was brought up, so to speak, that he is perhaps most vivid and enthralling. The folk-lore of those lonely sub-arctic tracts is in keeping with the savagery of nature. We rarely, if ever, hear of friendly elves or companionable gnomes there. The supernatural beings that haunt those shores and seas are, for the most part, malignant and malefic. They seem to hate man. They love to mock his toils, and sport with his despair. ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... island the appearance of a general conflagration."[382] By May Day in Manx folk-lore is meant May Day Old Style, or Shenn Laa Boaldyn, as it is called in Manx. The day was one on which the power of elves and witches was particularly dreaded, and the people resorted to many precautions in order to protect themselves against these mischievous beings. Hence at daybreak they set fire to the ling or gorse, for the purpose of burning out the witches, who are ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... 'Tisn't, no 'tisn't, the sub-contractor; 'Tisn't machinery. No! In fact, What Sweating is, in a manner exact, After much thinking we cannot define. Who is to blame for it? Well, we incline To think that the Sweated (improvident elves!) Are, at the bottom, to blame themselves! They're poor of spirit, and weak of will, They marry early, have little skill; They herd together, all sexes and ages, And take too tamely starvation wages; And if they will do so, much to their shame, How can the Capitalist ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... through and over the lattice-work which separates the regions of the natural and the supernatural. She had firm faith in midnight revels in the woods, held by those elves, fairies, and satyrs who come down to us from the dim and shaded life of earlier ages, and whose existence she had eagerly accepted when I hinted its possibility. Her theory of the mutability of species exceeded Darwin's; for she fancied that the vegetable world was occasionally ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... that dotted the sparkling, dew-drenched grass. It was, as I have said in the introduction to this book, a large part of childhood's radiant romance! What tales our fancy wove into the fairy-rings under the elm-trees! We lifted each moist fungus half expecting to see the brownies and the elves fly from beneath it! And what fearsome care we took to include no single hypocritical toadstool among our treasures! I am really afraid that Mr. Chesterton would have been less conscientious. Mushrooms ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... intelligence and wonderful strength. Some of the new little creatures were ugly and dark and deformed; these the gods called gnomes or dwarfs, and to them they gave homes underground, with power over all that was hidden in the earth. But for the beautiful, fair creatures whom they called elves and fairies, the gods made a home somewhat above the earth, where they might live always among flowers and birds ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... fate of the elves is nearly the same As the terrible fate of men; To love, to rue, to be, and pursue A flickering wisp of the fen. We must play the game with a careless smile, Though there's nothing in the hand; We must toil as if it were worth ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... muse steps in and cheer his despondency, by assuring him of undying fame. "Halloween" is a strain of a more homely kind, recording the superstitious beliefs, and no less superstitious doings of Old Scotland, on that night, when witches and elves and evil spirits are let loose among the children of men: it reaches far back into manners and customs, and is a picture, curious and valuable. The tastes and feelings of husbandmen inspired "The old Farmer's Address to his old mare Maggie," which exhibits some pleasing recollections ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... recall her figure: Was it regal as Juno's own? Or only a trifle bigger Than the elves who surround the throne Of the Faery Queen, and are seen, I ween, By mortals ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... travellers are halted on the road, in practical illustration of Robin's doctrine; comic incidents from the old ballads are reproduced; and so the episode ends merrily of these frolics in the wood. At that point a delicious fairy pageant is introduced, presenting Queen Titania and her elves and illustrating at once the grievance of the fairies against the men whose heavy feet have crushed their toads and bats and flowers and mystic rings, and Marian's dream of love. Sir Arthur Sullivan's ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... that Satan had flown off with the soul. Suspicions and accusations of witchcraft were rife; and an old woman had to be careful of the reputation of her cat. Wanderers among the mountains saw dragons; in the forests elves peeped at the woodmen from behind the trees, and fairies danced beneath the moon in the open places. The world had not been sufficiently explored for the absence of contrary experience to carry much weight; ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Troom seem dead, All their mighty deeds are fled; For their Hound, who hounds surpassed, Elves ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... from Asia to north-western Europe, and since all the pedigrees of their chieftains were traced back to Woden, it is not improbable that he may have been really a deified ancestor of the principal Germanic families. The popular creed, however, was mainly one of lesser gods, such as elves, ogres, giants, and monsters, inhabitants of the mark and fen, stories of whom still survive in English villages as folk-lore or fairy tales. A few legends of the pagan time are preserved for us in Christian books. Beowulf is rich in allusions to these ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... Windsor Castle, elves, within, without, Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room, That it may stand till the perpetual doom In state as wholesome as in state 'tis fit, Worthy the owner, and the owner it. The several chairs ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Legends': The Merman The Fisherman of Goetur The Magic Scythe The Man-Servant and the Water-Elves The Crossways ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... or ether. In mediaeval literature, these earth-spirits are often called gnomes, while the water-spirits are spoken of as undines, the air-spirits as sylphs, and the ether-spirits as salamanders. In popular language they are known by many names—fairies, pixies, elves, brownies, peris, djinns, trolls, satyrs, fauns, kobolds, imps, goblins, good people, etc.—some of these titles being applied only to one variety, and others indiscriminately to all. Their forms are many and various, but most frequently human ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... the pilgrims) which forms the beginning and the end of the overture, is assailed by the briefer motives of sensuous seduction and ecstasy of the middle; the quivering, tickling passages of the violins play round the sacred music of the chorale like so many seductive elves. The Venusberg music is probably the most perfect expression of pure sensuality which has ever been reached in the world of music; it is the complete translation of sensual craving and sensual rapture into the language of music. In the Venusberg music composed for ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... must be known that in those days the Northmen believed in dreams and omens and warnings—indeed, they were altogether a very superstitious people, having perfect faith in giants, good and bad; elves, dark and bright; wraiths, and fetches, and guardian spirits— insomuch that there was scarcely one among the grown-up people who had not seen some of these fabulous creatures, or who had not seen some other people who ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... to see dryads dancing in the moonlight (as she and I saw them in the same spot to-night), careless that Nature was distilling magic perfume for us from tree and fern and wild flower, our eyes shut to the fact that elves disguised as Indian lilies were using silvered ponds ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... Rhine and the Black Forest and all the other haunts of elves and fairies and hobgoblins; but for good honest spooks there is no place like home. And what differentiates our spook—Spiritus Americanus—from the ordinary ghost of literature is that it responds to the American sense of humour. Take Irving's stories for example. The Headless Horseman, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... country. But nowhere south of Tweed are finer specimens to be found than in this old Hampshire park. Three great avenues of them run round a triangle half a mile across, and outside the shade of their black branches the purple heather and waving bracken form a carpet fit for elves and fairies. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Claus: once, so they say, He set out to see what people were kind, Before he took presents their way. 'This year I will give but to givers, To those who make presents themselves,' With a nod of his head old Santa Claus said To his band of bright officer-elves. ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that, toiling With wild white roses' bloom— No printers' vats a-boiling Nor labour of the loom— With fern and foxglove chalice On tiny feet or wings Titania's elves made sallies, And that's how Lady Alice Had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... beast suddenly disappears and encircled by a soft light two beautiful fairies come forward to teach the new Ala the occult science of his chosen ministry including cabalistic words and medical art. The two elves then become the familiar spirits of the sorcerer who ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... life— My onion is imperfectness: I cleave To nature's blunders, evanescent types Which sages banish from Utopia. "Not worship beauty?" say you. Patience, friend! I worship in the temple with the rest; But by my hearth I keep a sacred nook For gnomes and dwarfs, duck-footed waddling elves Who stitched and hammered for the weary man In days of old. And in that piety I clothe ungainly forms inherited From toiling generations, daily bent At desk, or plough, or loom, or in the mine, In pioneering labors for the world. Nay, I am apt, when floundering confused ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... given to Fairies is "Ellyll," an elf, a demon, a goblin. This name conveys these beings to the land of spirits, and makes them resemble the oriental Genii, and Shakespeare's sportive elves. It agrees, likewise, with the modern popular creed respecting goblins and ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... the wind blew furiously round the house, which seemed like a ship in a terrible storm. We drank to the fertilization of the dunes, to the victors of Achen, to the prosperity of the colonies, to the memory of Nino Bixio, to the elves. Nevertheless, I was still a little uneasy. Our host when he needed the servant touched a hidden spring; to tell the coachman to get the carriage ready he spoke some words into a hole in the wall; and these tricks ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... elves, the humming-birds, are frequent visitors to those honeysuckles, under which I have placed my reader to be a listener. How many vibrations those little wings make in a minute, how so long a bill can have subtractive force sufficient to get anything from the ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... the Moon with the nocturnal revels and dances of elves and fairies is felicitously expressed in the ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... scenery was Alpine, but the scale was toy-like, as befitted the region, and the mimic peaks and valleys with green brooks gushing between them, and strange rock forms recurring in endless caprice, seemed the home of children's story. All the gnomes and elves might have dwelt there in peaceful fellowship with the peasants who ploughed the little fields, and gathered the garlanded hops, and lived in the farmsteads and village houses with those high ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... then," Tai-yue suggested, whereupon Pao-yue prosecuted his raillery. "In this Lin Tzu cave," he said, "there was once upon a time a whole swarm of rat-elves. In some year or other and on the seventh day of the twelfth moon, an old rat ascended the throne to discuss matters. 'Tomorrow,' he argued, 'is the eighth of the twelfth moon, and men in the world will all be cooking the congee of the eighth of the twelfth moon. We have ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... for a goblin of darkness. The heart of Edwin, which no human terror could appal, sunk within him; his nerves trembled, and the objects that surrounded him, swam in confusion before his eyes. But it is not for virtue to tremble; it is not for conscious innocence to fear the power of elves and goblins. Edwin presently recollected himself, and a gloomy kind of tranquility assumed the empire of his heart. He was more watchful than ever for his beloved Imogen; he gazed with threefold earnestness upon ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... Invisible winged creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how oblivious were ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe! But so have I seen little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain. Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Langstaff, of Southampton, for some observations, which I have since repeated. The best plan for observing the order is to make a person first raise his eyebrows, and this produces transverse wrinkles across the forehead; and then very gradually to contract all the muscles round the elves with as much force as possible. The reader who is unacquainted with the anatomy of the face, ought to refer to p. 24, and look at the woodcuts 1 to 3. The corrugators of the brow (corrugator supercilii) seem to be the first muscles ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... cabin, the sugar-tree, the crystal stream, had sunk from sight, like the city in one of Monsieur Gralland's fantastic tales? Perhaps they had done so,—the spot had all the air of a bit of fairyland,—and the woodland maid was gone to walk with the elves. Well, perchance for her it would be better so. And yet it would be pleasant if she should climb the hillside now and sit beside him, with her shy dark eyes and floating hair. Her hair was long and ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... as if she had been born among white flowers in the moonlight, and because the afterglow of the sunrise, from which the elves flee, crimsoned her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... affairs. Rather more than a hundred years ago, for instance, a war broke out in Fairyland because the King of the Fairies, whose name is Oberon, and the Queen of the Fairies, whose name is Titania, had asked the Trolls to dinner. The Gnomes were very much annoyed at this, and the Elves still more so, for the chief glory of the Elves was that being elfish got you to know people; and it was universally admitted that the Trolls ought never to be asked out, because they were trollish. King Oberon said that ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... the elves at the noon of night on Cro' Nest top, and, clambering out of their flower-cup beds and hammocks of cobweb, they fly to the meeting, not to freak about the grass or banquet at the mushroom table, ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... third, a beautiful, spacious pine-wood, climbing over cliffs to the far verge of the cape where the lighthouse flashes. These were like woods in a fairy tale, and may well have had each their own particular elves and spirits. Each had a separate character: the first as of the earth, homely, full of gentle russet colours from the juniper and the wild fruit; the second, haggish, full of witches whose finger-nails had never ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... religious rites of the Anglo-Saxons. Woden or Odin, Thor and the other deities did not lose their adherents in a day, and Bede records the relapses into idolatry of Northumbria as well as the other parts of England. There can be no doubt that fairies and elves entered largely into the mythology of the Anglo-Saxons, and the firmness of the beliefs in beings of that nature can be easily understood when we realise that it required no fewer than twelve centuries of Christianity to finally destroy them ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... various individuals and classes in the communities is widespread both in myth and reality. We find peculiar dialects spoken by, or used in addressing, deities and evil spirits; giants, monsters; dwarfs, elves, fairies; ghosts, spirits; witches, wizards, "medicine men"; animals, birds, trees, inanimate objects. We meet also with special dialects of secret societies (both of men and of women); sacerdotal and priestly tongues; ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... classes of subordinate spirits, to whom were assigned peculiar employments. The chief of these were the Fairies, concerning whom the reader will find a long dissertation, in Volume Second. The Brownie formed a class of beings, distinct in habit and disposition from the freakish and mischievous elves. He was meagre, shaggy, and wild in his appearance. Thus, Cleland, in his satire against the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... Metaphysiques, and Miracles, and Traditions, and Abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else, but to execute what they command them. The Fairies likewise are said to take young Children out of their Cradles, and to change them into Naturall Fools, which Common people do therefore call Elves, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... to belong rather to elves than to fairies[81]—the elves that haunt hills, and are known all over Europe; dwarfs, trolls, kobolds, pixies, and so forth. Teutonic witches are called horn-blowers. Again, the fairy-train or fairy-hunt is supposed to carry horns; we have seen it already in Sir Orfeo,[82] ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick |
