"Elves" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... says: "The Elves were supposed greatly to envy the privileges acquired by Christian initiation, and they gave to those mortals who had fallen into their power a certain precedence, founded upon this advantageous distinction. Tamlane, in the old ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... wild violets grew so thick you could not see the ground beneath them, 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 ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... but limp ungainly things that would rouse disdain and laughter and even pity, at anything at once so weak and so malevolent. But they are not like the demons of sin that can hamper and wound; they are just little gnomes and elves that can make a noise, and their strength is a ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... often exerted by the interposition of his angels and subordinate ministers, who executed his sacred purposes. But they also believed, that all nature was full of other invisible powers: fairies, goblins, elves, sprights; beings stronger and mightier than men, but much inferior to the celestial natures who surround the throne of God. Now, suppose that any one, in these ages, had denied the existence of God and of his angels, would not his impiety justly have deserved the appellation of atheism, even ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... life. Then the terrible scene changes; the wild 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 is in ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... folk-lore. The folk-lore of England was originally made up of Teutonic elements, which have been modified by Danish and Norman invasions, by remnants of old Keltic belief, and by the introduction of Christianity, which last degraded the good fairies into mischievous elves. (See Hazlitt, 'Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare,' Halliwell's 'Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of Midsummer Night's Dream,' also Poet-Lore, April, 1891, 'Fairy-lore in Midsummer ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... the mule carriage began to recede from the fixed roller beam, and to see them at leisure, after a few seconds' exercise of their tiny fingers, to amuse themselves in any attitude they chose, till the stretch and winding on were once more completed. The work of these lively elves seemed to resemble a sport, in which habit gave them a pleasing dexterity. Conscious of their skill, they were delighted to show it off to any stranger. As to exhaustion by the day's work, they evinced no trace of it on emerging from the mill in the evening; for they immediately ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... the long wooded hill clattering like a troop of the queen's cavalry, and turned down toward the great level bow which the road makes before it crosses the Gauley. There was a dim light rising beyond the flat lands where the crooked elves toiled with their backs against the golden moon. But they were under the world yet, with only the yellow haze shining through the door. This was the acre of ghosts. Tale after tale I had heard, sitting on the knee of the old grey negro Clabe, about the horrors ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... power over you, and you will go elf-wild!—so say the Danes. I had unconsciously laid myself down upon 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 with that stream, the glories of the present, and even the history of the future, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... 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 ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... twice when it came, and then to leave a blank for him to think about her in. The great slow steamer far out to sea showed a green eye of jealousy or a red one of anger because it could not come ashore where Sally was, but had perforce to go on wherever it was navigated. The millions of black sea-elves—did you ever discriminate them?—that the slight observer fancies are the interstices of the moonlight on the water, were all busy about Sally, though it was hard to follow their movements. And every time St. Sennan said what o'clock it was, he added, "One hour nearer ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... 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 conscious ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... to seem very lifeless. But the phantoms of Tasso, he would fain make realities; he works at every detail of character, history, or geography, which may make his people real; they are not, as with Spenser, elves and wizards flitting about in a nameless fairyland, characterless and passionless; they are historical creatures, captains and soldiers in a country mapped out by the geographer; but they are phantoms all the more melancholy, these beautiful and heroic Clorindas and Erminias and Tancreds ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... woods, limpid, serene, Puffing its fans the Nautilus went its way, And from a hundred salt and weedy shelves Peered little horned faces of sea-elves: The prawn darted, half-seen, Thro' watery sunlight, like a pale green ray, And all around, from soft green waving bowers, Creatures like fruit out-crept from fluted shells ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... elves of Troom seem dead, All their mighty deeds are fled; For their Hound, who hounds surpassed, Elves have bound ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... they came near a cave and the little mare went into it. They went through the cave. Then Svadilfare caught up on the little mare and the two went wandering together, the little mare telling Svadilfare stories of the Dwarfs and the Elves. ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... legends of his native 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. In his very first romance, "Den ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... them, and lo, the games become a mockery, and he finds that he is cavorting still outside the walls, while the good citizens inside are making sly sport of him. Who, being recently banished from Boyville, has not sought to return? In vain does he haunt the swimming hole; the water elves will have none of him. He hushes their laughter, muffles their calls, takes the essence from their fun, and leaves it dust upon ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours: I must go seek some dewdrops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear. Farewell, thou lob of spirits, I'll begone; Our queen and all our elves come here anon. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... murmur as the wind died down, rising to a high, clear crescendo of rushing, tumbling water as the breeze stirred in the tree tops and brought to him the forest sounds. Hour after hour he lay awake listening to it, his childish imagination picturing fairies and elves holding their revels in the woods beyond. An oratorical little brook it was, unconsciously leaving an impress of its musical speech on the ears of the embryo orator. Moreover, in its quiet pools lurked watchful trout. Few country ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... water, air 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 ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... related to the elves and the trolls," thought Gertrude. The old man was standing upon the hearth, playing his fiddle, so as not to be in the way ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... contains his most exquisite lyrics, his tenderest love passages, and one glimpse of fairyland which—I cannot but think—outshines the utmost beauty of A Midsummer Night's Dream: Prospero's farewell to the "elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves." Again a miracle; these are things which cannot be staled by repetition. Come to them often as you will, they are ever fresh as though new minted from the brain ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... white day; others like elves 490 Danced in a thousand unimagined shapes Upon the sunny streams ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... fourteenth century, but he added immensely to the actual legend. It is true that these additions still do not exactly give us the Arthur whom we know, for they still concern the wars with the Saxons and Romans chiefly. But if it were only that we find first[46] in Layamon the introduction of "elves" at Arthur's birth, and his conveyance by them at death in a magic boat to Queen "Argante" at Avalon, it would be almost enough. But there is much more. The Uther story is enlarged, and with it the appearances of Merlin; the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... of a separate order of beings, living on this earth, but invisible and immaterial to us. Able, however, occasionally to manifest their presence; known in almost all countries and ages as demons not necessarily bad, gnomes, fairies, kobolds, elves, goblins, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the fairy elves, who shun the light; When, from their blossom'd beds, they slily peep, And spy my pale star, leading on the night,— Forth to their ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... he enslaved their survivors or wedded their women, and in his turn fell into slavery to the cruel Druidic religion of his subjects. To these Iberians, and to the Celtic dread of them, we probably owe all the stories of dwarfs, goblins, elves, and earth-gnomes which fill our fairy-tale books; and if we examine carefully the descriptions of the abodes of these beings we shall find them not inconsistent with the earth-dwellings, caves, circle huts, or even with the burial ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... can be reached neither from above nor below, and on it stands a temple of their construction. In Pepeeko, Hilo, the natives labored for a month in quarrying and dressing stone, but when it was ready the elves built their temple in a night. So at Kohala they formed a chain twelve miles long between the quarry and the site, and, passing the blocks from hand to hand, finished the great ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... As Paul Sartori (528) has recently shown, the use of special or secret languages by 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; special dialects of princes, nobles, courts; women's ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... countries, the beliefs cherished by the non-literary classes whose ballads and fairy tales have only recently been collected, would probably reveal a general identity, concealed by diversity of name, among the 'lesser people of the skies,' the elves, fairies, Cyclopes, giants, nereids, brownies, lamiae. It could then be shown that some of these spirits survive among the lower beings of the mythology of what the Germans call a cultur-volk like the Greeks or Romans. It could also be proved that much of the narrative element in the classic epics ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... when my sister married. I was born out of wedlock, when my family were bankrupt and in mourning for an uncle who had taken his life. Now you know my family! That's the stock I come from. Once I narrowly escaped fourteen years' hard labour—so I've every reason to thank the elves, though I can't be altogether ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... 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
... been oppressively lively, thanks to a visit from the Dugdale children; which little elves were sent out of the way while their mother performed the not unnecessary duty of putting her establishment in order. For Harrie was determined that her house, and none other, should have the honour of receiving Uncle ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... awakened in me no surprise or even curiosity. It simply sounded homelike and familiar. I gazed abstractedly out of the window at the brilliant blossoms in the garden, that nodded their heads at me like so many little elves with coloured caps on, but I said nothing. I felt that Cellini watched me keenly ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... many other elves who lived in the garden. One, who lived in a lily which made a lovely home; and a poppy elf, who was always sleepy; but the rose elf liked her own sweet smelling room, with its crimson curtains, best ...
— Mother Stories • Maud Lindsay
... them not, but cheered himself as he rode on by calling to mind some of the beautiful stories of the old religion of his land. He thought of the elves and fairies who were said to dwell in these very forests, and at midnight to creep up from their hiding-places and gambol and play tricks among the flowers and dewdrops with the wild bees and the summer insects, or dance in magic circles on the greensward. ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... elves were away from home, a giant came into the glen. He was seeking just such a cool place ...
— Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children • Flora J. Cooke
... short in winter, so far North, and they would soon be driven into the house. Then they sat by the nursery fire; and those were almost the pleasantest hours, for the old nurse would tell them old Scotch stories of elves and fairies, and sing them old songs. Jean would crawl close to Randal and hold his hand, for fear the Red Etin, or some other awful bogle, should get her: and in the dancing shadows of the firelight she would think she saw Whuppity Stoorie, the ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... came over her while he stroked her hair. It came stealing, it came creeping, it came rushing, as when elves pass ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... 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 more enlightened than ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... where there is a fire." Mrs. Reece led the way. "Then you can tell us all about these elves." They sat down around the fire, and Mrs. Reece continued, "Don't you think it would be fun to pop corn while we're ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... woven 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
... tentativeness. The reader who comes to a perusal with the expectation of getting some substantial diet, will be grievously mistaken; but those who are content if they can catch and hold fast a fleeting flavour will not regret the half-hour spent in listening to the songs of the elves and the prattle of the pages in this quaint ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... how man, loke adoun: Awake and think on Cristes passioun I crowche the from Elves and from Wightes.' There with the night-spel seyde he anon rightes On the foure halves of the hous aboute And on the threissh-fold ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... a spot of earth, you might, I ween, Have guessed some congregation of the elves, To sport by summer moons, had ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... hardly any place more fantastic than a Bermuda shorefront in the moonlight. In these little eroded recesses, caves and grottoes one might expect to see crooked-legged gnomes, scampering to peer at the human intruder. Gnarled cedars, hanging precariously, might hide pixies and elves. A child's dream of fairyland, this reality of ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... are as dainty and airy as if the elves themselves had led her to their bowers and discovered to her their secrets; and this is truly what her poetic sense has done, for the poet is a seer and singer of the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... lips, the moon shone out from behind the clouds above the dark forest. There was a fragrance of lilies all about her, and a gossamer gown floated around her, whiter than the whiteness of the fairest lily. It was fine, like the finest lace that the frost-elves weave, and softer than the softest ermine of the snow. On her long golden hair gleamed ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... enchanting dreams of his boyhood, instead of sighing after them as something gone for ever, he would say to himself, "what matter they are gone? In the heavenly kingdom my own mother is waiting me, fairer and stronger and real. I imagined the elves; God ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks
... Renaissance both in England and in Italy had a similar craving. But the aspect under which these ancient dreams are regarded by them is most significantly different. With Spenser and Ariosto, fairies and elves, gods and demons, are regarded in their fancied connection with man. Even in the age of Pope, when the gods and the Rosicrucian Sylphs have become alike "poetical machinery," this is their work. But among the moderns it is as connected with Nature, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... executant, of one who stands between the music and our hearing. The music has to intoxicate him before he can play with it; then he becomes its comrade, in a kind of very serious game; himself, in short, that is to say inhuman. His fingers have in them a cold magic, as of soulless elves who have sold their souls for beauty. And this beauty, which is not of the soul, is not of the flesh; it is a sea-change, the life of the foam on the edge of the depths. Or it transports him into some mid-region of the air, between hell ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... than professing it. She was a queer card. She wore a green velvet 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... vegetable children into different shapes and making them no longer recognizable in their original forms. Like the fairies in Irish mythology, this man steals away the plant babies, but instead of leaving sickly elves in their places, he brings into the world exceedingly healthy or lusty youngsters which grow up into a full maturity, and develop traits of character superior to the ones they supplant. For instance he took away the ugly, thorny insipid cactus and replaced it by ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... for home at a brisk run, for during her adventure the night had advanced, and her imagination peopled the surrounding bush with bogeys, and imps and elves. ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... 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
... runners. There was a magnificent sunset, and the snowy hills and deep-blue water of the St. Lawrence Gulf seemed to rim in the splendor like a huge bowl of pearl and sapphire brimmed with wine and fire. Tinkles of sleigh bells and distant laughter, that seemed like the mirth of wood elves, came from every quarter. ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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 ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... of mortals, thou distinguish'd care Of thousand bright Inhabitants of Air! If e'er one vision touch.'d thy infant thought, Of all the Nurse and all the Priest have taught; 30 Of airy Elves by moonlight shadows seen, The silver token, and the circled green, Or virgins visited by Angel-pow'rs, With golden crowns and wreaths of heav'nly flow'rs; Hear and believe! thy own importance know, 35 Nor bound thy narrow views ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... he descended the stairs. "Before I would call that gray carle my father, or his child my wife, may I feel all the hammers of the elves and sprites he keeps tortured within that ugly little prison-house playing a death's march on my body! Holy Saint Dunstan, the timbrel-girls came in time! They say these wizards always have fair daughters, and their love ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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
... saw approaching a set of the most beautiful little people, so little that they would only have reached to my knee; they looked like men and women, but they were better proportioned. They called themselves Elves, and their garments were composed of the leaves of flowers, trimmed with the wings of gnats and flies—not at all ugly. They seemed as if they were searching for something—what I did not know; but when they came a little nearer to me their leader tapped my sausage-stick, and said, ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... historian, and with the widow and daughter of Steffens. There is a music in Tieck's voice, a spirituality in his intelligent eyes, which age cannot lessen, but, on the contrary, must increase. The Elves, perhaps the most beautiful story which has been conceived in our time, would alone be sufficient, had Tieck written nothing else, to make his name immortal. As the author of M rchen, I bow myself before him, the elder and The master, and who was the ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... told her best tales; and when at last the child lay down under her lace curtains, her head was full of a curious jumble of Christmas elves, poor children, snow-storms, sugarplums, and surprises. So it is no wonder that she dreamed all night; and this was the dream, which ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... Hammerstein Castle, a ring of basking sward, girdled by a silver slate-brook, and guarded by four high-peaked hills that slope down four long wooded corners to the grassy base. Here, it is said, the elves and earthmen play, dancing in circles with laughing feet that fatten the mushroom. They would have been fulfilling the tradition now, but that the place was occupied by a sturdy group of mortals, armed with staves. The intruders were sleepy, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... 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, the ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... azure! 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 ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... in the brook, Sealed are the spicy valves; Mesmeric fingers softly touch The eyes of many elves. ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... bwye ye dun Elves! who, on whings made o'leather, Still roun my poorch whiver an' whiver at night; Aw mAc naw hord-horted, unveelin disturber, DestrAcy your snug nests, an your plAc ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... slim figures of the dancers, with their flashing blue or black eyes, their burning cheeks, their parted lips, their bosoms rising and falling, the scene moving in ever-changing perspective; a sight gay and wonderful as the freakish games of a crowd of elves. ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... I have heard them gladly, And if I could, would turn them all to elves, That if they cannot ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... the mind) has fled. Spirit is used especially in contradistinction from matter; it may in many cases be substituted for soul, but soul has commonly a fuller and more determinate meaning; we can conceive of spirits as having no moral nature; the fairies, elves, and brownies of mythology might be termed spirits, but not souls. In the figurative sense, spirit denotes animation, excitability, perhaps impatience; as, a lad of spirit; he sang with spirit; he replied with spirit. Soul denotes energy and depth of feeling, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... 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, and ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... looks 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
... eccentric members that I was startled into biblical phrases. In the market they were strange enough, dead and on the marble slabs, or in green leaves, but in the lagoon they were a kaleidoscope of complexions and shapes. They were the lovely elves to complement the fantastic shellfish, yellow, striped with violet; bright turquoise, with a gold collar; gold, with broad bands of black terminating in winglike fins; scarlet, with cobalt polka-dots; silver, with a rosy flush; glossy green, dazzling ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... veil from the many; they cannot see the heavenly beauty of Nature—they do not understand the fairy tale which she is ever telling. This is gentle, idyllic, fairy lore, unsought by the learned. It whispers of roses, of dancing elves, of weeping ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... 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 ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... If any elves had been hovering about the dingy hall just then, they would have seen the mother's tired face brighten beautifully when she discovered the gifts, and found that her little girls had been so kindly remembered. Something more brilliant than the mock diamonds in ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... used to try to imagine what tune it was that could call from the mountain air the 'flower sprites' and 'sunshine elves' of morning on ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... saw some mighty pretty shows; A revolution, without blood or blows, For, as I understood, the cunning elves, The people all revolted ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... sprightly elves Who, as they row, And as their shining oars they swing Them to and fro, Keep time to music wafted on The scented air, Made by the mermaids as they comb ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... queen of sprites there happened, at this time, a sad disagreement: they never met by moonlight in the shady walks of this pleasant wood, but they were quarreling, till all their fairy elves would creep into acorn-cups and ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... is," continued the dwarf, "that we see many strange things; but I have nothing very remarkable at present to relate, for my journey was an ordinary one but for my accident. I had to see the elves who had charge of healing herbs, and gain their permission to cull them, for they are very particular that they should be pulled in the right season, and they so cover their gardens up that one could ...
— The Princess Idleways - A Fairy Story • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... the dewy branches; crystal streams lisping through banks purple with violets, rosy with eglantine, or sweet with wild thyme; thickets where the rabbits hide; sequestered nooks on which the elms and alders throw long shadows; circles of green grass made by dancing elves; rounded hills shut in by oaks, pines, birches, and laurel, where shepherds pipe on oaten straws, or shag-haired satyrs frolic and sleep; and meadows, whose carpets of cowslip and mint are freshened daily by nymphs pouring out gentle streams from ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... lichen on the trees takes the form of their leaves. In the most stupendous scenes you will see delicate and fragile features, as slight wreaths of vapor, dewlines, feathery sprays, which suggest a high refinement, a noble blood and breeding, as it were. It is not hard to account for elves and fairies; they represent this light grace, this ethereal gentility. Bring a spray from the wood, or a crystal from the brook, and place it on your mantel, and your household ornaments will seem plebeian beside ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... repeat the plots current in other countries, and display the same non-Christian idea of death and of the future world (see "The Lyke-wake Dirge"), the same ghostly superstitions and stories of metamorphosis, and the same belief in elves and fairies, as are found in the ballads of Greece, of Provence, of Brittany, Denmark and Scotland. We shall now examine these supposed common notes of all genuine popular song, supplying a few out of the many instances of curious identity. As to brusqueness of recital, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there, 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the signal giv'n, Behold a wonder! They but now who seem'd In bigness to surpass earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless, like that Pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount, or fairy elves, Whose midnight revels by a forest side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while over-head the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth Wheels her pale course: they on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear; At once with joy and ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... sensitiveness to the finer stuff of romance. He has chosen more than occasionally to employ, in the accomplishment of his purposes, what seems at first to be precisely the magical apparatus so necessary to the older Romanticism. Dryads and elves are his intimate companions, and he dwells at times under fairy boughs and in enchanted woods; but for him, as for the poets of the Celtic tradition, these things are but the manifest images of an interior passion and delight. Seen in the transfiguring mirror of his music, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... so much better that day, that the good doctor, when he came, was astonished; and when he heard that the fairies had done him the honor to take him to their Midsummer festival, he was delighted, as well as astonished, and laughingly declared that the elves had robbed him of his patient. "Why, Charley," he continued, "if the fairy Queen can put such a rosy color in your cheeks, and such a sparkle in your eyes in one night, she beats me all to pieces at doctoring. I shall have to give you up to her, and only come here every day to make a social call, ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... a general rustle and flutter, as when a covey of wild pigeons has been started; and all the little elves who rejoice in the name of "says he" and "says I" and "do tell" and "have you heard" were speedily flying through the consecrated air ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Face-of-god, smiling in his face, 'but where I pray thee are these elves and wood-wights, that we meet them not? Grim things there are in the woods, and things fair enough also: but meseemeth that the trolls and the elves of thy young years have been ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... 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 all ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... "Away, ye dainty elves, ye have served my turn to-day, and I shall not forget." They danced to exquisite waltz music, hovering above Faust, and gradually disappeared in the mists of ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... 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 humor. Take Irving's ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... were ethereal beings of great beauty and with voices that had the clearness of silver. During moonlight nights especially they danced in dales and groves. Ljusalfer, light elves, personified the benign influences in nature, especially as they manifest themselves in the realms of light and air. Svartalfer, black elves, lived in the earth and personified the silent forces that operate beneath its surface. ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... by moonlight, dancing in the fields; and when their track was found in the dew,[3] a good harvest was expected. Popular belief took the floating autumn cobwebs for the work of elves and fairies. The spirits of mountain and wood were related to the water-spirits, nixies who sat combing their long hair in the sun, or stretched up lovely arms out of the water. The elves belonged to the more spiritual side of Nature, the ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... into the full, quivering pinkness of the jewel-like light that floated about them, . . girls as 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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... woman to treasure. But them 'at expect when they tak hooam a bride, 'At nowt nobbut sunshine wi' them will abide, An' think 'at noa sorrow will iver oppress, They'll find ther mistak aght, yo'll easily guess. For th' mooast fascinatin an' lovable elves, Are all on 'em mortal, just th' same as ussels, An' show tempers 'at sometimes are net ovver pleasant, They find fault whear ther's room, an' sometimes whear ther isn't, An' to get there own way, ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... thoughts could have 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 to your words"— ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... 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 ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy |
