"Elvish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... numbers 15 were discernable. Roused by a note so unusual, and an apparition so unwontedly smug as the worthy Morris, a whole legion of dingy and smoke-dried brats, came trooping from the surrounding huts, and with many an elvish cry, and strange oath, and cabalistic word, which thrilled the respectable marrow of Mr. Brown, they collected in a gaping, and, to his alarmed eye, a menacing group, as near to the house as their fears and ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... heroines belong, not to England, not to Christendom, but to an Utopia of gallantry, to a Fairyland, where the Bible and Burn's justice are unknown, where a prank which on this earth would be rewarded with the pillory is merely matter for a peal of elvish laughter. A real Homer, a real Careless, would, it is admitted, be exceedingly bad men. But to predicate morality or immorality of the Horner of Wycherley and the Careless of Congreve is as absurd as it would be to arraign a sleeper for his dreams. "They belong to the regions of pure comedy, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... arms and warm words, like comfortable innkeepers. But travelling in the great level lands has a curiously still and lonely quality; lonely even when there are plenty of people on the road and in the market-place. One's voice seems to break an almost elvish silence, and something unreasonably weird in the phrase of the nursery tales, "And he went a little farther and came to another place," comes back into ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... he, stroking his beard, "but you're in mighty grace. The Welshman always mounts his he-goats for guard on them he delighteth to honour." With one of his more than ordinarily elvish and malicious shouts he scampered past the enraged sentinels, and was heard rapidly ascending the steps of the great tower, beneath the massive foundations of which lay the dark and cheerless abode so unexpectedly destined for the reception ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Rose He conjured, and in a glassy cauldron set With elvish unsubstantial Mignonette And such vague bloom as wandering dreams enclose. But she? Awed, Charmed to tears, Distracted, Yet— Even yet, perhaps, a trifle ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... chambers, will be hocus-pocust into mere store-houses, wretcheder ones than if they were made of wood, into miserable wareshops and stalls. What then would the dwarfish sprites, and the mighty mountain-spirit, and all the goblins and elvish imps, and the swarm of gnomes there below have to do? and yet they are always, some of them cleverly, some of them clumsily, putting their hands to the wheel. And the waters! and the vapours! O thou ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... 'chapelet', 'carol', 'deluge', 'franchise', 'illusion', 'problem', 'recreant', 'sphere', 'tissue', 'transcend', with very many easier than these. In Skinner's Etymologicon (1671), there is another list of obsolete, words{86}, and among these he includes 'to dovetail', 'to interlace', 'elvish', 'encombred', 'masquerade' (mascarade), 'oriental', 'plumage', 'pummel' (pomell), and 'stew', that is, for fish. Who will say of the verb 'to hallow' that it is now even obsolescent? and yet Wallis two hundred years ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench |
