"Faerie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that struck one; that was the general character of the whole. Then, in details, there, on stout oak shelves, were the books on which my father loved to jest his more imaginative brother; there they were,—Froissart, Barante, Joinville, the Mort d'Arthur, Amadis of Gaul, Spenser's Faerie Queene, a noble copy of Strutt's Horda, Mallet's Northern Antiquities, Percy's Reliques, Pope's Homer, books on gunnery, archery, hawking, fortification; old chivalry and ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... else, comments: 'As the unprejudiced reader will see, this clear and admirable account confirms our hypothesis that in communal celebration we have at once the origin and model of three poems, "The Faerie Queene," "Paradise Lost" and "In Memoriam," recorded as having been composed by members of ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... of the sixteenth century, we begin to find such verse as I shall now present to my readers. Only I must first make a few remarks upon the great poem of the period: I mean, of course, The Faerie Queen. ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... the play show any traces of obligation to Spenser, who wrought the same tale into the variegated structure of his great poem. The story of Phedon, relating the treachery of his false friend Philemon, is in Book ii. canto 4 of The Faerie Queene; which Book was ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... of King Artour, Of which the Bretons speken gret honour, All was this lond ful-filled of Faerie; The elf-quene with hire joly compagnie Danced ful oft in many a grene mede. This was the old opinion as I rede; I speke of many hundred yeres ago; But now can no man see ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... thought it an acquittal of conscience after their kindling periods to dwell on the immorality of war. The one spoke of the beauty of Bible precepts, the other disburdened himself on the cruelty and wickedness of a battle. What artistic hypocrisy! It was as if one were to strike up the "Faerie Voices" waltz, and tell a girl to keep her feet still; as if one were to lend "Robinson Crusoe" to a boy, and warn him not to think of running away to sea. Still, I must even add my voice to the orthodox chorus, and affirm that warfare is bad, brutal, fraudful, a thing of meretricious ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... and learning Sir Philip Sydney, that he made him known to Queen Elizabeth, and by that means got him preferred to be secretary to his brother{5} Sir Henry Sidney, who was sent deputy into Ireland, where he is said to have written his "Faerie Queen;" but upon the return of Sir Henry, his employment ceasing, he also return'd into England, and having lost his great friend Sir Philip, fell into poverty, yet made his last refuge to the Queen's bounty, and had 500l. ordered ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... Antony Diogenes the most ancient, whose epitome we find in Phocius Bibliotheca, Longus Sophista, Eustathius, Achilles, Tatius, Aristaenetus, Heliodorus, Plato, Plutarch, Lucian, Parthenius, Theodorus, Prodromus, Ovid, Catullus, Tibullus, &c. Our new Ariostoes, Boyards, Authors of Arcadia, Urania, Faerie Queen, &c. Marullus, Leotichius, Angerianus, Stroza, Secundus, Capellanus, &c. with the rest of those facete modern poets, have written in this kind, are but as so many symptoms of love. Their whole books are a synopsis or breviary of love, the portuous ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... is a cycle of poems, and the verse has caught the very trick of music,—alluring, baffling, and evasive. This time we have the landscape of the night, the glamour of moon and stars,—pictures half real and half unreal, mystic imaginings, fancies, dreams, and the enchantment of "faerie," and throughout the unanswered cry, the eternal "Wherefore" of destiny. Dawn ends the song with a fine clear note, the return of day, night's misty phantoms rolled away, and the world itself, again ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... literature most easily commanded by the storyteller who has not read widely. Stories from the Norse and Greek Mythology, from the Niebelungen Lied, the Arthurian legends, and from Robin Hood; stories of Roland and of Charlemagne; stories from the Faerie Queene, and from the Canterbury Tales; historical and biographical stories are generously represented in the five hundred titles, but such stories should not be attempted without sufficient reading and feeling for the subject to enable the ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... inadequate name, and Cloth of Gold will always be the most favourite combination, and when planted together one sets off the other to a degree little thought of when these varieties are grown separately. Purple and the other yellows (Faerie Queene and Monarch) also make a pleasing bed. Fire King and Orange Bedder should be grown in masses, separately or together, and when seen in the late afternoon or early evening their vivid and gorgeous colouring is almost unsurpassed ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... of Paris was to her unknowe"; but his "Legende of Goode Women" might, so far as its subject-matter is concerned, have been written by a French, a Spanish, or an Italian Chaucer, just as well as by the British Daniel. Spenser's "Faerie Queene" numbers St. George and King Arthur among its heroes; but its scene is laid in Faerie Lande, if it be laid anywhere, and it is a barefaced moral allegory throughout. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, the elimination of which from ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... they had rested themselves awhile in the castle that the stranger knight told who he was and why he came there. He was, he said, Arthur, the ward of Merlin, and had ridden far and long in quest of the Faerie Queen. And having fulfilled his vow to Una, in delivering the Red Cross Knight out of the power of the giant, he bade both farewell, leaving behind him, as a remembrance of their friendship a diamond box containing a precious ointment, which would cure any wound, however ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... invariably so fascinating to children that it is certain they must serve some good purpose and appeal to some inherent craving in child-nature. But here comes in the necessity of discrimination. The true meaning of the word "faerie" is spiritual, but many stories masquerade under that title which have no claim to it. Some universal spiritual truth underlies the really fine old fairy tale; but there can be no educative influence in the ...
— The Story Hour • Nora A. Smith and Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the hard rock go the branching silver veins; as into the solid land run the creeks and gulfs from the unresting sea; as the lights and influences of the upper worlds sink silently through the earth's atmosphere; so doth Faerie invade the world of men, and sometimes startle the common eye with an association as of cause and effect, when between the two no connecting ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... a lady of great dignity, And lifted up to honorable place; Famous through all the land of Faerie: Though of mean parentage and kindred base, Yet decked with wondrous gifts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... is for sale. Could I buy that faerie land, sweetheart, and build therein a hidden house and over its threshold carry a sweet bride! Ah, you have rewritten the sacred story of Eden. Not for the love of woman should I be driven from the happy garden, but brought by woman's grace from the desert into the circle of ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... confessions to be made, which would have the effect of putting his young nurse and himself upon more open and intimate terms. He looked forward to this culmination with impatience, and yet with anxiety. One morning, when they had been reading Spenser's "Faerie Queene," Cornelia's weekly letter was brought in, and subsequently ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... interest Larry, whose eyes followed the man inquiringly. When we went into Bates’ room on our tour of the house, Larry scanned the books on a little shelf with something more than a casual eye. There were exactly four volumes,—Shakespeare’s Comedies, The Faerie Queen, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and Yeats’ Land ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... followed the law, and with success, but his heart was with the Muses and the odorous East. From a boy he had loved and studied the old English, Scotch and Welsh writers, with the result that all his productions have a mediaeval aroma. The Faerie Queene, Chaucer and his successors—the Scottish poets of the 15th and 16th Centuries, The Morte d'Arthur, the authorised version of the Bible and North's Plutarch have always lain at his elbow. Then, too, with Dante, Shakespeare and Heine's poems he is supersaturated; but the ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the difficult rhyming scheme, a scheme that calls for six words of one rhyme and four of another, will understand the presence of forced lines, an intrusion that one must needs suffer in even "The Faerie Queene." These padded lines are a serious blemish to the poem, but the introduction of naive and familiar expressions is one of its charms, as when the Pearl, protesting like Piccarda in Paradise[1] that among beatified spirits there ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett
... Jaegers. All are gracefully molded women's figures, and all alike are emblematic of the richness of the harvest. The signs of the zodiac letter the cornice between the arches and the attic. The inscription above the eastern gateway is from Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and that over the western from "The Triumph of ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... the Forests of Thy Wonder, where the mighty giants grow, Where we cleave Thy works asunder, and lay the mighty low, From the jungle and the prairie, From the realms of fact and faerie,— Evening brings us home at last, To ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... passionate "Melodie"; then a lilting measure from Debussy's "Faun," followed by a solemnly lovely Brahms arrangement devised by the virtuoso himself. At the dying-out of the applause, the violinist addressed himself to the nook where Io was no more than a vague, faerie figure to his eyes, misty ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Rushton quotes several instances in its fuller form, "fee simple,"—we have but to turn back a few stanzas in this same canto of the "Faerie Queene," to find one in which the term is used with the completest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Swarm'd and were straitn'd; till the Signal giv'n, Behold a wonder! they but now who seemd In bigness to surpass Earths Giant Sons Now less then smallest Dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless, like that Pigmean Race 780 Beyond the Indian Mount, or Faerie Elves, Whose midnight Revels, by a Forrest side Or Fountain fome belated Peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while over head the Moon Sits Arbitress, and neerer to the Earth Wheels her pale course, they on thir mirth & dance ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... first, lusty spring all dight in leaves and flowres - then came the jolly sommer being dight in a thin cassock coloured greene, then came the autumne all in yellow clad - lastly came winter cloathed all in frize, chattering his teeth for cold that did him chill," from "The Faerie Queene," by Edmund Spenser. On the western gateway, "For lasting happiness we turn our eyes to one alone, and she surrounds you now, great nature, refuge of the weary heart and only balm to breasts that have been bruised. She bath cool hands for every fevered brow and gentlest ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... waters, between soaring canyon walls, we raced eastward into the creeping twilight. Here and there the banks widened out into valleys of wondrous beauty, flanked by jagged miniature mountains transfigured in the slant evening light. It seemed the "faerie land forlorn" of which Keats dreamed, where year after year come only the winds and the rains and the snow and the sunlight and ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... illusions; but, as Shakespeare tells us, our little life is rounded with a sleep,—a dreamland. If Madame Blavatsky had recovered Prospero's buried wand, and amid the dry and dusty realism of our time raised for her followers a realm of faerie, beguiling them from scenes of falling temples and fading heavens, were it not cruel to break her wand, even though it be glamour? I remember at Concord, in my youth, a little controversy in which miracles were ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... the revels of Kenilworth, made possible also the splendor, like that of setting suns, which characterizes the "Faerie Queen." And the prowess, the achievement, the discovery, the colonization, the high tide of life, which ran like lightning through the Nation's arteries, made the drama, not only a possibility, but a fact. It was the embodiment of the mighty activities of a mighty age. The tragedy, to use the splendid ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Hickory, Dame Hickory, Here's sticks for your fire, Furze-twigs, and oak-twigs, And beech-twigs, and briar!' But when old Dame Hickory came for to see, She found 'twas the voice of the false faerie. ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... proper opposite of Hope. By Giotto she is represented as a woman hanging herself, a fiend coming for her soul. Spenser's vision of Despair is well known, it being indeed currently reported that this part of the Faerie Queen was the first which drew to it the attention of Sir ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... been digging from the minds of Chaucer and Spenser, and which, with all their rusticity, had somewhat of venerable in them. But I found not there neither that for which I looked. At last I had recourse to his master, Spenser, the author of that immortal poem called the "Faerie Queen," and there I met with that which I had been looking for so long in vain. Spenser had studied Virgil to as much advantage as Milton had done Homer, and amongst the rest of his excellences had copied that. Looking farther into the Italian, ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... first part of 'Polyolbion,' and in 1622 completed the work. In 1626 we hear of him being styled Poet Laureate, but the title then implied neither royal appointment, nor fee, nor, we presume, duty. In 1627 he published 'The Battle of Agincourt,' 'The Court of Faerie,' and other poems; and, three years later, a book called 'The Muses' Elysium.' He had at last found an asylum in the family of the Earl of Dorset; whose noble lady, Lady Anne Clifford, subsequently Countess of Pembroke, and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... nevertheless, practised and valiant soldiers, and prudent and crafty politicians; that he who wrote the "Arcadia" was at the same time, in spite of his youth, one of the subtlest diplomatists of Europe; that the poet of the "Faerie Queene" was also the author of "The State of Ireland;" and if they shall quote against me with a sneer Lilly's "Euphues" itself, I shall only answer by asking—Have they ever read it? For if they have done so, I ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... gracious lady, yet no paines did spare To doe him ease, or doe him remedy: Many restoratives of vertues rare And costly cordialles she did apply, To mitigate his stubborne malady. Spenser's Faerie Queens. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the Niblung story in the sober history of the Goths and Huns, Burgundians and Franks, is like the vanity confessed by the author of the Roman de Rou, when he went on a sentimental journey to Broceliande, and was disappointed to find there only the common daylight and nothing of the Faerie. Nevertheless it is the historical names, and the vague associations about them, that give to the Niblung story, not indeed the whole of its plot, but its temper, its pride and glory, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... true, unless, indeed, there be no answer to Pilate's 'What is truth?' For myself, I walk in a whirling world and a darkness shot with fire. Did I do this thing? Yea, verily, I did! Then, seeing that I dwell not in Edmund Spenser's faerie-land nor believe that an enchanter's wand may make white seem black and black seem white, I now see myself nakedly as I am,—a man who knew not himself; a sword, jewel—hilted, with a blade of lath; a gay masker whom, his vizard torn away, the servants thrust forth into the cold! ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... china jugs filled with magnificent double stocks, and rich wallflowers,* with their bitter-sweet odour, like the taste of orange marmalade, pinks, sweet-peas, and mignonette, from her own little garden, or woodland posies that might beseem the hand of the faerie queen, composed of those gems of flowers, the scarlet pimpernel, and the blue anagallis, the rosy star of the wild geranium, with its aromatic crimson-tipped leaves, the snowy star of the white ochil, and that third starry flower the yellow loose-strife, the milk vetch, purple, or pink, ...
— Aunt Deborah • Mary Russell Mitford
... and the seventh Was wrought as the faerie blades, And given to Elf the minstrel By the ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... falling rills Within a valley of sweet grass, To which there went one narrow pass Through the dark hills, but seldom trod. Rarely did horse-hoof press the sod About the quiet weedy moat, Where unscared did the great fish float; Because men dreaded there to see The uncouth things of faerie; Nathless by some few fathers old These tales about the place were told That neither squire nor seneschal Or varlet came in bower or hall, Yet all things were in order due, Hangings of gold and red and blue, And tables with fair service ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... Hirst, not yet a ghost, substantial, His off-drives mellow as brown ale, and crisp Merry late cuts, and brave Chaucerian pulls; Waddington's fury and the patience of Dipper; And twenty easy artful overs of Rhodes, So many stanzas of the Faerie Queen. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... frontispiece with the central chamber of the How, but the essential features are the same. Even such a minute touch as the terraces on the hill have their bearing, I believe, on Mr. MacRitchie's "realistic" views of Faerie. For in quite another connection Mr. G. L. Gomme, in his recent "Village Community" (W. Scott), pp. 75-98, has given reasons and examples for believing that terrace cultivation along the sides of hills ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... this play, is not conceived with his usual judgment. There is no analogy or resemblance whatever between the fairies of Spenser, and those of Shakespeare. The fairies of Spenser, as appears from his description of them in the second book of the Faerie Queene, Canto 10. were a race of mortals created by Prometheus, of the human size, shape, and affections, and subject to death. But those of Shakespeare, and of common tradition, as Johnson calls them, were a diminutive race of sportful beings, endowed with immortality and supernatural ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... shop; another, that he was only the son of a physician: one alleges that he was an atheist; another, that he was a Trinitarian, and so forth. But we know almost as little with respect to many men of comparatively modern times. Thus, how little do we know of the lives of Spenser, author of 'The Faerie Queen,' and of Butler, the author of 'Hudibras,' beyond the fact that they lived in comparative obscurity, and died in extreme poverty! How little, comparatively, do we know of the life of Jeremy Taylor, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the most beautiful bridge in Sussex, dating from the fourteenth century, and a little church filled with memorials of the Bartelott family. One of Stopham's rectors was Thomas Newcombe, a descendant of the author of The Faerie Queene, the friend of the author of Night Thoughts, and the author himself of a formidable poem in twelve books, after Milton, called ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... poet, Edmund Spenser, who wrote his wonderful poem, "The Faerie Queene," in the days of Queen Elizabeth, invented a great many new words. Some of these were seldom or never used afterwards, but some became ordinary English words. Sometimes his new words were partly formed out of old words which were ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... Greek cycle stories Norse cycle stories King Arthur tales Charlemagne and Roland legends Chivalry tales Stories from Chaucer Stories from the Faerie Queene Irish hero tales Stories from Shakespeare Stories from the Old Testament Stories from the New Testament Robin ...
— Lists of Stories and Programs for Story Hours • Various
... Honor, were you not provoked with yourself for being so old as to regard that bewitching sprite, and marvel whence comes the cost of those robes of the woof of Faerie? ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... animals," I say,' and so on. It is evident that this mode of speech is not only literary, but literary in a very ornate and almost artificial sense. Keats never put into a sonnet so many remote metaphors as a coster puts into a curse; his speech is one long allegory, like Spenser's 'Faerie Queen.' ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton |
