"Sylph" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... crowning proof. Paternal affection, family pride, the noble instincts to reinstate yourself in the castle of your ancestors, all demand the step. And when you have seen the lady! She has the figure and motions of a sylph, the face of an angel, the eye of love itself. What a sight she is crossing the lawn on a sunny afternoon, or gliding airily along the corridors of the old place the De Stancys knew so well! Her lips are the softest, reddest, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... little nose with an upward tilt, which expressed a contemptuous gaiety, an inquiring curiosity; a dimpled chin sloping a little towards the full round throat; the bust and shoulders of a Venus, the waist of a sylph, set off by the close-fitting velvet bodice, with its diamond and turquoise buttons; hair of palest gold, fluffed out into curls that were traps for sunbeams; hands and arms of a milky whiteness ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... and are within half a mile of it. We are inside of Sister Islands, and the Sylph seems to be taking the same course. She acts just as though she was following us," said Dory, who had been watching the progress of the beautiful steam-yacht ever since she first came ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... the beautiful. On the other hand, the grotesque seems to be a halting-place, a mean term, a starting-point whence one rises toward the beautiful with a fresher and keener perception. The salamander gives relief to the water-sprite; the gnome heightens the charm of the sylph. ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... earnestly upwards. Presently one of the trees—as I must call them—unfolded a long ciliary process, with which it seized one of the gleaming fruits that glittered on its summit, and sweeping slowly down, held it within reach of Animula. The sylph took it in her delicate hand, and began to eat. My attention was so entirely absorbed by her, that I could not apply myself to the task of determining whether this singular plant was or was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... this strange mother and daughter, whilst the pretty Euphemia paid the same compliment to him. During his stay, he ventured to look once only at her sylph-like figure. There was an unreceding something in her liquid blue eyes, when he chanced to meet them, which displeased him; and he could not help seeing that from the instant she entered the room she had seldom ceased staring in ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... theaters of Europe. To the subdued strains of the orchestra there seems to appear in the midst of a shower of light, a cascade of gold and diamonds in an Oriental setting, a deity wrapped in misty gauze, a sylph enveloped in a luminous halo, who moves forward apparently without touching the floor. In her presence the flowers bloom, the dance awakens, the music bursts forth, and troops of devils, nymphs, satyrs, demons, angels, shepherds and shepherdesses, ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... little bird whispered in my ear that you were seen in Redcliffe Meadows walking with a mighty pretty young lady, with a figure like a sylph and a face like an angel. Now then, Tom, don't be shy, but out with it, and tell ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... He looked at the little lady, she looked at him, and he felt that he was melting; but he remained steadfast, with his gun at his shoulder. Suddenly a door opened, the draught caught up the little Dancer, and off she flew like a sylph to the Tin-soldier in the stove, burst into flames—and that was the end of her! Then the Tin-soldier melted down into a little lump, and when next morning the maid was taking out the ashes, she found him in the shape of a heart. There was nothing left of the little ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... and ate lunch. Before lunch was finished, two Indian girls came down the river. The younger, tall, slender and graceful, dressed in bright, clean scarlet, was a picture. With her jet black hair hanging in shining plaits, her piercing eyes and handsome face, she was the most comely, sylph-like Indian maiden ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... wide world," I exclaimed, quite unintentionally quoting Tom Moore; "there never has been, nor can ever be again, so charming a creature. No nymph, or sylph, or winged Ariel, or syren with song and mirror, was ever so fascinating—no daughter of Eve ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... was preparing to play the tune which Frank had requested. The Sylph was making very good progress through the water, and the rowers kept pulling with a ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... feet in the witchery of its rhythm and set them moving upon the sand-covered floor of the Temple. Yet there was no smile on her lips as, moved by whatever it is that causes us to do strange things in the East, she danced like a wraith or a sylph, or a leaf in the wind, in and out of the columns and out into the light of the moon, and through the granite door onto the terrace where once had been planted the incense trees which had come with the spoil from Punt to perfume the air to ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... fer'tile cur'ti lage sword val'et myr'tle syn'a gogue boast breez'y wid'geon cod'i cil ghost greasy pig'eon dom'i cile queer gar'den mal'ice ver'sa tile brief par'don pal'ace hyp'o crite spoke e'vil tor'toise hip'po drome croak ea'gle mor'tise scen'er y self pole'ax sel'vage ple'na ry sylph poult'ry por'ridge dean'er y ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... are yet with visions bright Of sylph and river, flower and fay, Now through a narrow corridor She ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... in truth, a beautiful, sylph-like young woman—one whom I would have looked at with complacency in any circumstances; for who that admires the fair and the lovely in nature—whether it be the wide-spread beauty of sky and earth, or beauty in its minuter modifications, as we see it in the flowers ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... The fascinating sylph, Madeleine Guimard, broke almost as many hearts and inspired as many duels as the charming Sophie Arnould herself. Plain even to ugliness, and excessively thin, her exquisite dancing and splendid eyes made great havoc among her numerous admirers. Lord ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... captain to give his eleven a formal tea, Phil arranged the usual preliminaries, sick at heart, and wearily certain as to the result. Three put in an appearance—Vercoe, Baines, and Roberts—and in place of the burly forms of the rest of the St. Amory's eleven, the sylph-like figures of their fags flitted to Phil's hall of entertainment with curt little notes. Worcester and the rest "regretted they were unable to avail themselves ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... bathing-machine boy comes trotting his horse through the water, and, backing up by the rock on which the distressed lady stands, bids her get on. Get on the back of a horrid bathing-horse! behind the back of a horrid boy! Had she been a sylph the prospect would have been most untempting, but a two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder! Nevertheless, the unhappy fair one begins to prepare for the sacrifice with grief and consternation in her face. "How can I do it?" her trembling lips whisper, and she looks ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... sat beside some willows That overhung the sea, And as she view'd the billows, She moan'd most piteously; The storm in all its rigour Swept the bosom of the main, And shook the sylph-like ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... world much better without them, I was not altogether insensible to beauty in an artistical point of view, otherwise I should never have been able to grace the pages of HARPER with the above likeness of this Norwegian sylph. After all, it must be admitted that they have a way about them which makes us feel overpowered and irresponsible in their presence. Doubtless this fair damsel was unconscious of the damage she was inflicting ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... into Lucien's eyes; the thrill of her frame seemed to answer to every movement of her companion. Whence comes this flame that radiates from a woman in love and distinguishes her above all others? Whence that sylph-like lightness which seems to negative the laws of gravitation? Is the soul become ambient? ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... the evil vapours of fever had just lifted from his brain, and were floating away, in the light of the sun of life; he felt the pressure of no duty—was like a bird of the air lying under its mother's wing, and dreaming of flight; his childhood's most cherished dream had grown fact: there was the sylph, the oriad, the naiad of all his dreams, a living lady before his eyes—nor the less a creature of his imagination's heart; from her, as the centre of power, had all the marvellous transformation proceeded; and the lovely strength had kissed him on the forehead! The soul of Cosmo ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... not lift her eyes and smile when she was talking to men; she did not trouble herself to put on her prettiest gown when the evening train came in, bringing the bachelors from the city. She was tall—five foot eight in her stockings; all her muscles were well developed; there was nothing sylph-like about her waist, but all her motions had a strong, gentle grace of their own that bespoke health and dignity. She had a profession, too, which was much beneath most of the be-crimped and smile-wreathed ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... the symbol expressed by the wings of the air-sylph forming within the case of the caterpillar? Only he who feels in his own soul the same instinct which impels the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come." Such a man knows and feels that the potential works in him even as the actual works on him. As all the organs of ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... scarcely more substantial than brown paper. Their feet are made for ornament and for dancing. Though they possess a roundness of form that leaves nothing to be desired in symmetry of figure, still they are light as a sylph,—so buoyant, clad in muslin and lace, that it would seem as if a breeze might waft them away like a summer cloud. Passionately fond of dancing, they tax the endurance of the gentlemen in their worship of Terpsichore, stimulated ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... most universal, as it is certainly the most sociable, of all fashionable dances. It admits of pleasant conversation, frequent interchange of partners, and is adapted to every age. The young or old, the ponderous paterfamilias or his sylph-like daughter, may with equal propriety take part in its easy and elegant figures. Even an occasional blunder is of less consequence in this dance than in many others; for each personage is in some degree free as to his own movements, not being compelled by the continual embrace ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... northern colonies, he would have me to understand, was unbounded. For example, Miss Arabella Pope of Norfolk, in Virginia,—and did I know her? No, I had not that pleasure, though I assured him the Popes of Virginia were famed. Miss Pope danced divinely as any sylph, and the very memory of her tripping at the Norfolk Assembly roused the captain to such a pitch of enthusiasm as I had never seen in him. Marvellous to say, his own words failed him, and he had recourse to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... artist?—No; I am an author and a plagiarist. Every sketch in my book is taken from some other work, except the "Screecher," which is from the artistic pen of Lady G.M.; and the lovely form and features of the coloured sylph, for which I am indebted to my friend Mr. J.F.C.—You must not be too curious.—I consider myself justified in plagiarizing anything from anybody, if I conceive it will help to elucidate my subject or amuse my reader, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... me twenty years are past Since I have look'd upon thee last, And thought thee fairest of the fair, With thy sylph-like form and light-brown hair! I can remember every word That from those smiling lips I heard: Oh! how little it appears Like the lapse of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 489, Saturday, May 14, 1831 • Various
... can be very becoming to Lady Mabel," ruminated Mrs. Tempest. "Those small sylph-like figures ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... Tinne's principle to aim at producing the best terrier he could, irrespective of the fads of this kennel or that, and his judgment has been amply vindicated, as the prize lists of every large show will testify. And to-day he is the proud possessor of Ch. The Sylph, who has beaten every one of her sex, and is considered by many about the best Fox-terrier ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... Berenice!—I call upon her name—Berenice!—and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah, vividly is her image before me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains! And then—then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told. Disease—a fatal disease, fell like the simoon upon her frame; and, even while I gazed upon her, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... made some excuse to visit the house, but no one was there. Once they observed a sylph-like form, but she was not the person; and so they lived on, each night hearing the ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... allegro; the steps of the dancers became quicker, their gestures more animated, the play of their limbs more voluptuous. With the exception of one couple, every glance and movement of the performers seemed directed or aimed at the Caliph. This couple consisted of the most sylph-like and exquisitely formed of the four female dancers, and of a Persian warrior, who was pursuing her, and from whom she strove coyly to escape. With admirable grace and skill did these two figures detach themselves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... Soft tunes that sweetly mingle, The cows are coming home. Malvine and Pearl and Florimel, Dekamp, Redrose and Gretchen Schnell, Queen Bell and Sylph and Spangled Sue— Across the fields I hear her "loo-oo" And clang her silver bell; Goling, golang, golinglelingle, With faint far sounds that mingle, The cows come slowly home; And mother-songs of long-gone years, And baby joys and ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... tinted glass bottles, lighting up the glittering liquid contained within them!—why, they look more like soap-bubbles than anything else! ... and the boy who carried them moved with such a lazy, noiseless grace that he might have been taken for a dream-sylph ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... effects of his sorrow, no one could say. He looked at the little lady, and she looked at him. He felt himself melting away, but he still remained firm with his gun on his shoulder. Suddenly the door of the room flew open and the draught of air caught up the little dancer, she fluttered like a sylph right into the stove by the side of the tin soldier, and was instantly in flames and was gone. The tin soldier melted down into a lump, and the next morning, when the maid servant took the ashes out of the stove, she found him in the shape of a little tin heart. But of the little dancer ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... Sent by a sylph, unheard, unseen, A new-year's gift from Mab our queen: But tell it not, for if you do, You will be pinch'd all black and blue. Consider well, what a disgrace, To show abroad your mottled face: Then seal your lips, put on the ring, And sometimes ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... away from home so long that she had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not join in the movement. Then Giles felt that all was over. As for her, she was thinking, as she watched the gyrations, of a very different measure that she had been accustomed to tread with a bevy of sylph-like creatures in muslin, in the music-room of a large house, most of whom were now moving in scenes widely removed from this, both as regarded ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... he was back off Niagara, and there again sighted the enemy; but a heavy westerly gale drove both squadrons to the lower end of the lake, where each entered its own harbor on the 19th. August 29 the American put out again, having an additional newly built schooner, named the "Sylph," large and fast, carrying three or four long 32-pounders. Chauncey reported that he had now nine vessels with ninety-one guns, but that the enemy was still superior. In number of guns, possibly; but it ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... the foremost of the tram: Be thine the throne, and thine to reign O'er all the varying year! But ere thou rulest the Fates command; That of our chosen rival band A Sylph shall win thy heart and hand, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... most clear, no ill betide us, Near the Georgium sidus This planet likes to dwell. Lovely as light, when morning breaks{51} Above the hills in golden streaks, Observe yon blushing rose, Uxbridge, the theme of ev'ry tongue, The sylph that charms the ag'd and young, Where grace and virtue glows. Gay Lady H-e her lounge may take,{52} Reclining near the Indian lake., And think ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... yielded, though reluctantly, to her whim. As she entered the bower, and turned to speak to him, the moonlight fell full upon her figure. "What a pretty little witch you are!" he exclaimed. "My Lily Bell, my precious pearl, my sylph! You look like a spirit just floated ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... sylph-like simplicity to one, whose features, though beautiful, were marked by an expression foreign to simplicity, evincing that taste, not sentiment, presided over her toilet, and that, "chez elle, un beau desordre ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... flat—ta!" and Arabella's putting of these two assertions together, and promise to combine them at the piano when breakfast was at an end, though it was Sunday morning, were exasperating to the exquisite lover of music. Mr. Pericles was really suffering torments. Do you know what it is to pursue the sylph, and touch her flying skirts, think you have caught her, and are sure of her—that she is yours, the rapturous evanescent darling! when some well-meaning earthly wretch interposes and trips you, and off she flies and leaves you floundering? A lovely melody ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... him, as Flynn might have said, for before him stood his ideal of a fairy, an angel, a sylph—or anything beautiful that best suits your fancy, reader! Sunny hair, sunny eyes—earnest and inquiring eyes—sunny smiles, and eyebrows to match. Yes, she had eyebrows distinctly darker than her hair, and well-defined over a pair ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... sneeze should interrupt a sigh!"—How unpoetical is snuff! The most suitable verses which a lover could address to a snuff-taking mistress, would be imitations of Horace's lines to the Sorceress Canidia. What sylph would superintend the conveyance of this dust to the nostrils of a belle? What Gnome would not take a fiendish delight in hovering over ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... heaven-inspired melodious Singer; loftiest Serene Highness; nay thy own amber-locked, snow-and-rosebloom Maiden, worthy to glide sylph-like almost on air, whom thou lovest, worshippest as a divine Presence, which, indeed, symbolically taken, she is,—has descended, like thyself, from that same hair-mantled, flint-hurling Aboriginal Anthropophagus! Out of the eater cometh ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... thoroughly well, and without appearing to find it an exertion. The housekeeping was admirable; to that point the excellence of the breakfast had borne witness. I recollect once falling violently in love with a Massachusetts beauty, possessed of a charming face, a sylph-like figure, and as much sentimentality as would have stocked half a dozen flaxen-haired Germans. It was my ninth serious attachment if I remember rightly, and desperately smitten I was and remained, until one unlucky day when the mamma of my adorata invited ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... nothing at all to do with that or anything else that ever was published but 'Evelina;' you, I suppose, read the 'Sylph' for its ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay |
