"Faery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Faery Queene," if I must confess it, I can never read far without a sense of suffocation from the affluence of its beauties. It is a marvellously fair sea and broad,—with tender winds blowing over it, and all the ripples are iris-hued; but you long for some brave ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... up, on the grass I proceeded to lead Jane into the most cherished realms of my fancy. Together we sailed those "perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," dabbling our hands in the fountain, while the golden August sunshine ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... for ever, eagles, crying flames, And set them as a banner, that men may know, To dare the generations, burn, and blow Out on; the wind of Time, shining and streaming.... These I have loved: White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food; Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood; And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... storm, and had it there from King John, and then to Palos which, so to speak, went mad! Then through Spain to Barcelona, where was the court, and all the bells in every town ringing and every door and window crowded, and here is the Faery Prince on a white charger, his Indians behind him and gold and parrots and his sailors! Processions and processions—alcalde and alcayde and don and friar and priest, and let us stop at the church ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... seemed that we had, ages gone, In some far summer weather, When this same faery moonlight shone, Sung these ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... the ceaseless midnight cold, By the faery spell possessed, His head sunk down, and his gray beard rolled On the rust of his ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... snowflakes on the pane is like the furtive tread of fearful things in old, enchanted woods. If at first she missed those dainty novelties among which she was reared, the old, sufficient song of the mystical sea singing of faery lore at first soothed and at last consoled her. Even, she forgot those advertisements of pills that are so dear to England; even, she forgot political cant and the things that one discusses and the things that one does not, and had perforce to contend herself ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... what a faery view was there! Glad as he was to know that after to-night he would never again see this living room in its present familiar guise—for he had arranged with a furniture dealer to come and take everything left ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... in the smoky little tent, Ellen Ember began to dance, with her quite surprising grace—as Pierrette might have danced in Carnival. It was the charming, faery measure which she had danced for me in Miss Liddy's dining-room; and as she had sung to me then, so now, in a sweet piping voice, she ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... Of pearl beneath the azure waves, And tents all woven pleasantly In verdant glades of Faery. Come, beloved child, with me, And I will bear thee to the bowers Where clouds are painted o'er like flowers, And pour into thy charmed ear Songs a mortal may not hear; Harmonies so sweet and ripe As no inspired ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... running, chiming, striking upon the word "gold"— "Ding-a-ding-a-dong! 'Taty-patch a gold mine—'taty-patch a gold mine!" The prosaic Mr Latter had set the chime ringing, as a dull sacristan might unloose the music of a belfry; but like a chime of faery it rippled and trilled, closing ever upon the deep note "gold," and echoed back as from a veritable ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... depths of his imagination, a lovelier reflection of that of nature, like the hills and heavens more softly shining in the water of his native lake." Hogg was in his element, as he revelled amid the supernatural, and luxuriated in the realms of faery: the mysterious gloom of superstition was lit up into brilliancy by the potent wand of his enchantment, and before the splendour of his genius. His ballad of "Kilmeny," in the "Queen's Wake," is the emanation of a poetical mind evidently ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the regions of humanity by a sort of crimping system, which extended to adults as well as to infants. Many of those who were in this world supposed to have discharged the debt of nature, had only become denizens of the 'Londe of Faery'" (Scott). ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Faerie There is no lack of company,— The world is real, the world is wide, But there be many things beside. Who once has known that crystal spring Shall not lose heart for anything. The blessing of a faery wife Is love to sweeten all your life. To find the truth whatever it be— That is the luck ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... took it for a faery vision Of some gay creatures of the element, That in the colours of the rainbow live, And ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the jocund rebecks sound To many a youth and many a maid Dancing in the chequered shade, And young and old come forth to play On a sunshine holiday, Till the livelong daylight fail: Then to the spicy nut-brown ale, With stories told of many a feat, How Faery Mab the junkets eat. She was pinched and pulled, she said; And he, by Friar's lantern led, Tells how the drudging goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn That ten day-labourers ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... in the meads Full beautiful, a faery's child. Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... instance of a respectable character strangely disguised by the affectations and servilities of a courtier of this "Queen of Faery." He was the cousin, school-fellow, and inseparable companion of Sidney, and so devoted to him that, in the inscription which he composed long after for his own tomb, he entitled himself "servant to queen Elizabeth, councillor to king James, and friend to sir Philip ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... 2I 4 blank. Double columns. Dedication to Queen Elizabeth on verso of titlepage. Bks. I-III. Commendatory verses signed W. R. (i.e. Walter Raleigh) and Hobynoll (i.e. Gabriel Harvey). 'The Second Part of the Faery Queene', containing Bks. IV-VI, begins at sig. Q5 with separate titlepage 'Imprinted at London for Mathew Lownes. 1609.'. The fragment of the seventh book 'Of Mutability' first appears in this edition with head-title at sig. 2H 4. The copy described in the Huth catalogue, ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... be saved unless some other influence could be found to save us from the unseen masters of this place. For by this time we had need of mutual comfort, and openly said it to one another—but in low tones—that the valley was Faery. The river went on calling to us all the while. In places it was full of distant cheering, in others crowded with the laughter of a present multitude of tiny things, and always mocking us with innumerable tenuous voices. It grew to be evening. It was nearly two days ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... fairer hue Than Ganymed or Hylas; distant more, Under the trees now tripped, now solemn stood, Nymphs of Diana's train, and Naiades With fruits and flowers from Amalthea's horn, And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since Of faery damsels met in forest wide By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, 360 Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore. And all the while harmonious airs were heard Of chiming strings or charming pipes; and winds Of gentlest gale Arabian ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton
... And now although the inviting river flows, And every poplared cape, and every bend Or willowy islet, win upon thy soul And to thy hopeful shallop whisper speed; Yet hope not thou at all; hope is no more; And O, long since the golden groves are dead The faery cities ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Libyan shore. Overhead would be the azure sky. Before us, stealing up the golden beach, would be the Mediterranean. What a colourful scene! Soft breezes would lull you to my mood, and on their spicy-laden breath would come the notes of faery music." ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... of Mulla. Here, in the midst of terrors by night and day, at the edge of the dreadful Wood, where 'outlaws fell affray the forest ranger,' Spenser had been settled for three years, describing the adventures of knights and ladies in a wild world of faery that was but too like Munster, when the Shepherd of the Ocean came over to Ireland to be his neighbour. Raleigh settled himself in his own house at Youghal, and found society in visiting his cousin, Sir George Carew, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... heavenly works the terrestrial composition of a number of sonnets to his noble patrons; and not to multiply more instances, our great poet Spenser, in compliance with this disgraceful custom, or rather in obedience to the established tyranny of patronage, has prefixed to the Faery Queen fifteen of these adulatory pieces, which in every respect are the meanest of his compositions. At this period all men, as well as writers, looked up to the peers as if they were beings on whose smiles or frowns all sublunary good ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Straightway the faery realm opened to me, and two months of Italian rambling were spent in association with the folk I esteemed only less ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... it that won't make a decent show for itself after you've chopped all the rhyming tails off. That's my advice, Gifted Hopkins. Is there any book you would like to have out of my library? Have you ever read Spenser's Faery Queen?" ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... mortal, but stammer! Smite every rapturous wire With golden delirium, rebellion and silvery clamor, Crying—"Awake! awake! Too long hast thou slumbered! too far from the regions of glamour, With its mountains of magic, its fountains of Faery, the spar-sprung, Hast thou wandered away, O Heart! Come, oh, come and partake Of necromance banquets of beauty; and slake Thy thirst in the waters of art, That are drawn from the streams ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?" There were books enough; very few French books; but then any one who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, with extravagant enthusiasm. Lives of the Duke of Wellington, for example; Spinoza; the works of Dickens; the Faery Queen; a Greek dictionary with the petals of poppies pressed to silk between the pages; all the Elizabethans. His slippers were incredibly shabby, like boats burnt to the water's rim. Then there were photographs from the Greeks, and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua—all ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... connection with the Italian discourses of polite culture. Sidney's 'Arcadia' is a copy of what Boccaccio had attempted in his classical romances, and Sanazzaro in his pastorals.[18] Spenser approached the subject of the 'Faery Queen' with his head full of Ariosto and the romantic poets of Italy. His sonnets are Italian; his odes embody the Platonic philosophy of the Italians.[19] The extent of Spenser's deference to the Italians in matters of poetic art may be gathered from this passage in the dedication ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... occurred and renewed her hopes again: a position as amanuensis—with which some of the lighter duties of a nurse were combined—to an infirm gentleman of means living at Twickenham, and engaged upon a great literary research to prove that the "Faery Queen" was really a treatise upon molecular chemistry written in a peculiar ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Cairill—Cairill Swiftspear. An' Cairill wronged Keevan of Emhain Abhlach, of the blood of Angus of the great people when he was sleeping in the likeness of a pale reed. Then Keevan put this penance on Cairill—that for a year Cairill should wear his body in Emhain Abhlach, which is the Land of Faery and for that year Keevan should wear the body of Cairill. And ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... representation that even in this form he gains the reader's interest. But, if we ask what is the main thing which he celebrates, we find that it is precisely the course of the great war in which his nation is engaged against the Papacy and the Spaniards. The Faery Queen is his sovereign, whose figure under the manifold symbols of the qualities which she possessed, or which were ascribed to her, is always coming forward afresh in his verse. With wonderful power Elizabeth united around her all the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... a double throne. Like burnish'd cloud of evening shone; While, group'd the base around, Four Damsels stood of Faery race; Who, turning each with heavenly grace Upon me her immortal face, Transfix'd me to ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... Ireland, you must know, where if you lie down upon the green earth and sink into untimely slumber, you will 'wake silly'; or, for that matter, although it is doubtless a risk, you may escape the fate of waking silly, and wake a poet! Carolan fell asleep upon a faery rath, and it was the faeries who filled his ears with music, so that he was haunted by the tunes ever afterward; and perhaps all poets, whether they are conscious of it or not, fall asleep on faery raths before they write ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... every hilltop the eye turns to it, in the sheltered orchards the air is salt with it, the thunder of its great breakers on the coast can be heard far inland, an undercurrent beneath the singing of birds and the hum of bees; it is never far from the eyes or from the mind, blue as faery under a June sun, when the wheeling gulls are dazzling white flashes above it, broken into greys and greens and purples by the sudden hail of quick spring squalls, a heaving grey waste of waters under steady rain, or a wild and elemental force, terrible and splendid, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... you are and wherever you may be when you take up this book—I beg of you not to feel disturbed because I have let Fancy and a faery or two slip in between the covers. You will find them quite harmless and friendly—and very ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... is hard to see why you should include "Zanoni" or (to bracket works of very different value) "The Scarlet Letter"; and by what discrimination are you to open your doors to "The Pilgrim's Progress" and close them on "The Faery Queen"? To bring things closer home, I will here propound to Mr. Besant a conundrum. A narrative called "Paradise Lost" was written in English verse by one John Milton; what was it then? It was next translated by Chateaubriand into French prose; and what was it then? Lastly, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... different opinion, may it please your knighthood," answered Dwining, gently. "I will carry him off from the very foot of the gallows into the land of faery, like King Arthur, or Sir Huon of Bordeaux, or Ugero the Dane; or I will, if I please, suffer him to dangle on the gibbet for a certain number of minutes, or hours, and then whisk him away from the sight of all, ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... gone. Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold. Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the Faery Queen; A Scot will fight for Christ's Kirk o' the Green: And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at the devil. Though justly Greece her eldest sons admires, Why should not we be ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... completed, but enough was done to justify all the laudation that belongs to a Herculean task and the exploitation of an almost incredible amount of human data. As for finishing the work, the failure hardly detracts from its value or affects its place in literature. Neither Spenser's "Faery Queen" nor Wordsworth's "The Excursion" was completed, and, per contra, it were as well for Browning if "The Ring and the Book" had not been. In all such cases of so-called incompletion, one recognizes Hercules from the feet. Had this mighty story-teller ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... their part in this story, the Silver Knight, with his swan and faery skiff, the fair falsely-accused damsel, the wicked sorceress, could hardly be painted in flagrant life-colours. The music of Lohengrin brings to mind pictures one seems to remember on vellum margins ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... sleep.[2] [3]"This is brave of thee, O Cuchulain," quoth he. "It is not much, at all," replied Cuchulain. "But I will bring thee help," said the young warrior. "Who then art thou?" asked Cuchulain. "Thy father from Faery am I, even Lug son of Ethliu." "Yea, heavy are the bloody wounds upon me; let thy healing be speedy."[3] "Sleep then awhile, O Cuchulain," said the young warrior, "thy heavy fit of sleep by Ferta in Lerga ('the Gravemound on the Slopes') till ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... no more now Than daisies to a munching cow; Just a cheery pleasant season, Daisy buds to live at ease on. He's forgotten how he smiled And shrieked at snowdrops when a child, Or wept one evening secretly For April's glorious misery. Wisdom made him old and wary Banishing the Lords of Faery. Wisdom made a breach and battered Babylon to bits: she scattered To the hedges and ditches All our nursery gnomes and witches. Lob and Puck, poor frantic elves, Drag their treasures from the shelves. Jack the Giant-killer's ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... masses. The minds of men had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, but toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, not without a certain beauty and use—as let Spenser's 'Faery Queen' bear witness—till the latter half of the ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... that he had thought profoundly. But what minor item of insufficiency or feebleness was discernible? She discovered that he could be easily fretted by similes and metaphors they set him staggering and groping like an ancient knight of faery in a forest bewitched. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... attracted by him. A few minor poets, like Folengo, [Sidenote: Folengo, 1491-1544] showed traces of his influence, but Ariosto and Tasso were bitterly hostile. [Sidenote: Ariosto, 1531] The former cared only for his fantastic world of chivalry and faery, and when he did mention, in a satire dedicated to Bembo, that Friar Martin had become a heretic as Nicoletto had become an infidel, the reason in both cases is that they had overstrained their intellects in the study of metaphysical theology, "because ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... sit in an old sweater and muddy breeches, the very reverse of your picture of a soldier, and I imagine to myself your receipt of this. Our chief interest is to enquire whether milk, jam and mail have come up from the wagon-lines; it seems a faery-tale that there are places where milk and jam can be had for the buying. ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... Faery of Sheba, idol moulded in Onyx milk-white, moon-mailed and casqued with gems; Ye gold-swathed queens of Egypt, Isis' kin, With bright god-hawks and snakes for diadems; Serene masque-music of Greek girls that bear The sacred Veil to that ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... learns to observe suitable groupings and relationships, becomes sure of himself and free from the distraction of emotional disturbance, and may even come to enjoy the work. Certainly he improves greatly in speed of memorizing nonsense syllables. If, instead, he practises on Spenser's "Faery Queen", he improves in that, and may cut down his time for memorizing a twelve-line stanza from fifteen minutes to five. This improvement is due to the subject's finding out ways of tackling this particular sort of material. He gets used to Spenser's style ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... waiting for the slow sun to set: and when at last a tint on the walls of Lowlight came with the magic of Earth's most faery hour he rode in slowly not perhaps wholly unwitting, for all his anxious thoughts of Serafina, that a little air of romance from the Spring and the ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... that I heard said once, as if such a thing had never occurred to anybody before, "Yes, isn't it strange that those few families should keep it all among themselves!" It was a slender female voice, lifted by a young girl with an air of pensive surprise, as at a curious usage of some realm of faery. ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... it? how works it?... We scarcely detect it. But life goes: the heart dies: haste, O leech, and dissect it! This accursed aesthetical, ethical age Hath so finger'd life's hornbook, so blurr'd every page, That the old glad romance, the gay chivalrous story With its fables of faery, its legends of glory, Is turn'd to a tedious instruction, not new To the children that read it insipidly through. We know too much of Love ere we love. We can trace Nothing new, unexpected, or strange in his face When we see it at last. 'Tis the same little Cupid, With the same dimpled cheek, ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... compositions of Chopin, in his delightful and inspiring book, "Chopin, the Man and His Music," calls the studies Titanic experiments; the preludes, moods in miniature; the nocturnes, night and its melancholy mysteries; the ballades, faery dramas; the polonaises, heroic hymns of battle; the valses and mazurkas, dances of the soul; the scherzos, the work of Chopin the conqueror. In the sonatas and concertos he sees the princely Pole bravely carrying his banner amid classical currents. ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... of Milton suggests to us eloquent rhythms and images which pose like Grecian sculpture. But Milton's world was the world as the grave, gowned men saw it who composed the Westminster Confession. The name of Shelley rings like the dying fall of a song, or floats before our eyes amid the faery shapes of wind-tossed clouds. But Shelley's world was the world of the utilitarian Godwin and the mathematical Condorcet. The supremacy of an intellectual vision is not a common characteristic among poets, but it raises Milton and ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford |
