"Faery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intentionally omitted the English horn and the bass clarinet, the scoring is remarkable for its color and faery. The work is highly lyrical in effect, and the woodsiness is beautifully established. The solemnity of Prospero, the adroitness of the lovers and the contrasting natures of the volatile Ariel and the sprawling Caliban, make up a cast of characters in the development of which music is peculiarly ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... invite, When the merry bells ring round, And 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 ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... 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 ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... perforated floor, Where kneeling at her prayers, the Moorish queen Inhaled the cool delight, [1] and whilst she asked The Prophet for his promised paradise, Shaped from the present scene its utmost joys. A goodly scene! fair as that faery land Where Arthur lives, by ministering spirits borne From Camlan's bloody banks; or as the groves Of earliest Eden, where, so legends say, Enoch abides, and he who rapt away By fiery steeds, and chariotted ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... BRUIN How a Princess Edane, A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard A voice singing on a May Eve like this, And followed, half awake and half asleep, Until she came into the Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue; And she is still there, busied with a dance, Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood, Or where stars walk upon ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... a twinkling the ring of Faeries was going round and round, till it looked just like a glittering ring, perfectly still; then all in a moment they had stopped, and each Faery in turn ran across the ring, ducked between two Faeries, was back again, then between two more, and so on, till I got perfectly confused, and couldn't tell one from another, they seemed so mixed up; they kept getting more and more in a maze, ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... that tremulous moment before the break of day, shore and stream and sky melted and ran together in the liquid pattern of an abalone shell. Then, suddenly, the sun shot up over the rim of the world, "out of the gates of the day," a clear persimmon, gorgeous as a Chinese lantern, and the realm of faery warmed into reality,—river and river banks, houses and little ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... rhyming tails to 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)
... old, flowers dutifully blush at the make-believe of faery legends, and broken dolls confess that they are ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... is least of it in the authors who are most representative of the 'age of chivalry.' There is a disappointment prepared for any one who looks in the greater romantic authors of the twelfth century for the music of 'The Faery Queene' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.' . . . The greater authors of the twelfth century have more affinity to the 'heroic romance' of the school of the 'Grand Cyrus' than to the dreams of Spenser or Coleridge. . . . The magic that is wanting to the clear and elegant narrative of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... its wall decays, The last true Mandarin's strangled; hands profane Already are put forth to share the spoil; Soon the Sun's realm will be a legend vain, An idle tale incredible to sense; The world is gray in gray—we've flung the soil On buried Faery,—then where can Love be found? Alas, Love also is departed hence! [Lifts his cup. Well let him go, since so the times decree;— A health to Amor, late of Earth,—in tea! [He drains his cup; indignant ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... recall her figure: Was it regal as Juno's own? Or only a trifle bigger Than the elves who surround the throne Of the Faery Queen, and are seen, I ween, By mortals ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Carreras. Bedient could not bring his mind to the latter delay at this stage of the journey, though the metropolis called to him amazingly. Here he had been born; and here was the setting of many early memories, now seen through a kind of faery dusk. With but an hour or so in lower Manhattan, he swept in impressions like a panorama-film, his mind held to no single thought for more than an instant. The finest outer integument had never been worn from his nerves, so that nothing of the pandemonium distressed; but what his oriental ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... was born, Timothy Moran was thirty-three years old, a faery number, as he often told himself afterward. When he was forty and she was seven, another mystic number, he dedicated his life to her and she gave him back his lost kingdom of enchantment. It was on the evening of her seventh birthday that she ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... carrying civilization into these dark and distant corners of the earth. I would have them know the fascination of leaning through those "magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... syl.), Incontinence personified in The Faery Queen, by Spenser. He is the father of Cymoch'les and Pyroch'les.—Bk. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... 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 ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... in the belief 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
... 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 sang her ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... Isaiah, "Thanksgiving" in Moses, "Penitence" in David, and "Supplication" in Jeremiah, had uttered themselves in sublime, or lively, or subdued, or tender strains —the poetry of the "Divine Commedia," of the "Jerusalem Delivered," of the "Faery Queen," of the "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," of the "Night-Thoughts," of "Smart's David," all poetry, let it be observed, not defending religion merely, or confining itself to the praise ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery's child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... in faery-land, The king of ghosts and goblins there, Mad Robin I, at his command, Am sent to view the night-sports here. What revel rout is here about, In every corner where I go; I will it see, and merry be, And make good sport ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... move to our new home, I came across the rough notes I wrote last December, when the marvel of Helen's beauty was fresh to me. As I read the disjointed and half incredulous words I had set to paper, I found myself living over again those days of Faery and enchantment. ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... rational mind of waking experience. The triviality and irrationality of dreams are sufficiently accounted for if the dream state is thought of as the meeting place of two conditions of consciousness: the foam and flotsam "of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," whose vastitude, whose hidden life, and rich argosies of experience, can only be inferred from the fret of the tide on their nether shore—the tired brain ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the fields to 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 ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... teach nothing but games, then will the sun definitely refuse to set on the roast beef of old England. May it be soon. Some day, mayhap, I shall gather my great-great-grandsons round my knee, and tell them—as one tells tales of Faery—that I can remember the time when Work was considered the be-all and the end-all of a school career. Perchance, when my great-great-grandson John (called John after the famous Jones of that name) has brought home the prize for English Essay on 'Rugby ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... like a crocodile's, which spouted water like a whale. It lived in a fresh-water lake.[157] In the same number of the same Journal Sir George Grey gives extracts from a Maori legend of the dragon, which he compares with corresponding passages from Spenser's "Faery Queen". "Their strict verbal and poetical conformity with the New Zealand legends are such as at first to lead to the impression either that Spenser must have stolen his images and language from the New Zealand poets, or that they must have acted unfairly by the English bard" (p. 362). ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... satire. It has been compared," he adds, "to the geysers propelling a vast column of boiling water by the force of subterranean fire;" and he speaks of some one who after reading a book of the Dunciad, always soothes himself by a canto of the Faery Queen. Certainly a greater contrast could not easily be suggested; and yet, I think, that the remark requires at least modification. The Dunciad, indeed, is beyond all question full of coarse abuse. The second book, in particular, illustrates ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... only instances of unpardonable bad taste to be found in his correspondence or the notes of his conversation, are insulting phrases applied to a man who was really more unfortunate than criminal in his relations to this changeling from the realms of faery. It is not too much to say that his dislike of his father amounted to derangement; and certainly some of his suspicions with regard to him were the hallucinations of a heated fancy. How so just ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... they turned the rivers to blood, and the fields to a ravaged camp, And they neared the golden faery town, that burned in the dusk ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... with the amplitude of the subject, so varied and spacious that, as has been well said, the "Polyolbion" is not a poem to be read through, but to be read in. Nothing in our literature, perhaps, except the "Faery Queen," more perfectly satisfies Keats's desideratum: "Do not the lovers of poetry like to have a little region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... originally the same as the Queen of Elfhame; in Scotland, however, in the seventeenth century, there is a Maiden of the Coven, which was an important position in the Esbat but entirely distinct from the Queen of Faery, while in other places a woman, not the Queen, is often the officer and holds the highest ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... The faery took Cinderella by the hand, and said, "Now, my dear, go into the garden and fetch me a pumpkin." Cinderella bounded lightly to execute her commands, and returned with one of the finest and largest pumpkins ...
— Cinderella • Henry W. Hewet
... can it not deny, To that most sacred empresse, my dear dred, Not finishing her Queene of Faery, That mote enlarge her living prayses, dead. But Lodwick*, this of grace to me aread: Do ye not thinck th'accomplishment of it Sufficient worke for one mans simple head, All were it, as the rest, but rudely writ? How then should I, without ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... rich-clad, of 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 ...
— Paradise Regained • John Milton
... so thick the airy crowd Swarmed and were straitened; till, the signal given, Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed 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 faery elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead 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 ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... 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, Dreaming of moths that drink them under ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... and returned. The day was wearying beyond conception, yet the men, British and Indian alike, were singing as they passed Al-Ajik. Samarra camp was a swirl of dust after the day's busyness; almost a faery place in ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... in richness of sound, he surpassed Thalberg by a variety of tone of which the redoubtable Viennese player had no dream. He had his delicate, light, freakish moods in which he might stand for another Chopin in qualities of fancy, sentiment, and faery brilliancy. In sweep of hand and rapidity of finger, in fire and fineness of execution, in that interweaving of exquisite momentary fancies where the work admits, in a memory so vast as to seem almost superhuman; in that lightning ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... flecked with green patches and veins of marl, and suddenly in the stillness from the depths of the wood a bird began to sing a melody that charmed the heart into another world, that sang to the child's soul of the blessed faery realm beyond the woods of the earth, where the wounds of man are healed. And so at last, after many turnings and windings, they came to a high bare land where the lane broadened out into a kind of common, and along the edge of this place there ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... may hear Your voice of faery laughter— What matters though the heavens fall, And hell come ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... device of Faery That mocked my steps with many a lonely glade, And fancied wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid? Have these things been? or what rare witchery, Impregning with delights the charmed air, Enlighted up the semblance of a smile In those fine eyes? ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... I it," answered Maude, allowing her eyes to rove delightedly among all the marvels of the ante-chamber, "and the Lady Custance the very Queen of Faery." ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh were his friends and patrons. In 1598 Spenser was appointed a sheriff in Ireland, and not long afterward in a rebellion his property was destroyed and his child killed. He did not long survive this calamity. His best-known poem is "The Faery Queen." ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... a Princess Edene, A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard A voice singing on a May eve like this, And followed, half awake and half asleep, Until she came into the land of faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue; And she is still there, busied with a dance. Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood, Or where stars walk ...
— The Land Of Heart's Desire (Little Blue Book#335) • W.B. Yeats
... the seven seas, the smoking trains piercing the bowels of the mountains and connecting cities vibrant with hordes of business men, the telegraph wires setting the world aquiver with their incessant reports, the whole sinister glittering faery of gain and industry and dominion, seemed to tread and soar and sound and blare and swell with just such rhythm, such grandeur, such intoxication. Mountains that had been sealed thousands of years had split open again and let emerge a race ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... round his neck and possessed him—came a roar of sound. The brass band from Black Mountain was in possession of the platform. The golden windows shone comfortably in the cold spring evening, and Hazel ran towards them as she would have run towards the wide-flung onyx doors of faery. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... And as for the "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; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... ISABELLA and the EVE thus illustrated; and then there's HYPERION - O, yes, and ENDYMION! I should like to see the lot: beautiful pictures dance before me by hundreds: I believe ENDYMION would suit you best. It also is in faery-land; and I see a hundred opportunities, cloudy and flowery glories, things as delicate as the cobweb in the bush; actions, not in themselves of any mighty purport, but made for the pencil: the feast of Pan, Peona's isle, the 'slabbed margin of a well,' the chase ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the golden flame? Left Keats for beauty's lure, a name But "writ in water"? Woe is me! To grieve o'er flowerful faery. My Phasian doves are flown so long— The dream ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... ceaseless midnight cold, By the faery spell possessed, His head sunk down, and his gray beard rolled On the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... for a faery queen, Was the loveliest little damsel His eyes had ever seen: A serving-man was holding The leading rein, to guide The pony and its mistress, ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... is taken from the reprint of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe's tiny Ballad Book, itself now almost introuvable. It does not, to the Editor's knowledge, occur elsewhere, but is probably authentic. The view of the Faery Queen is more pleasing and sympathetic than usual. Why mortal women were desired as nurses (except to attend on stolen mortal children, kept to "pay the Kane to hell") is not obvious. Irish beliefs are precisely similar; in England they are ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... by harps and hands Invisible were we drawn O'er charmed seas, through faery lands, Under a clearer dawn: We entered our new world of love With blessings in our wake, While prospering heavens smiled above, For ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... tholde dayes of the King Arthour, Of which that Britons speken great honour, All was this land fulfilled of faery. ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... 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 and picturesquely ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... 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
... Courier, discussing the 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 the impromptus ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... 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
... the meads Full beautiful—a faery's child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... flowed forth a marvellous stream, whose waters healed all manner of sickness; so that for many a long year no man died in that city. Such is the legend of the patron saint of England,—a legend reproduced in Spenser's poem of the "Faery Queen," wherein St. George appears as the Red Cross Knight, and the Princess as Una, the mystical maid, who, after the overthrow of the dragon, becomes the bride of her champion. Need I recall to any student ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... round the cornice of a monument; but if, as each leaf came from the chisel, it took proper life and fluttered freely on the wall, and if the vine grew, and the building were hidden over with foliage and fruit, the architect would stand in much the same situation as the writer of allegories. The "Faery Queen" was an allegory, I am willing to believe; but it survives as an imaginative tale in incomparable verse. The case of Bunyan is widely different; and yet in this also Allegory, poor nymph, although never quite forgotten, is sometimes rudely thrust against the wall. Bunyan was fervently in earnest; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the faery songs, the golden, glad, and airy songs, When all the world was morning, and when every heart was true; Songs of darling Childhood, all a-wander in the wildwood— Songs of life's first loveliness—songs ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... had, ages gone, In some far summer weather, When this same faery moonlight shone, Sung these ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... is no dream, Melisande. Or if it is a dream, then in my dream I love you, and if we are awake, then awake I love you. I love you if this is Fairyland, and if there is no Fairyland, then my love will make a faery land of the world for you. ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... Many a dream had she spun over its sparkling water in days gone by. She forgot lovelorn youths, and the cayenne speeches of malicious neighbors, and all the problems of her girlish existence. In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of "faery lands forlorn," where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart's Desire. And she was richer in those dreams than in realities; for things seen pass away, but the things ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... safelier stand the test of Mr. Wordsworth's theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say, that the style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from prose, and the language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and that the stanzas are blots in THE FAERY QUEEN? ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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 and ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... but I know I shall enjoy the fables, they are so delightfully written, and give such good lessons in a simple and yet attractive way. I do not think I have told you that my dear teacher is reading "The Faery Queen" to me. I am afraid I find fault with the poem as much as I enjoy it. I do not care much for the allegories, indeed I often find them tiresome, and I cannot help thinking that Spenser's world of knights, paynims, fairies, dragons and all sorts of strange ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Patsy had tossed about and moaned with the racking pain of it, raving deliriously through her score or more of roles. She had gone dancing off with the Faery Child to the Land of Heart's Desire; she had sat beside the bier in "The Riders to the Sea"; she had laughed through "The Full o' Moon," and played the Fool while the Wise Man died. The nurses and doctors had listened with open-eyed wonder and secret enjoyment; she had allowed them to ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... with such 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 ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... But one came by me at whose word the bitter condemnation died. His brows were crowned with thorns of light: his eyes were bright as one who sees The starry palaces shine o'er the sparkle of the heavenly seas. 'Is it not beautiful?' he cried. Our Faery Land of Hearts' Desire Is mingled through the mire and mist, yet stainless keeps its lovely fire. The pearly phantoms with blown hair are dancing where the drunkards reel: The cloud frail daffodils shine out where filth is splashing ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... terms that we can behold it in the same shape and in the same light—if, for example, when he sees a thing in "the light which never was on sea or land, the consecration and the poet's dream," he can make us also see it in that faery light. ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... the meads, Full beautiful a faery's child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... dead and 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 wiser than our sires? ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... averred that the translation of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written by Homer before he arrived at years of discretion; and Coleridge declares the version of the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman himself evidently thought that he was the first translator who had been admitted into intimate relations with Homer's soul, and caught by direct contact the sacred fury of his inspiration. He says finely of those who had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... thinking busily about him during the first part of the ascent, and convinced myself, as usual, that, but for his generosity to the poor, and his benign aspect, the peasantry must undoubtedly have regarded him as a wizard who speculated in souls and had dark dealings with the world of faery. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... sweetly it sung to us, Light was our talk as of faery bells— Faery wedding-bells faintly rung to us, Down in ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... "Don Juan," it 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
... 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. See how simple ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... I have caves 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 shepherd's pipe E'er breathed into Arcadian glen, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... a giant gaunt, And he was named Sir Oliphaunt, A perilous man of deed: And he said, "Childe, by Termagaunt, If thou ride not from this my haunt, Soon will I slay thy steed With this victorious mace; For here's the lovely Queen of Faery, With harp and pipe and symphony, ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... adventure fled; 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
... share, too, in the ministry, and the influence. The hills beyond the river lay yesterday, at sunset, lost in purple gloom; they receded into airy distances of dreams and faery; they sank softly into night, the peaks of the delectable mountains. But I knew, as I gazed enchanted, that the hills, so purple-soft of seeming, were hard, and gray, and barren in the wintry twilight; and that in the distance was the magic that ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... that dost armes professe, And through long labours huntest after fame, Beware of fraud, beware of ficklenesse, In choice and change of thy beloved dame. Spenser, FAERY QUEENE ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... railed pavement by the Minster Close. On the colonel's ear their three footfalls sounded as though a dream. The vast bulk of the minster, glimmering above the leafless elms, the solid Norman tower with its edges bathed in starlight, were transient things, born of faery, unsubstantial as the small figure that tripped ahead of him ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Faery] All the old copies read—But room Fairy. The word Fairy or Faery, was sometimes of three syllables, as often ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... haunting music, sole perhaps and lone Supportress of the faery-roof, made moan Throughout, as fearful the whole ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... gathering darkness 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 in it away, within an hour of his departure—he told himself ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... met a lady 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
... library's contents, whereby the light of intelligence is poured upon the mind through as many varied mediums, from the deep, cold, black and blue of learned and scientific lore to the glowing flame colour and crimson of poetry and romance. Having taken down a choice copy of the Faery Queen, we committed our person to an ebony arm-chair, and our spirit to the magic guidance of our author's fancy. Obedient to its leading, we were careering somewhere betwixt earth and heaven, when a slight noise brought us down for a moment to our proper sphere; yet hardly,—for on looking up we ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written. By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory a double one, personal and historical, as well as moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen of Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth, {72} to whom the poem was dedicated. Prince Arthur is Leicester, as well as Magnificence. Duessa is Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots. Grantorto is Philip II. of Spain. Sir Artegal is Justice, but likewise ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... like the author of the "Faery Queen," translated and admired Du Bellay and Ronsard; to some critics of our own time this taste seems a modish affectation. For one, I have ever found an original charm in the lyrics of the Pleiad, and have taken great delight in Hugo's amazing variety of music, ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... the faery broods Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods, Before King Oberon's bright diadem, Sceptre, and mantle, clasp'd with dewy gem, Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip'd lawns, The ever-smitten Hermes empty left His ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... Straightway the faery realm opened to me, and two months of Italian rambling were spent in association with the folk I esteemed only less than ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... once more lay beneath me, with the broad Potomac beyond, looking like a currentless transparent lake, clipped about by finely wooded irregular heights, and navigated by faery barks. Such was the aspect this noble river presented, and just such the little fleet of fishing-boats scattered over its bosom, busied in pursuit of the shad and the ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... cobbler's son, took his tools and laces, Wrought her shoes of scarlet dye, shoes as pale as snow. They shall lead her wild-rose feet all the faery paces, Danced along the road of love, the ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... 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 of the most gifted order; ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of Scotland, and to whom some of the adventures which the British bards assigned to Merlin Caledonius, or the Wild, have been transferred by tradition, was, as is well known, a magician, as well as a poet and prophet. He is alleged still to live in the land of Faery, and is expected to return at some great convulsion of society, in which he is to act a distinguished part,—a tradition common to all nations, as the belief of the Mahomedans respecting ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... midst, 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
... her rose-winged fancies, From shadowy shoals of dream To clothe her in the wistful hour When girlhood steals from bud to flower; Bring her the tunes of elfin dances, Bring her the faery Gleam.—BURKE. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... of beauty who reveals the divinity, not as the inspired prophetesses filled with the Holy Breath did in the ancient mysteries, but in casual gestures and in a waving of her white arms, in the stillness of her eyes, in her hair which trembles like a faery flood of unloosed shadowy light over pale breasts, and in many glimmering motions so beautiful that it is at once seen whose footfall it is we hear, and that the place where she stands is holy ground. ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell |
