"Fairy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... observed, that a power to recall at will pleasing objects would be a more valuable gift to any mortal than ever was bestowed in a fairy tale. With this power Emma was endowed in the highest perfection; and as fast as our heroine recollected some evil that had happened, or was likely to happen, Emma raised the opposite idea of some good, past, present, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... too have seen the castled West, Her Cornish creeks, her Breton ports, Her caves by knees of hermits pressed, Her fairy islets bright with quartz: And dearer now each well-known scene, For what shall be than ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... Angelina lead the mazy dance down; Never did fairy trip it so fantastic; How my heart flutters, while my tongue ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... trees; where in the vestibules, under the porticos and between the granite pillars, Caryatides and Hermes, symbols of immobility, gaze at the immutable symmetry of the verdant lawns; and the Villa Medici—like a forest of emerald green spreading away in a fairy tale, and the Villa Ludovici—a little wild—redolent of violets, consecrated by the presence of that Juno adored by Goethe in the days when the plane-trees and the cypresses, that one might well have thought immortal, had already begun to tremble with the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... heavens, poured down a flood of summer heat and radiance, that rendered these cool shades inexpressibly delightful. Pleasant was it, as the huntsmen leaped from stone to stone, to listen to the sound of the waters rushing past them. Pleasant as they sprang upon some green holm or fairy islet, standing in the midst of the stream, and dividing its lucid waters, to suffer the eye to follow the course of the rapid current, and to see it here sparkling in the bright sunshine, there plunged in shade by the overhanging ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... people would say, of a more exalted kind, in the window of a bookseller. Is Annie a literary lady? Yes; she is deeply read in Peter Parley's tomes and has an increasing love for fairy-tales, though seldom met with nowadays, and she will subscribe next year to the Juvenile Miscellany. But, truth to tell, she is apt to turn away from the printed page and keep gazing at the pretty pictures, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... many generations. My grandmother told it to me as I tell it to you; and her mother and my mother sat beside, never interrupting, but nodding their heads at every turn. Almost it ought to begin like the fairy tales, Once upon a time,—it took place so long ago; but it is too dreadful and too true to tell like a fairy tale.—There were two brothers, sons of the chief of our clan, but as different in appearance and disposition ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... the gate of the palisade I looked, and saw the sandy neck joining the town to the main, and the deep and dark woods beyond, the fairy mantle giving invisibility to a host. Between us and that refuge dead men lay here and there, stiff and stark, with the black paint upon them, and the colored feathers of their headdresses red or blue against ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... guess that I am ready and willing to take them under my care, to teach them common sense with a smattering of intelligence—to be, as one might say, a father to them. They look at me. There is nothing about me to tell them that I know what is good for them better than they do themselves. In the fairy tales the wise man wore a conical hat and a long robe with twiddly things all round the edge. You knew he was a clever man. It avoided the necessity of explanation. Unfortunately, the fashion has gone out. We wise men have to wear just ordinary clothes. ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... clear she shines! How quietly I lie beneath her guardian light; While heaven and earth are whispering me, "To morrow, wake, but dream to-night." Yes, Fancy, come, my Fairy love! These throbbing temples softly kiss; And bend my lonely couch above, And bring me rest, and bring ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... asking me all these questions? I'm no fairy prince under enchantment. Just a waif left alone in New York. ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... humming-birds, as they are in the Latin tongue. One minute poised in midair, apparently motionless before a flower while draining the nectar from its deep cup — though the humming of its wings tells that it is suspended there by no magic — the next instant it has flashed out of sight as if a fairy's wand had made it suddenly invisible. Without seeing the hummer, it might be, and often is, mistaken for a bee ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... fountains, the glitter of lights, and the perfume of innumerable flowers. It was a perpetual carnival, inspired by imagination, animated by genius, and combining everything that could charm the taste, distract the mind, and intoxicate the senses. The presiding genius of this fairy scene was the irrepressible duchess, who reigned as a goddess and demanded the homage due to one. Well might the weary courtiers cry out against les galeres ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... fire, and you must just get right into bed, and I'll lie down and put my arms round you, and Toby shall lie at your feet. You'll soon be warm then, and maybe if you're a very good boy, and don't cry, I'll make up a little fairy tale for ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... Basileus, The King par excellence? Always 'the Great King, the King of the Persians.' Others were mere kings of Sparta, or where it might be. And this Great King was a far-way, tremendous, golden figure, moving in a splendor as of fairy tales; palaced marvelously, so travelers told, in cities compared with which even Athens seemed mean. Greek drama sought its subjects naturally in the remote and grandiose; always in the myths of prehistory, save ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... dwarf pines of the Esterel coves, against which an azure sea lapped in soft caress.... Cannes with its far-flung draperies of white villas.... The proud solemnity of the Alpes Maritimes thrusting up to the snow-line and glinting white against the sun.... Fairy bungalows nesting in tropic gardens and waving welcome with their palm-fronds to the rushing train.... The Baie des Anges laughing with sky and hills.... The many-tunnelled cliff-route from Villefranche to Cap D'Ail, where moments of darkness tease one to longing for the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... Judith packed a club bag and suitcase. Could Uncle Tom and Mother have guessed that such a fairy-tale was going to happen when they planned their gifts?—But, of course not. Where were her skates and plenty of handkerchiefs? Silver shoes she must have sometime, but here were the old ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... shot in a cowpunchers' brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy tales together and dreamed the dreams that never come true. On this, his first visit to his father's ranch since he left it six years before, he brought her with him. She had been laid up half the winter ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Peace! for thine the hours That wisdom decks in moral grace, And thine invention's fairy powers, The charm improv'd of nature's face; Propitious come! in silence laid Beneath thy olive's grateful shade, Pour the mild bliss that sooths the tuneful mind, And in thy zone ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... the world was a small pond, Grandma and red roof, lowing Of oxen and a clump of trees. And all around the huge green meadow. How lovely was this dreaming into distance. This absolute nothingness as bright air and wind And bird cries and fairy-tale books. Far off the ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... seven o'clock. There is a 'knocking at the gate' of my fairy land; it warns me that I must be on my Washington-street ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... English, like the Americans, have too much good sense to worry about drama. There are a certain number of cranks and faddists who get an unholy delight out of eccentric plays, but they are few in the Anglo-Saxon countries, where good sense reigns. We only take fairy tales seriously when we are children; we never get intoxicated by ideas; this is where we differ from the Continentals. Art is all very well in its way and in its proper place. I like a good picture, or a good song, or a rattling story as well as anybody; but art ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... peepers were the bells of dream-land calling me to rest. The sweet sound no sooner caught my ear than my thoughts began to steal away on tiptoe and in a moment the house of my brain was silent and deserted, and thereafter, for a time, only fairy feet came into it. So even those happy thoughts of a joyous holiday soon left ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... afraid, So long had they in silence stood, Looking upon that moonlight flood,— "How sweetly does the moonbeam smile To-night upon yon leafy isle! Oft in my fancy's wanderings, I've wished that little isle had wings, And we, within its fairy bowers, Were wafted off to seas unknown, Where not a pulse should beat but ours, And we might live, love, die alone! Far from the cruel and the cold,— Where the bright eyes of angels only Should come around us, to behold A paradise so pure ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... cool. He heard the wind roaring from the northwest in the night. The frame of the little tavern shuddered. Ice fragments, torn from eaves and gables, went spinning away into the darkness over the frozen crust with the sound of the bells of fairy sleighs. ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... that he dared yet to think of a love confessed and reciprocated. The prince in disguise is all very well in a fairy tale; in England of the twentieth century he is an anachronism; and Medenham would as soon think of shearing a limb as of profiting by the chance that threw Cynthia in his way. Of course, a less scrupulous wooer might have devised a hundred plausible methods of ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... him in a scientific manner. Still, for all that, it was a bitter winter, and a good many people in Cyrus and elsewhere, who had no fur coats, went cold by day and lay cold by night, as one good lady pathetically expressed it. There was little snow, and what there was fell in wonderful crystals, fairy studies in geometry, which delighted the eyes of Joey and Georgie Means, as they trotted to school, with Miss Peace's "nuby" over one little head and her shawl over the other. Every morning the sun rose in a clear sky, shining like steel; every ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... Guillaume, likewise making merry over it. "We know it's Cinderella's court robe, eh? The fairy brocade and lace that are to make you very ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... or rather hissing those words, the boon companion underwent much such a change as one reads of in fairy-books. Out of old materials sprang a new creature. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... this shout that we warped away from the jetty and made for the open sea. A yacht with white sails all agleam as it crossed the bar of a searchlight so that it seemed like a fairy ship in the vision of a dream, crept into the harbour and then fluttered into the ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... at the young fairy with an almost distressful expression; but at the same moment a flash, half hidden between her thick, short eyelashes, shot like an incendiary spark at Lucien, who, in a magnificent dressing-gown thrown open over a fine Holland ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... dangers lie, that I may be on my guard against them." Thereat they laughed the more, and answered him, "Oh, foolish traveler, your head is certainly full of dreams! There are no such things as sirens; all that is an old Greek fable, a fairy tale with no meaning except for old Greeks and modern babies! You will never meet with any sirens or harpies, nor will you ever see again the Princess of whom you talk, unless, indeed, in your dreams. It is this country that is the only real one, there is nothing at all beyond the sunset." ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... fails to satisfy a man. The meaning of one of the Hebrew words for sin is 'missing the mark.' It is a blunder as well as a crime. It is trying to draw water from broken cisterns. It is 'as when a hungry man dreameth and behold he eateth, but he awaketh and his soul is empty.' Sin buys men with fairy money, which looks like gold, but in the morning is found to be but a handful of yellow and faded leaves. 'Why do ye spend your money for that which is not bread?' It cannot but be so, for only God can satisfy a man, and only in doing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... (I like to be at least as precise as a fairy tale in the matter of dates) there was no Lombardy. And that time was not, geologically speaking, so very remote; for the whole valley of the Po, from Turin to the sea, consists entirely of alluvial deposits—or, in other ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... encouraged by seeing armed white men leading the way, came along with renewed enthusiasm. That grass was something terrible. One would hardly care to go through it if he knew that a bag of gold or a fairy princess awaited him beyond; with a lion there, the delight of the job became immeasurably less. We could not see three feet ahead. From time to time we were floundering down into channels of water hidden by the density of the grass. Some ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... believe true than false: And in the same Sense may we take Petronius and Boileau; nay, if we don't take 'em thus, I can't tell whether there were ever such a thing as a true Heroic Poem in the World; not so much as the Fairy-Queen, Gondibert, or Orlando Furioso; all which have Fable enough in 'em of any reason; but their principal Actions might be still true, as we are sure was that of the best Heroic that ever was written; (I need not say I mean Virgil) since few or no Authors ever deny'd that there was such a ...
— Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697) • Samuel Wesley
... on the dominant? I dare say most people still think of the musician as a being who lives in an enchanted world of sound, rather than as a person greatly occupied with tedious feats of penmanship; just as I myself still think of a prima ballerina not as a hard-working gymnast but as a fairy, whose existence is ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... disappear almost as quickly! I'm afraid there's something a little bit uncanny about him," said Frances, who was very imaginative. "But if he helps to put all the money troubles right, he will certainly be like a good fairy to us." ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... man who lived but to turn an epigram, to soulfully contemplate a lily, to sigh mysteriously, and cultivate the far-away look. These men were elocutionists who gesticulated in curves, and let the thought follow the attitude. They were not content to be themselves, but chased the airy, fairy fabric of a fancy ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... "Big Jim" Dougherty, who was no talker, sat dumb, and saw the wife who had dined every evening for three years at home, blossom like a fairy flower. Quick, witty, charming, full of light and ready talk, she received the experienced attack of the Honorable Patrick on the field of repartee and surprised, vanquished, delighted him. She unfolded her long-closed petals and around her the room became a garden. They tried to include "Big ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... ways thy hair; Thou lookest on the world with eyes grown serious And rul'st thy father with a sway imperious Particularly as regards his socks and ties Insistent that each with the other harmonise. Instead of simple fairy-tales that pleased of yore Romantic verse thou read'st and novels by the score And very oft I've known thee sigh and call them "stuff" Vowing of love romantic they've not half enough. Wherefore, like fond ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... the water. He knew it for a floor through which he let down his trammels and crab-pots into wonderland—a twilight with forests and meadows of its own, in which all the marvels of all the fairy-books were possible; but the terror of it had never ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Washington as in a dream—a fairy dream. The air of mystery that had grown from the first was now an impenetrable wall, the top of which his curiosity could not scale. Even his fancy, his imagination, served him not. There was but ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... visited the villa last summer the oeuvre had eight thousand marraines, and no doubt the number has doubled to-day. Fifteen hundred of these were American, marshalled by Madame Berard's representative in New York, Mr. R.W. Neeser. Some of these fairy godmothers had ten filleuls. Packages were dispatched to the Front every week. Women that could not afford presents wrote regularly. There were at that ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... I play A little fountain sings all day A tiny tune: It leaps and prances in the air— I saw a little fairy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... on the breast. Blue yellow-back he is called, though the yellow is much nearer a bronze. He is remarkably delicate and beautiful,—the handsomest as he is the smallest of the warblers known to me. It is never without surprise that I find amid these rugged, savage aspects of nature creatures so fairy and delicate. But such is the law. Go to the sea or climb the mountain, and with the ruggedest and the savagest you will find likewise the fairest and the most delicate. The greatness and the minuteness ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... blew with their bellows until the very roof of the great cave-hall seemed to tremble, and the smoke rolled up the wide chimney, and escaped in dense fumes from the mountain-top. When they left off working, and the fire died away, a fairy ship, with masts and sails, and two banks of long oars, and a golden dragon stem, rose out of the glowing coals; and it grew in size until it filled a great part of the hall, and might have furnished room for a thousand warriors with their arms and steeds. Then, at a word from the dwarfs, it began ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... Hans Andersen, that great though child-like teacher, called the "Overshoes of Fortune." A gentleman, at an evening party, has been running down modern society and wishing he were in the heroic Middle Ages. In going away he unwittingly puts on the fairy overshoes, which have the gift of transporting the wearer at once to any place and time where he wishes to be. Stepping out he finds his own wish fulfilled—he is in the Middle Ages. There is no gas, the street is pitch dark, he is up to his ankles in mud, he is nearly knocked ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... went on David, "this dashed fairy-tale won't hold water. You know Coke. Is 'e the kind o' man to go bumpin' round like a stage 'ero, an' hoisting Union Jacks as the ship sinks? I ax you, is 'e? It's nonsense, stuff an' nonsense. An', if the Andromeeda ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... like the nickname better myself," Elizabeth replied easily. Her good fairy beckoned her on. "These children are all laughing because they think we are going to pull each other's hair presently. We will show them at least that we are a lady and a gentleman, I trust. Let me see your books." She looked at him with ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... hurried by that dismal old rookery. I thought it the most hideous purgatory that ever sheltered a horde of miserable humans. But you needn't be afraid to pass it now! The immaculate sweetness and serenity of that wee street is like a miracle and the old house is a fairy dream come true. ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... child had been born, a child she dared not own, a child to whom the stigma of disgrace would be attached if the truth were made known. As I told you, my adopted father loved Mary Tregony almost as he loved me, and it was the dream of his heart that we should be man and wife. It seems almost like a fairy story now, but at that time it was terribly real. Even yet I can hardly believe in its truth. We found Mary lying in a miserable room, with her child sleeping by ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... Fairy, w you say is a harmles Fairy, Has done little better then plaid the Iacke ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the works referred to. The word Sithbhe is indeed given in both Lexicons, but explained a city, not a round tower. The word Sithbhein is also given in both, but explained a fort, a turret, and the real meaning of the word as still understood in many parts of Ireland is a fairy-hill, or hill of the fairies, and is applied to a green round hill crowned by ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... moment all the world was fairy. Then, with a wild scrabble of claws upon stone, a small white shape shot from beneath my chair, took the broad steps at a bound and vanished into the darkness. The welter of barks and growls and grunts of ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... rainbow showers, ruffling the tiny lake beneath, and filling the air with a low, dreamy murmur. Never had that lovely creation of art, blending with nature, looked so like an ideal thing as now—a very growth of fairy-land. The play of the waters in the air was as the glad ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... autumn weather came on, during which Beverley managed to be with Alice a great deal, mostly sitting on the Roussillon gallery, where the fading vine leaves made fairy whispering, and where the tempered breeze blew deliciously cool from over the distant multi-colored woods. The men of Vincennes were gathering their Indian corn early to dry it on the cob for grating into winter meal. Many women made ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... iron, not of vines and flowers such as Chateaubriand describes], "the nearer river, the island where the first birds build—these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity of the home town, its kindly brooding companionship, its doors to an efficiency as intimate as that of fairy fingers." [Footnote: "Friendship Village," p. vii, author's note.] And this is but one of thousands of "home towns" in that great basin, towns with Daphne streets and Queen Anne houses, and gloomy court-houses ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... with a couple of children, enjoying the evening air in front of her lodge, and who told me to walk a little farther and turn to the right. I obeyed her to the letter, and my turn brought me into sight of a house as charming as an old manor in a fairy tale. I had but a rapid and partial view of Cheverny; but that view was a glimpse of perfection. A light, sweet mansion stood looking over a wide green lawn, over banks of flowers and groups of trees. It had a striking character of elegance, produced partly by ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Who—that Almanach de Gotha of people who do things or choose their parents wisely—tells us that Mr. Ransome's recreations are "walking, smoking, fairy stories." It is, perhaps, his intimacy with the last named that enables him to distinguish between myth and fact and that makes his activity as an observer and recorder so valuable in a day ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... Whale-Fish Islands, much to the delight of my Esquimaux friends, I had paddled about in the inflated boat, and its portability seemed fully to be appreciated by them, though they found fault with the want of speed, in which it fell far short of their own fairy craft. ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... the graceful, fairy figure as Daisy tripped away—instead of thinking he had done a very foolish thing that bright morning. Rex lighted a cigar and fell to dreaming of sweet little Daisy Brooks, and wondering how he should pass the time until he ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... with even accent on all. A Pakeha Maori is an Englishman who lives as a Maori with the Maoris. Mr. Tregear, in his 'Maori Comparative Dictionary,' s.v. Pakepakeha, says: "Mr. John White [author of 'Ancient History of the Maoris'] considers that pakeha, a foreigner, an European, originally meant 'fairy,' and states that on the white men first landing sugar was called 'fairy-sand,' etc." Williams' 'Maori Dictionary' (4th edit.) gives, "a foreigner: probably from pakepakeha, imaginary beings of evil influence, more commonly known as ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... discernible, but the tiniest, little, silvery, sunny-hearted chirp that you ever heard, inside the eggs, and a little, tender pecking from every imprisoned chick, standing at his crystal door, and, with his faint, fairy knock, knock, knock, craving admission into the great world. Never can I forget or describe the sensations of that moment; and, as promise rapidly culminated in performance,—as the eggs ceased to be eggs, and analyzed themselves into shattered shells ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... find many such parallel instances of the assumed omnipotence of "grownups." With this awful indictment before me, you ask me, a "grown-up," to write an introduction for the "Firelight Fairy Book," and thereby to assume the responsibility for passing judgment upon it. There is but one circumstance that makes me willing to do so. I believe that where any nice "grown-up" is concerned, if you crack the hard outside shell with which circumstances have surrounded him, beneath it you ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... under shadowier skies, [Str. 6. More pale and sad and clear Waxed always, drawn more near, The face of Duty lit with Love's own eyes; Till the awful hands that culled in rosier hours From fairy-footed fields of wild old flowers And sorcerous woods of Rhineland, green and hoary, Young children's chaplets of enchanted story, The great kind hands that showed Exile its homeward road, 210 And, as man's helper made his foeman God, Of pity and ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... sweet with your hair back," Madelaine had said, loosening the waves about Charlotte's forehead with fairy touches. "It was too extreme before. We could hardly see your eyes, and they ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... demons, the Bruges, the Incubi (Yatus), the Succubi (Pairika), the Peris of our fairy tales, mingled familiarly with mankind before the time of the prophet, and contracted with them fruitful alliances, but Zoroaster broke up their ranks, and prohibited them from becoming incarnate in any form but that of beasts; their hatred, however, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... nearest his own residence, "somewhere about Finsbury Circus." That man's astronomical notions were very imperfect, but they were quite as good as those of the person who seriously wrote, and of the persons who seriously believe, this fairy tale of the star which heralded the birth ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... she corrected him, waiting afterward to listen to a strange fairy-like tale. The solitary, sick-looking man, with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was so actual that she recaptured the pungent drift of his burning cigarette. He talked about love in a bitter intensity that hurt her. Yet, at first, he had said that she was lovely, a touch of her ... forever in the ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... age," continued the Woman of the World, "when a young girl tiring of fairy stories puts down the book and looks round her at the world, and naturally feels indignant at what she notices. I was very severe upon both the shortcomings and the overgoings of man—our natural enemy. My old friend used to laugh, and that made me think her callous and foolish. One day ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... he said, trying to speak cheerily. "No mistaking your fairy footsteps, Tummus. I thought ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... read of "Aladdin's Lamp," which accomplished such wonderful things. This, of course, is only a fairy story, but it illustrates the fact that man has within him the power, if he is able to use it, to gratify ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... Fairy Tales Alice in Wonderland Arabian Nights Black Beauty Mother Goose Pilgrim's Progress Rip Van Winkle Robinson Crusoe Story of the Bible Wood's Natural History Through the ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... found in the early histories of existing civilised nations, for to do this would entail the writing of the whole chapter on this subject. For the same reason I must reluctantly pass over the abundant evidence of mother-right that is furnished in folk-lore, in heroic legends, and in the fairy stories of our children. These stories date back to a time long before written history; they are known to all of us, and belong to all countries in slightly different forms. We have regarded them as fables; they are really survivals of customs and practices once common to all society. Wherever ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... cry, my dainty little fairy. You have nothing to blame yourself for—except for being so bewitchingly sweet whether you are laughing or crying. You exhale sweetness like a flower. I want your influence to pervade every place where I am, to distract me when I am moody and laugh away my longings. Hush, ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... little French fairy flitted into the room, with her hair off her face to display such eyes and complexion as are rare in all times; and muslins, laces, and ribbons so blended, as to set off a petite figure to the very best advantage. Owen was going to bow again, when a little affected laugh, and a 'Ma foi! he ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long: And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow'd and so ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... gracious sovereign, then Prince Regent, always appeared to me to differ in some material circumstances from the ordinary routine of court etiquette, and rather to resemble one of those amusing and instructive narratives denominated fairy tales. But on this delicate subject perhaps the safest course is to suffer the reader to judge for himself: so without further circumlocution, I will submit my lamented friend's account to his perusal, in the precise words in which I have so often ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... quivering as the twilight, clustered round her heart; for a moment she indulged in impossible dreams, and seemed to have entered a newly-discovered world. The horizon of her experience expanded like the glittering heaven of a fairy tale. Her eye was fixed in lustrous contemplation, the flush on her cheek was a messenger from her heart, the movement of her mouth would have in an instant become a smile, when the clock of St John's struck four, and ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... no more fantastic fairy-tale and there is no more fascinating drama than the life-story of Catherine the Great, which recently has been so brilliantly told by Mr. Francis Gribble. A Cinderella amongst German royalties, a pauper Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine became the mightiest potentate of her ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... which falls into the Tweed from the northward, about a quarter of a mile above the present bridge. As the streamlet finds its way behind Lord Sommerville's hunting-seat, called the Pavilion, its valley has been popularly termed the Fairy Dean, or rather the Nameless Dean, because of the supposed ill luck attached by the popular faith of ancient times, to any one who might name or allude to the race, whom our fathers distinguished as the Good Neighbours, and the Highlanders called Daoine Shie, or Men ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... weeds leapt into sight, and then the flower sailed into deep water, and up leapt the two arches of a bridge. "It'll strike!" they cried; "no, it won't; it's chosen the left," and one arch became a fairy tunnel, dropping diamonds. Then it vanished for Rickie; but Stephen, who knelt in the water, declared that it was still afloat, far through the arch, burning as if it ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... and yet so varying: her temper was so little mingled with the common characteristics of woman; it had so little of caprice, so little of vanity, so utter an absence of all jealous and all angry feeling; it was so made up of tenderness and devotion, and yet so imaginative and fairy-like in its fondness,—that it was difficult to bear only the sentiments of earth for one who had so little of earth's clay. She was more like the women whom one imagines are the creations of poetry, and yet of whom no poetry, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... who for many years continually took tea with us. One of them, Mrs. Kinsman, presented me with the cotton quilt under which her uncle had died. Another lady, Miss Louisa Nancrede, who had been educated in France, had seen Napoleon, and often described him to me. She told me many old French fairy-tales, and often sang a ballad (which I found in after years in the works of Cazotte), which made a great impression on me—something like that of "Childe Roland to the dark tower came." It was called Le ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... fame had seized upon the popular imagination. His career in the war would have been interesting in itself, but when one recognizes that he was already a world figure, the greatest modern Italian dramatist and novelist, his life seems almost like a fairy story. Before the war began he made addresses all over his country, urging Italy's participation in the war, and when war was declared, to him, as much as to any other man, was due the credit. He entered the navy, and has written some fascinating descriptions of his ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... bundles. One, he told me, was a new novel for his wife, with some fairy stories for the children,—all, of course, phonographs. Besides, he had bought an indispensable ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... certain number of meteors do fall into his furnaces day by day, it is not nearly enough to account for his continuous radiation. It seems after this as if nothing else could be suggested; but yet an answer has been found, an answer so wonderful that it is more like a fairy tale than reality. ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... of Providence, where his powers lay. He had no suspicion, indeed, that he was producing a masterpiece. He could not guess what place his allegory would occupy in English literature; for of English literature he knew nothing. Those who suppose him to have studied the Fairy Queen might easily be confuted, if this were the proper place for a detailed examination of the passages in which the two allegories have been thought to resemble each other. The only work of fiction, in all probability, with which he could compare his Pilgrim, was his old favourite, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... continue to translate his works, till he was as well known and loved in England as he was on the Continent. Appreciation, fame, and joy, declared the complacent poet, followed his footsteps wherever he went, and his whole life was full of sunshine, like a beautiful fairy-tale. Mary translated his Only a Fiddler; O. T., or Life in Denmark; The True Story of My Life; and several of the Wonderful Stories for Children. The Improvisatore was the only one that went ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... who danced like a fairy dream; others who made blunders and gave the wrong hand, and betrayed various awkwardnesses. Doctor Joe found several lady friends, and danced two or three times, then proposed that Hanny should try, which he was sure "would ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... brilliant of them all, a picture-book illuminated in crude and joyous colors—bright reds, apple greens, golden oranges and yellows—and executed with genuine verve and fantasy. The Slavonic and Oriental legends and fairy tales are illustrated astonishingly, with a certain humor in the matter-of-fact notation of grotesque and miraculous events. The personages in the pictures are arrayed in bizarre and shimmering costumes, delightfully inaccurate; and if they represent kings and queens, are set in the midst ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... 'Gainst Saxon hosts his sinewy, long-haired race Unmailed, yet victory-crowned; that King who left Tintagel, Camelot, and Lyonnesse, Immortal names, though wild as elfin notes From phantom rocks echoed in fairy land— Great Arthur! Year by year his deeds were sung, While he in Glastonbury's cloister slept, First by the race he died for, next by those Their children, exiles in Armoric Gaul, By Europe's minstrels then, from age to age; But ne'er by ampler voice, or richlier toned Than England lists ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... head that Owen would suspect her secret. Indeed, the whole affair was so dream-like, of so unsubstantial, so gossamer a lightness, that merely to speculate upon her romance would have been to shatter it, as one might put a finger through a fairy cobweb. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... showed an artistic taste; they were tidy people also, for everything was in order, and a peep into the firelit room on the right showed the table set ready for the Christmas meal. It was like wandering through the enchanted empty palaces of the dear old fairy-tales, except that it was not a palace at all, and the banquet spread out on the darned white cloth was of so meagre a description, that at the sight the beholders flushed with a ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... to be not sufficiently considered. He was full of nebulous theories for the amelioration of such conditions. The spectacle of women working for a living caused Raymond both uneasiness and indignation. To Sabina, it seemed that he was a chivalric knight of romance—a being from a fairy story. She had heard of such men, but never met with one outside a novel. She glorified Raymond into something altogether sublime—as soon as she found that he liked her. He filled her head, and while her common-sense vainly tried to talk as Sally Groves ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... then that, as Corot sat, pencil in hand, this lovely spring morning and watched the trees gradually take shape against the slowly lightening sky, and listened to the birds singing their morning greeting, he should fancy he saw the fairy wood nymphs come out from their secret hiding places and dance joyously about in the bright morning sunlight? It seems most natural indeed that they should be there, and dancing, too. The mere fact of ...
— Stories Pictures Tell - Book Four • Flora L. Carpenter
... of gold,' she writes from Florence, 'the gold of dawn and daylight, the gold of the stars, and, now dancing in weird enchanting rhythms through this magic month of May, the gold of fireflies in the perfumed darkness—"aerial gold." I long to catch the subtle music of their fairy dances and make a poem with a rhythm like the quick irregular wild flash of their sudden movements. Would it not be wonderful? One black night I stood in a garden with fireflies in my hair like darting restless stars caught in a mesh of darkness. It gave me a strange sensation, as if I were not ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Marquis in the end. This, too, is a return to former days, to the days when kings married shepherdesses. The pleasure that we have in reading such novels is very much like that which we used to feel on hearing fairy-stories. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... mystery to me: A tiny piece of exquisite foliage is put into the ground. After a while its leaves all fall off and it is bare and brown, like a little stick in the snow. Yet down under the snow at the roots of the brown stick, fairy rose spirits are being worked up into the small stalks. They have been waiting for a rose to be put into the ground that is fine enough for them, and it has come—and others. Months afterward, a dozen or more of pinkish yellow-golden roses ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... to count too readily on a similar spirit in others,—and to be disappointed. It gave an exaggerated coloring to his views and descriptions, that inevitably led to a reaction in the minds of such as embarked their all on the splendid dreams of a fairy land, which they were never to realize. [35] Hence a fruitful source of discontent and disaffection in his followers. It led him, in his eagerness for the achievement of his great enterprises, to be less scrupulous and politic as to the means, than a less ardent spirit would have ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... Olympus render us characteristic assistance. The Round Game Department has issued a set of rules for the correct method of massaging and greasing the feet. (Major Wagstaff e refers to this as, "Sole-slapping; or What to do in the Children's Hour; complete in Twelve Fortnightly Parts.") The Fairy Godmother Department presents us with what the Quartermaster describes as "Boots, gum, thigh"; and there has also been an issue of so-called fur jackets, in which the Practical Joke Department has plainly taken a hand. Most of these garments ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... the poor-house, the prison, and the new barracks. The hotels are very dear everywhere; they seem to depend for existence on commercial travellers and tourists. Tourists are expected to be prepared to drop money as the child of the fairy tale dropped pearls and diamonds, on every possible occasion, and unless one is able to assert themselves they are liable to be let severely alone as far as comfort is concerned, or attendance; but when the douceur is expected plenty are on ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... beside us, and lifting the little creature to his knee. How pretty Flurry looked in her dainty white frock, all embroidery and lace, with knots of black ribbons against her dimpled shoulders, and her hair flowing round her like a golden veil! Such a little fairy queen ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... time had a wonderful charm for Daisy; it was, as she thought, better than a fairy tale. The doctor at last let her into the secret that he had a trilobite too; and the next time he came he brought it with him. He was good enough to leave it with Daisy a whole day; and Daisy's meditations over it and her own together were ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... whispered Grace in his ear, as she brought him in view of the young dancers. Ada was a lovely child, and the old uncle's heart had already taken her in. She was a graceful little dancer, and moved in the figures with the lightness of a fairy. It was a beautiful sight, and in the face of all the prejudices which half a century had worn into him, he felt that it was beautiful. As he looked upon it, he could keep the dimness from his eyes only by a ...
— Home Scenes, and Home Influence - A Series of Tales and Sketches • T. S. Arthur
... secret, and her pretty plans for her gift. Such lovely drawings she saw in her mind's eye, such fairies, such delightful ships, kittens, babies in the cradle! But when the pencil was in her hand, the lines went all ways but the right; her fairy was a grimy little object, whose second wing could never be put on; the ships were saucers; the kitten might have been the pig; the baby was an owl in an ivy-bush; and to look at the live baby in the cradle only puzzled her the more. Miss Fosbrook gave her real drawing lessons; but ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... countries. So familiar were people in those days with animals that they thought of them almost as human beings and believed that they had their own languages. It was people who believed these things who made up many of the old fairy tales about animals—stories like "Red Riding ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... Lise adjured her. "When I first was acquainted with him he handed me a fairy tale that he was taking five thousand a year from Humphrey and Gillmount, he was going into the firm. He had me razzle-dazzled. He's some hypnotizes as a salesman, too, they say. Nothing was too good for me; I saw myself with a house on the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
