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More "Elfin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his hand she came down, not upon the step beside him as he meant, but upon her knees before him, with her two little hands upon his knees and her face of elfin beauty upheld ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... time he her would kiss She call'd on Mary's son; Then he became a lovely knight, His elfin shape ...
— Ellen of Villenskov - and Other Ballads • Anonymous
... sorely sunk with woe Sir Topaz sees the elfin show, His spirits in him die: When Oberon cries, A man is near, A mortal passion, cleeped fear, Hang's flagging ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... were two long vermilion clouds. Behind the black hill the sun had shouldered up, molten, and the shadow of Vessons, standing monkey-like on the lowest bar of the gate, lay on the stretch of wet clover behind him—a purple, elfin creature, gifted with a prehensile dignity. The cows did not appear after his first call. He lifted his head and called again in a high plaintive tone, as one reasons with a fretful child. 'Come o-on, come o-on!' Then he sank into the landscape again. After an interval, ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... hungry and noisy; and over all, with moonlight calmness and steadiness, Mary Pitkin ruled and presided, dispensing to each his portion in due season, while Diana, restless and mischievous as a sprite, seemed to be possessed with an elfin spirit of drollery, venting itself in sundry little tricks and antics which drew ready laughs from the boys and reproving glances from the deacon. For the deacon was that night in one of his severest humors. As Biah Carter afterwards remarked of that night, "You could feel there was thunder ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... last descendant, Jean. She bore the name of the Rutherfords, but she was the daughter of their trembling wives. At the first she was not wholly without charm. Neighbours recalled in her, as a child, a strain of elfin wilfulness, gentle little mutinies, sad little gaieties, even a morning gleam of beauty that was not to be fulfilled. She withered in the growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... never more complete than when they were roaming the woods. In them Easter was at home, and her ardent nature came to the surface like a poetic glow from her buoyant health and beauty. Then appeared all that was wayward and elfin-like in her character, and she would be as playful, wilful, evanescent as a wood-spirit. Sometimes, when they were separated, she would lead him into a ravine by imitating a squirrel or a wild-turkey, and, as he crept noiselessly along ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... been said, you know, that all the millions of pins which are lost every year are picked up by fairies and hammered out on elfin anvils into notes of music. There are some who say that this statement must be received with caution, although they admit that the half and quarter notes do bear a very ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... her. Time, experience, even the pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on that alabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she had accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an elfin youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly elusive than when she had worn the poppy ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... shining stones, and whose firm, but slender bars, were of purest gold.—"Favoured mortal!" (the speaker was beside me)—"favoured beyond even thine own conception, know that thou art permitted to behold the Elfin Paradise—the true, the veritable Fairy Land. Pollute it not by the tone of mortal speech; to us are thy thoughts not unknown, and partially are we permitted to gratify thy desire for information. Thinkest thou—so indeed hath man taught thee—that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... come I to the festival Thou holdest in the regions of romance, Where dragons lurk and elfin spirits dance, And pearls lie hid within each rose petal. What magic changes in life's crystal ball Shall thus transform earth's dullness at thy glance! Ride then the wind, a feather for thy lance, A pool thy sea, thy heaven a waterfall. So shall thy soul to fairy ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... she paddles in the very noon Of solemn midnight like an elfin thing, Charm'd into being by the argent moon— Whose silver light for love of her fair wing Goes with her in the shade, still worshipping Her dainty plumage:—all around her grew A radiant circlet, like a fairy ring; And all behind, a tiny little clue Of light, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... The elfin cast a glance around, As he lighted down from his courser toad, Then round his breast his wings he wound, And close to the river's brink he strode; He sprang on a rock, he breathed a prayer, Above his head his arm he threw, Then tossed a tiny curve in air, And headlong plunged ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... any rate there was no sense in belaboring the point. He turned to the staff. Five of them were the same big-boned heavy-framed type that apparently did most of the manual labor. The sixth, the late arrival, was an elegant creature, a bronze-skinned, green-eyed minx with an elfin face half hidden under a wavy mass of red-brown hair. Unlike the others, she had been docked—and in contrast to their heavy eyes and sleep-puffed features she was alert and lively. She flashed him an impish grin, revealing clean ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... temperament as well as its appearance. Its movements, its individuality, its posing as a little furry mass of concealed mysteries, its elfin-like elusiveness, all combined to justify its name; and a subtle painter might have pictured it as a wisp of floating smoke, the fire below betraying itself at two points only—the ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Toinette set the casement open, and lay a long time waiting and watching; then she fell asleep. She waked with a sneeze and jump and sat up in bed. Behold, on the coverlet stood her elfin friend, with a long train of other elves beside him, all clad in the beetle-wing green, and wearing little pointed caps. More were coming in at the window; outside a few were drifting about in the moon rays, which lit their sparkling robes till ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... not one among them had a bottom; owing to which cause the property within was merely, as it were, extinguished. The chest of drawers having been originally made to stand upon the top of another chest, had a dwarfish, elfin look, alone; but in regard of its security it had a great advantage over the bandboxes, for as all the handles had been long ago pulled off, it was very difficult to get at its contents. This indeed ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... most horrible confusion by having to turn out again; madly bent upon opening locked doors, and on forcing a passage into all kinds of out-of-the-way places where there is no thoroughfare; sending wild stewards, with elfin hair, to and fro upon the breezy decks on unintelligible errands, impossible of execution: and in short, creating the most extraordinary and bewildering tumult. In the midst of all this, the lazy gentleman, who seems to have no luggage of any kind - not so much as a friend, even - lounges ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... on this subject, as upon most others, a profusion of learning, found the first idea of the elfin people in the Northern opinions concerning the duergar, or dwarfs.[23] These were, however, it must be owned, spirits of a coarser sort, more laborious vocation, and more malignant temper, and in all respects less propitious to humanity, than the fairies (properly ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... nothing can detract from the inexpressibly quaint spirit of Gipsy originality in which these odd credos are expressed, or surpass the strangeness of the reasons given for them. If the spirit of the goblin and elfin lingers anywhere on earth, ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... four in the morning to open the door for nothing on sea or land or in the waters under the earth. I gave account, also, of the miraculous jumping contest (though I did not mention Miss Apperthwaite's having been with me), and of the elfin voice I had just now ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... nestled Tara, a vivid, eager slip of a girl, with wild-rose petals in her cheeks and blue hyacinths in her eyes and sunbeams tangled in her hair, that rippled to her waist in a mass almost too abundant for the small head and elfin face it framed. In temperament, she suggested a flame rather than a flower, this singularly vital child. She loved and she hated, she played and she quarrelled with an intensity, a singleness of ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... youth with the slowness of his labors and the little progress he had made since she last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall, and condemned, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... looking up thoughtfully to the sky and stars—then his hands dropped on the keys, and he began playing a sad and infinitely lovely movement, which crept gently over the instrument like the calm flow of moonlight over the dark earth. This was followed by a wild, elfin passage in triple time—a sort of grotesque interlude, like the dance of sprites upon the sward. Then came a swift agitato finale—a breathless, hurrying, trembling movement, descriptive of flight, and uncertainty, and vague impulsive terror, which carried us away on its ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... and I go in from some ineffectual gymnastics on the lawn to deal with the irruption. There is the usual trouble in connecting up, minute voices in Folkestone and Dover and London call to one another and are submerged by buzzings and throbbings. Then in elfin tones the real message comes through: "Bleriot has crossed the Channel.... An article ... about ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... down] There is something in her, Nicholas, that one doesn't find in other women, isn't there? An elfin strangeness. [He sighs] Although she is without doubt the richest girl in the country, her mother is so stingy that no one will have her. After her mother's death Sasha will have the whole fortune, but until then she will only give ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... but it is something very like it. Many a time the little girl, who looked up to and admired the big boy who could compel her to anything when he was so minded, would, for her own ends, work on his sense of responsibility, taking an elfin delight in ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... are arrested by the appearance of a bright, transparent cloud. It reaches from heaven to earth, and bourne in upon it, with music and with song, are Oberon, Titania, and their elfin train. The cloud parts, and Puck steps forth to ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... came, as I have told you, many of the fairy folk; but more often than any other came a little elfin knight, and he was the young Tamlane, who had been carried away to Fairyland when he was ...
— Stories from the Ballads - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... heavy crop. These include: 2 Walters, 4 O.K. Heart, 1 Canoka, 1 Slioka, 1 Rover, 2 Calendar, 1 Westoka, 1 Nursoka, 1 Aloka, 1 Symoka, 15 select unnamed bearing seedlings, yet on trial. All are promising. Also we have three of the Elfin paper shell heartnut hybrids. I have failed to find a good pollinator for these Elfins, so they are shy croppers, although producing plenty of the female blooms. All of the above trees are 6 inches in diameter and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... so, monsieur the colonel, because I myself have something to say." The little elfin voice disregarded Wachique and the page. They were part of the furniture of the room, and ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... this did not affect him, for he supposed his elfin friends had taken the opportunity to rest themselves, but after minutes lengthened into hours he began to be uneasy. What should he do if they never came back? How would he ever find his way out of these caverns? The thought was frightful, and to relieve his fears he began to call. ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... sad, and still ... Stillness, fogged brakes, and fog on high. Only in me the waters cry Who mourn the hours now slipped for ever, Hours of boding, joy, and fever, When we loved, by chance beguiled, I a boy and you a child— Child! but with an angel's air, Astonished, eager, unaware, Or elfin's, wandering with a grace Foreign to any fireside race, And with a gaiety unknown In the light feet and hair backblown, And with a sadness yet more strange, In meagre cheeks which knew to change Or faint or fired ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... whole table with his big hand. The surface of the table was covered with powdered chalk that the baronet had dusted over it in the hope of developing criminal finger prints. Now under the drumming of his palm the particles of white dust whirled like microscopic elfin dancers. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... barking and gamboling round her, when the stunted form of Hannah Croneen was seen approaching. Hannah wore her bedgown and her short blue serge petticoat; her legs and feet were bare; the breezes had caught up her short gray locks, and were tossing them wildly about. She looked very elfin and queer as she approached ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... smile crossed his grim, hard-featured face. He sat down in a low chair near his guest and drew to his side a small table that bore a tray of refreshments. He poured out a glass of wine and held it towards the queer, elfin figure crouched ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... pronounced it perfect with gay little pats of quaint panniered costumes, fitting of banded sailor hats o'er white coifs, recurling of ringlets, and dainty polishing of slippers. The graceful little figures seemed elfin and fairy-like in the half sleeves and low corsages of tight bodices from which depended enormously full skirts set off by ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... the sunshine In showers; it touches, see, Her high bright cheeks in turning; Ah, Elfin Company, ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... of heath and bitten furze, Within whose scanty shade, at summer-noon, The mother-sheep hath worn a hollow bed— Ye, that now cool her fleece with dropless damp, Now pant and murmur with her feeding lamb. Chase, chase him, all ye Fays, and elfin Gnomes! With prickles sharper than his darts bemock His little Godship, making him perforce Creep through a thorn-bush on yon ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... intruder that not only is a weed but looks like one? Why not bee-orchises for wartwort, and gentians for chickweed? I have no fault to find with the foxgloves under the apple-tree or with the ivy-leaved toad-flax that hangs with its elfin flowers from every cranny in the wall. But I protest against the dandelions and the superfluity of groundsel. I undertake that, if rest-harrow and scabious and corn-cockle invade the garden, I shall never use a hoe on them. More than this, if only the ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... in the companion bed belonged of right to the moonlight, for it was of quite elfin-like beauty. The child had dropped her cover on the floor, and the moonlight looked in at the naked little limbs. Presently she opened her eyes and looked at the ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... in the air, or little flakes of frost; It seemed 'twas golden smoke around, or sunbeams lightly tossed; It seemed an elfin music like to reeds and warblers rose: "Nay!" Lucy said, "it is the wind that through ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... the play that I have stolen. For all the many pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in it—dramatic inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like—you must bless the original author: of these things I have only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic conscience that makes a man of me and (incidentally) ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... language to the supposed intelligence of the seaman, the elfin youth stood listening with intense eagerness and expectation as the other went into the passage, and, by sundry kicks and bumps against wooden walls, gave evidence that he found the channel intricate. Presently a terrible kick occurred. This was the seaman's toe against the ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... vigorously. She wore no hat and her blond hair was tousled as usual. It seemed impossible for Bet to keep her unruly locks in order at any time, but now as the breeze ruffled it, she looked like some half-wild elfin creature. ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... all sorts of humanlike creatures, such as fishermen and sailors meet and marvel at on the sea, and landsmen see outside the elfin mounds. ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... path wound through a forest of fir, where a wood wind wove its murmurous spell and a wood brook dimpled pellucidly among the shadows—the dear, companionable, elfin shadows—that lurked under the low growing boughs. Along the edges of that winding path grew banks of velvet green moss, starred with clusters of pigeon berries. Pigeon berries are not to be eaten. They are woolly, tasteless things. But they are to be looked ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... large quantity of the herb which in English is called rosemary, in Spanish romero, and in the rustic language of Portugal, alecrim; which last is a word of Scandinavian origin (ellegren), signifying the elfin plant, and was probably carried into the south by the Vandals. The man seemed frantic with terror, and said that the witches had been pursuing him and hovering over his head for the last two leagues. He came from the Spanish frontier with meal and other ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... to the ugly brown spiders, and in gentle words told them, how in Fairy Land their kindred spun all the elfin cloth, and in return the Fairies gave them food, and then how happily they lived among the green leaves, spinning garments for their neighbors. "And you too," said she, "shall spin for me, and I ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... people say!— Would I could find that elfin seed! Then should I win your love, indeed, By being near you night and day— There is no other way, my love, There ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... aloft, the tops of the trees, from which the call of the red-headed woodpecker sounded as faint as the memory of a sound and the bark of the squirrels was elfin-thin. A hot crowded land, crammed with undergrowth and overgrowth wherever a woodland stood; and around every woodland dense cornfields; or, denser still, the leagues of swaying hemp. The smell of this now lay heavy on the air, seeming ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... brown men; but their limbs were oddly swathed in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to the fingers and feet: I have never seen men so wrapped up before, and women so only in the East. They wore turbans too, and thereunder peered out their elfin faces at me,—faces with protruding lower-jaws and bright eyes. They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen. The white-haired man, who I knew was a good six feet in height, sat a head below any ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... an essentially modern-looking couple as they sat there. Tuppence had no claim to beauty, but there was character and charm in the elfin lines of her little face, with its determined chin and large, wide-apart grey eyes that looked mistily out from under straight, black brows. She wore a small bright green toque over her black bobbed hair, and her extremely ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... the powdered firs were dreaming of a spring to come and a joy to be. The long hill beyond was richly purple with leafless beeches. The rosy light of sunset lay over the world like a pink kiss. Of all the airy, fairy places, full of weird, elfin grace, Rainbow Valley that winter evening was the most beautiful. But all its dreamlike loveliness was lost on poor, ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... hush of the quiet eves, When the gloaming stole through the silent wood, And the low-toned zephyrs that stirred the leaves Were like elfin harps in the solitude. ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... storms, no clouds, in thy blue sky foreseeing, Play on, play on, My elfin John! Toss the light ball, bestride the stick,— (I knew so many cakes would make him sick!) With fancies buoyant as the thistle-down, Prompting the face grotesque, and antic brisk, With many a lamb-like frisk! (He's got the scissors snipping ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... finger-tip caress in rhythmic vibrations that became whisperings and rustlings and mutterings of sound—but of sound so different; so elusively thin that it was shimmeringly sibilant; so mellow that it was maddening sweet, piping like an elfin horn, which last was just what Bassett decided would be like a peal from some bell of the gods reaching ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... mouths his words at earless owls, Past ribboned dusk and pillared woe, Where sonless maids their sorrows heal, And mixes purple mists with light, Both moaning airs and cringing howls, The swirling skelp that heavens show, And changes this vast plane of weal, This kingdom's tomb of rasping night To elfin cheer as dances bloom, And speeds his flight from Terror's urn, Past jasper lanes where moonstones glow, And turns his eyes at writhing Hell, Upon the spectral haunts of Doom, Where fiends in hissing Cesspoles burn 'Mid howls of pain from vassals flow That rake ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... stalks, a sable shade Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train, In silver samite knight and dame and maid Ride to the tourney on the barrier'd plain; And he must bow in humble mute disdain, And that worst woe of baffled souls endure, To see the evil that ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... other was warm with the light which poured upon it. The Gothic spires, the Moorish domes, the weird and mysterious caves, which last night had given more than a touch of awe to her majestic bedchamber, now looked a good deal less like the ruins of mediaeval castles and the homes of elfin sprites ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... back to those hazy fields that all poets know, wherein stand small mysterious cottages through whose windows, looking westwards, you may see the fields of men, and looking eastwards see glittering elfin mountains, tipped with snow, going range on range into the region of Myth, and beyond it into the kingdom of Fantasy, which pertain to the ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood 10 To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... dive in storm-vext seas, if but one pearl Of art or beauty therefrom may be wrung. No pure-browed pensive nymph his Muse shall be, An amazon of thought with sovereign eyes, Whose kiss was poison, man-brained, worldly-wise, Inspired that elfin, delicate harmony. Rich gain for us! But with him is it well? The poet who must ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... of relief, one finishes a long day's run, thinking it will suffice for many a day to come; the evening is scarce over before elfin suggestions of possible rides for the morrow are floating about in the air, and when morning comes the automobile is taken out,—very much as the toper who has sworn off the night before takes his morning dram,—it just ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... snow fell softly, softly; and the bare trees shook their branches in the keen air. The pleasant glow of the blazing logs lighted up the circle of happy faces, and peopled the distant corners with elfin shadows. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... punctual stars. Huge whitened hills Rise glimmering to the blue verge of the night, Ghostlike, and striped with narrow glens of firs Black-waving, solemn. O'er the Luggie-stream Gathers a veiny film of ice, and creeps With elfin feet around each stone and reed, Working fine masonry; while o'er the dam, Dashing, a noise of waters fills the clear And nitrous air. All the dark, wintry hours Sharply the winds from the white level moors Keen whistle. Timorous in his homely bed The school-boy listens, fearful ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... the composer as requiring advanced technique for performance, are full of poetical thought and tonal beauty that make them worthy of study. Many of them possess that Nature tone painting, that mystic, subtle romanticism of whispering tree-tops and elfin glades, that freshness and open air spirit which distinguish MacDowell's ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... no care of their clothes, and they never keep to the same fashions a month. I work for a doll with three daughters. Bless you, she's enough to ruin her husband!' The person of the house gave a weird little laugh here, and gave them another look out of the corners of her eyes. She had an elfin chin that was capable of great expression; and whenever she gave this look, she hitched this chin up. As if her eyes and her chin worked ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... possibility questioned, he felt a disagreeable conviction of its inevitableness. Mrs. Dressel's view was of course absurd. In spite of Justine's feminine graces, he had formerly felt in her a kind of elfin immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched heart and senses: it was only of late that she had developed the subtle quality which calls up thoughts of love. Not marry? Why, the vagrant fire had just lighted on her—and ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... find the same elfin revelry, the same masks, the same music. We seat ourselves, as before, under a gauze tent and sip odd little drinks tasting of flowers. But this evening we are alone, and the absence of the band of mousmes, whose ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... far down as his knee; his legs were bare. Around his sombrero, or shadowy hat, was tied a large quantity of the herb called in English rosemary, in Spanish romero, and in the rustic language of Portugal ellecrin, which last is a word of Scandinavian origin, and properly signifies the elfin plant. [It was probably] carried into the south by the Vandals or the Alani. The [man seemed] frantic with terror, and said that the witches had been pursuing him, and hovering over his head, for the last ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... air was stirring, and darkness brought forth a torment of mosquitoes. As day died, the woods awoke to sounds of bird and insect life; strange, raucous calls pealed forth, some familiar, others strange and unaccustomed. There were thin whistlings, hoarse grunts and harsh cacklings, high-pitched elfin laughter. Moving bodies disturbed the leaves overhead; from all sides came the rustle and stir of unseen creatures; sudden disputations were followed by startled silences. Sitting there in the dark, bedeviled by a pest of insects, mocked at by these mysterious voices, and ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... wonder-whist, How from the atmosphere a mist, So it seemed, slow uprist; And, looking from those elfin swarms, I was 'ware How the air Was all populous with forms Of the Hours, floating down, Like Nereids through a watery town. Some, with languors of waved arms, Fluctuous oared their flexile way; Some were borne half resupine ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... thro' the city's tumult and the beat Of hurrying feet, Those whom the god loves hear Pan's pipe, insistent, clear; Echoes of elfin laughter, high and sweet; Catch in the sparrows' cries Those tinkling melodies That sing where brooklets meet, And the wood's glamour colours the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 20, 1917 • Various
... and on. The blue, sunlit arch overhead, the waving trees that sent dancing shadows like troops of elfin sprites over the water, the fret in one place where a rock broke the murmurous lapping, the swish somewhere else, where grasses and weeds and water blooms rooted in the sedge rocked back and forth with the slow ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... head promptly with a faint echo of the elfin laughter that had so maddened him a little earlier. "No, I won't promise. But I'll show you where I was hiding if you ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... all the day; my last, the wife of the Japanese Consul, who brought with her two children. They were like little butterflies, dressed in their gay kimonas and bright red obis, their straight black hair framing their tiny elfin faces. I was delighted and could scarcely let them go. Their mother says she will send to me their photographs, and I will send them to thee, as they seem children from another world. They are much prettier, in my eyes, than the foreign children, with their white hair and colourless, blue ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... appendices to Scott's works are stored with material for novels of terror. The notes to Marmion, for instance, contain references to a necromantic priest whose story "much resembles that of Ambrosio in the Monk," to an "Elfin" warrior and to a chest of treasure jealously guarded for a century by the Devil in the likeness of a huntsman. In The Lady of the Lake there is a note on the ancient legend of the Phantom Sire, in Rokeby there is an allusion to the Demon Frigate wandering under ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... about to be opened to him. It seemed to him that he heard notes of fitful music leaping upwards a tone and downwards a diminished fourth, upwards a tone and downwards a major third, like triple-branching flames leaping fitfully, flame after flame, out of a midnight wood. It was an elfin prelude, endless and formless; and, as it grew wilder and faster, the flames leaping out of time, he seemed to hear from under the boughs and grasses wild creatures racing, their feet pattering like rain upon the leaves. Their feet passed ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... grass, Fifer in the dun cuirass, Fifing shrilly in the morn, Shrilly still at eve unworn; Now to rear, now in the van, Gayest of the elfin clan: Though I watch their rustling flight, I can never guess aright Where their lodging-places are; 'Mid some daisy's golden star, Or beneath a roofing leaf, Or in fringes of a sheaf, Tenanted as soon ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... wrote with an elfin mockery. Her brilliant eye of youth saw through the inconsistency of the beliefs he strove to reconcile. She learned his lore, read his books, and ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... is it for those timid few who, frightened at the long tail, scamper away from the intruder; for, when allowed to mingle in the sport, he suddenly seizes the fairest child, and hurries away to make a dainty meal off him with his little wives in elfin-land. To the Indian men the fairies profess a real friendship; and when they meet one near their dwellings they invite him in and feast him, and press him to stay all night. He invariably declines the polite invitation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... we find Oberon, the Elfin-king in deep melancholy, which no gaiety of his subjects, however charming, avails to remove. He has quarrelled with his wife Titania, and both have vowed never to be reconciled, until they find a pair of lovers, faithful to each other in all kinds of ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Those elfin steps their music moves no more Beneath light domes to tune the festal train, Nor at the moony eves along the shore To brim with fairy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... down in the valley—a cuckoo called. Out of the depths floated the elfin halloo, the gaily malicious challenge of spring herself, shouted up melodiously from the plains of Alsace—Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!—You poor, sullen, frozen foreigner up there on ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... builder's most rare device Could match this winter palace of ice; 'T was as if every image that mirrored lay In his depths serene through the summer day, Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, Lest the happy model should be lost. Sad been mimicked in fairy masonry By the elfin builders of ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... now the Lily pale Transparent grace thy beauties meek; Yet ere again along the impurpling vale, The purpling vale and elfin-haunted grove, 105 Young Zephyr his fresh flowers profusely throws, We'll tinge with livelier hues thy cheek; And, haply, from the nectar-breathing Rose Extract a Blush ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Again, the wicked fairies are apt to carry off men's wives with them to fairyland; but the lost spouses can be recovered within a year and a day when the procession of the fairies is defiling past on Hallowe'en, always provided that the mortals did not partake of elfin food while they were ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... that his mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came the intense glowing imagination of the Brontes—so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm of their predecessors? Again, I only know that their mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came this huge elfin creature, George Borrow, with his eagle head perched on his rocklike shoulders, brown-faced, white-headed, a king among men? Where did he get that remarkable face, those strange mental gifts, which place him by himself in literature? Once ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dragon," said Elfin. "You went out at the wrong time of day. The dragon should be hunted ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... that Thomas of Erceldoun is not dead, but that he is sleeping beneath the Eildon Hills, in Scotland. One day, he met with a lady of elfin race beneath the Eildon tree, and she led him to an under-ground region, where he remained for seven years. He then revisited the earth, but bound himself to return when summoned. One day, when he was making merry with his friends, he was told that a hart and hind were parading ...
— 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.
... silhouette upon a panel of palms and tree-ferns. I see the silhouette grow tall and straight again before my eyes, the door open, and Raffles listening with an alert lift of the head. I, too, hear something, an elfin hiss, a fairy fusillade, and then the sudden laugh with which Raffles rejoined us in the body ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... "Hark!'tis an elfin-storm from faery land, Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed: Arise—arise! the morning is at hand;— The bloated wassailers will never heed:— Let us away, my love, with happy speed; There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,— Drowned all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead: Awake! arise! ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... through the uneven lanes of the country. Ursula nestled near him, into his constant warmth, and watched the pale-lit revelation racing ahead, the visible night. Sometimes it was a wide old road, with grass-spaces on either side, flying magic and elfin in the greenish illumination, sometimes it was trees looming overhead, sometimes it was bramble bushes, sometimes the walls of a crew-yard and ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... was agreed; and the Elfin King went to a golden chest whence he took a phial that was filled with a blood-red liquor. And with this liquor he anointed the ears and the eyelids, the nostrils, the lips, and the finger-tips of the bodies of Burd Helen's two brothers that lay as ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... even now she might have had good reason to execrate the wearer of the wreath; for she alone, not Lienhard, was the sole cause of her misfortune. Her prayer on the rope that the saints would destroy the hated child, and the idea which then occupied her mind, that she was really a grown maiden, whose elfin delicacy of figure was due to her being one of the fays or elves mentioned in the fairy tales, had made a deep ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the tiny rhythm of an elfin bass-drum. "O.S. O.S." Click. Click. Click-click-click. Mechanically responsive to his office he answered, and for a moment was concerned with some message about a local freight. When he raised his face again, Miss Van Arsdale read there a sick ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the wayward elfin spirit, if we may so term it, throughout his career. His fairy gifts are of no avail at school, academy, or college: they unfit him for close study and practical science, and render him heedless of everything that does not address itself to his poetical imagination, and genial and festive feelings; ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... snow-tipped, far in the southern sky, and softening the rugged faces of the nearer range, black with their clustering beard of spruce and pine. The band played sweetly on the broad parade until after the tattoo drums had echoed over the plains and the garrison belles strolled aimlessly in the elfin light—all nature so lavishly inviting, yet so little valued now that nearly every man was gone. Out in the camp of "C" Troop men were flitting swiftly to and fro, horses were starting and stamping at ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... joys that ring Through the green deeps of leafy spring; I know the elfin cups and domes That are their small ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... the ground beneath them, and the grass was lush and long like fine green hair, and crept up the hillside and over the roots of the maple and basswood trees. Here lived the elves; she knew them well, and often lay with her head among the violets, listening for the thin sound of their elfin fiddles. Often she had drowsed the summer noon in the coolness, unheeding the dinner call, until busy Martha roused her with the sisterly scolding she knew she deserved ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... head on his breast, and through her sobs she spoke "Oh, take me from this evil place, and from the elfin folk, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... moon shone; the wild spiraea sent forth its odor from the road side; steam ascended from the moor-lands; and the white mist floated over the meadows like the daughters of the elfin king. ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... elfin grin crept over the little con-man's face. "Well, at any rate, I'm glad they sent you over," he said weakly. "Nothing like a good ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... congratulating myself on the possession of the buffalo-robe. That would go far towards the disguise; but other articles were wanting to complete my costume. The leggings and moccasins—the plumed head-dress and neck ornaments—the long elfin locks—the bronze complexion of arms and breast—the piebald face of chalk, charcoal, and vermilion—where were all these to be obtained? There was no costumerie in ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... and with the movement of her coming, one small breast showing and hiding among the ragged covert of the laces. At that ambiguous hour, and coming as she did from the great silence of the forest, the man drew back from the Princess as from something elfin. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... see it who will simply read "Grimm's Fairy Tales" or the fine collections of Mr. Andrew Lang. For the pleasure of pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy. Touchstone talked of much virtue in an "if"; according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an "if." The note of the fairy utterance always is, "You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word 'cow'"; or "You may live happily with the King's daughter, if you ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... and a rumbling there is in the elfin hill," said one of the lizards; "I have not been able to close my eyes for two nights on account of the noise; I might just as well have had the toothache, for that always keeps ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... embodied at all; at any rate, only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... face, one night, when Heaven seemed resting, Against the troubled fever of the earth; I dreamed that vivid throated birds were nesting, In trees that shook with elfin-hearted mirth. I dreamed that star-like purple flowers were springing A-throb with perfume all about the place, And that there was a far-off sound of singing— And then—I dreamed ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... into pearl that rosy bar, Sail its own soul from fairy fringe to fringe, Lured by the twinkling prey 'twas born to reach In its own pool, by many an elfin beach Of jewels, adventuring far Through the last mirrored cloud and sunset-tinge And past the rainbow-dripping cave where lies The dark green pirate-crab ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... to nothing, to what you call cosmic rays. And these are too weak to maintain my life. No, I must die. And then my poor robot will be alone." I sensed elfin amusement in that last thought. "It seems absurd to you that I should think affectionately of a machine. But in our world there is a rapport—a mental symbiosis—between robot and ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... the time is come: with southward speed The elfin spirits pass: a secret sting Hath fallen and smitten flower and fruit and weed, And every leafy thing. The wet woods moan: the dead leaves break and fall; In still night-watches wakeful men have heard The muffled pipe of many a ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... foxglove blazed like pillars of fire through the shadowy underwood and the woodbine flaunted its tall head proudly among the leaves. A gentle breeze rustled the fern, and breathed upon the quaking grass, setting its beautiful spikelets in motion until they seemed like fairy bells rung by elfin fingers. The flutter and hum of the wild things served but to intensify the stillness ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... whenas the elfin knight Approached, him seemed that the merry sound Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height, And many feet fast thumping the hollow ground, That through the woods their echo did rebound; He nigher drew to wit what it mote be. There he a troop of ladies dancing found Full merrily and making ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... And they who are meant to take and to keep the spirit of a dream, whether it be hidden in a poem, or held in the cup of a flower, or enfolded in arms of stone, will surely never miss it, even though they can hear roaring loudly above its elfin voice the cry of directed waters ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... fact that, as churches increase, dwarfs and elfin-folk diminish; so, at last, when the town of Kaboutermannekensburg was founded, and a church built, the Kaboutermanneken was fairly driven to the wall, or, rather, into the ground, where he lived in the bowels of the earth, and only appeared at intervals of a hundred years. But, upon the last ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... winds to nowhere, The pilgrim listens, as the night air brings The murmured echo, perpetual, from the gorge Of barren rock far down the valley. Now, Though twilight here, it may be starlight there; Mist makes elfin lakes in the hollow fields; The dark wood stands in the mist like a somber island With one red star above it.... "This I should see, Should I go on, follow the falling road,— This I have often seen.... But I shall stay Here, where the ancient milestone, like a watchman, Lifts ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... like elfin pipings, with sharp pitches and excited shrillnesses, to which Dick and Paula lent delighted ears, till, suddenly, with the abruptness of the trump of doom, all the microphonic chorus of the tiny golden lovers was swept away, obliterated, in a Gargantuan blast of sound—no less wild, no less ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... intercourse. Her beauty was illumined by the awakened soul within, as some rosy lamp might shine through a flawless vase of alabaster. There were hours when Anne's eyes seemed to ache with the splendor of her. As for Owen Ford, the "Margaret" of his book, although she had the soft brown hair and elfin face of the real girl who had vanished so long ago, "pillowed where lost Atlantis sleeps," had the personality of Leslie Moore, as it was revealed to him in those halcyon days ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... direction, and above lights were ascending and descending from landing to landing. I obtained a confused glimpse of vast masses of architecture—columns, arcades, flights of steps, stairways—a royal voluptuousness and elfin magnificence of construction worthy of fairyland. A negro page—the same who had before brought me the tablet from Clarimonde, and whom I instantly recognised—approached to aid me in dismounting, and the ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... mightiest chiefs of British song Scorned not such legends to prolong: They gleam through Spenser's elfin dream, And mix in Milton's heavenly theme; And Dryden, in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald king and court Bade him toil on, to make them sport; Demanded for their niggard pay, Fit for their souls, a looser lay, Licentious satire, song, and ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... speckled toad hopped and hobbled and scrambled from their path; a tiny snake, green as the grass blades that it stirred, slipped from a pool of moonlight into a lake of shadow. Somewhere a small owl, tremulously melodious, called and called: and from the salt meadows, distantly, the elfin ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... there were other kinds in Elfin Land; some living in the woods, some in the sand-dunes, but those called Staalkaars, or elves of the stall, were Old Styf's particular friends. These lived in stables and among the cows. The Moss Maidens, that could do anything with leaves, even ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... and put him to great shame, he took him to the river, and after washing him clean and combing his hair gave him a change of raiment and a hair string of exceeding great magic virtue, since when he had bound it on he became a Mikumwess, having all the power of the elfin-world. And also because he desired to excel in singing and music, the Master gave him a small pipe, and it was that which charmed all living beings; [Footnote: The identity of these incidents with those of "classic" times is worth noting. There is a lustration and ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of the morn, When equipped with spear and shield, Oberon, the elfin-born, Winding on his wizard horn, Calls the fairies to the field— I conjure thee, ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Nothing could be more picturesque than her general appearance. She was in the red frock that she usually wore; her wild hair curled in elf-locks all over her head; her eyes, bright as stars, shone in the middle of her little elfin face; her charming lips pouted just for a moment. Then she said in a clear tone, "What if I get up and strike you right across the face? Will you lock the ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... from thy home, Airy sprite, I bid thee come! Born of roses, fed on dew, Charms and potions canst thou brew? Bring me here, with elfin speed, The fragrant philter which I need. Make it sweet and swift and strong, Spirit, answer ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... South of Europe the rosemary has long had magic properties ascribed to it. The Spanish ladies used to wear it as an antidote against the evil eye, and the Portuguese called it the Elfin plant, and dedicated it to the fairies. The idea of the antidote may have been due to a confusion of the name with that of the Virgin; but as a matter of fact the 'Ros-marinus' is frequently mentioned by old Latin writers, including Horace and Ovid. The name came from the ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... the plains was being hurled toward the south in a condition of the wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the wan, elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing itself into spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... the delicate little wood-sorrel, Oxalis acetosella, which has a beautifully formed three-split or trefoil leaf of the most vivid green colour, and a white flower like that of a geranium. It is called "fairy-bell" by the Welsh, and was believed to ring chimes for the elfin folk. It was also greatly esteemed for its acid flavour and for various reputed medicinal and magical properties by the Druids and among the early inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland. Pliny says ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... the starlight draw elfin lines across her face, and my heart suddenly cried through my tongue words that my brain would ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... through her hair the sunshine In showers; it touches, see, Her high bright cheeks in turning; Ah, Elfin Company, ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... town, and running through the uneven lanes of the country. Ursula nestled near him, into his constant warmth, and watched the pale-lit revelation racing ahead, the visible night. Sometimes it was a wide old road, with grass-spaces on either side, flying magic and elfin in the greenish illumination, sometimes it was trees looming overhead, sometimes it was bramble bushes, sometimes the walls of a crew-yard and the ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... of the stream, and in doing this they discovered all sorts of wonderful things in what Florence called the Fairy Dell: moss-grown rocks from which sprung tiny bell-shaped flowers; a circle of wee pink toadstools, which indeed seemed fit for the elfin folk; a wild grapevine with a most delightfully arranged swing on which the two girls "teetered" away in great joy; shining pebbles, bits of rose-colored quartz, a forest of plumy ferns, and all such like things, over which the ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... hands would almost have passed inspection as human hands—except for the long, triangular nails curved over the fingertips like the claws of a cat. They wore skin-tight clothes of some metallic silky stuff, and long flowing gleaming silvery capes. They looked unearthly, elfin and strange, and in their ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... out-at-elbows office coat was worn over his ultra-smart street clothes, and he was puffing at a freakish little pipe in the shape of a miniature automobile. He eyed me a moment from the doorway, a fantastic, elfin little figure. I thought that I had never seen so strange and so ugly a face as that of this little brown Welshman with his lank, black hair and his deep-set, uncanny black eyes. Suddenly he trotted over to me with a quick little step. In the doorway he had looked forty. Now a smile ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... checkered gray and shade, where acres of feathery grasses flowed in wind-blown furrows; where in the purple obscurity of hollows the strange and aged little forests grew restless and full of echoes; where shadowy reeds like elfin swords clattered and thrust and parried across the darkling pools of haunted waters unstirred save for the swirl of a startled fish or the smoothly spreading wake of some furry creature ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... sufficiently to make it safe to mass them together without distinction. Thus there was George Macdonald, a Scot of genius as genuine as Carlyle's; he could write fairy-tales that made all experience a fairy-tale. He could give the real sense that every one had the end of an elfin thread that must at last lead them into Paradise. It was a sort of optimist Calvinism. But such really significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius. Of the Victorian Age as a whole it is true to say that it did discover a new thing; a thing called Nonsense. It may be doubted whether this thing ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... marks the transition to a type of tale wherein one special characteristic of elfin gifts is presented. For in this case, when the mannikin asked the midwife what her charge was, she modestly replied: "Oh, nothing; the little trouble I have had does not call for any payment." "Now then, lift up thy apron!" answered he; and it was quickly filled with the rubbish that ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... being! No storms, no clouds, in thy blue sky foreseeing, Play on, play on, My elfin John! Toss the light ball, bestride the stick,— (I knew so many cakes would make him sick!) With fancies buoyant as the thistle-down, Prompting the face grotesque, and antic brisk, With many a lamb-like frisk! (He's got the scissors snipping at your gown!) Thou pretty opening rose! (Go to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... was covered with powdered chalk that the baronet had dusted over it in the hope of developing criminal finger prints. Now under the drumming of his palm the particles of white dust whirled like microscopic elfin dancers. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... the ticking of the small French clock, very dull, very far away—or was it her heart? And, faintly ringing in the receiver pressed against her ear, millions of tiny stirrings, sounds like instruments of an elfin orchestra tuning, echoes as of steps passing through the halls of fairy-land, a faint confusion of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... for you to understand how deeply it has interested me to meet you," he said. "Allow me, from the bottom of my heart, to wish you success." Whereupon, before Maurice could say "damn!" he was gone again, leaving his elfin laugh behind him in the air, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... pilgrimage to their home in the middle of the fountain head marsh to meet them, nor are their real beauties revealed to one who carelessly splashes in. Instead, he is liable to be mired in black mud and see nothing so good as his way out again, nor will he even notice the elfin laughter of black crickets and green grasshoppers who rub their preposterously long hind legs together in glee at the joke, so eager will he be for ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... There were the beautiful silken fabrics of Lyons; the shimmering white satin, besprinkled with bouquets that rivalled nature; there were heavy, shining velvets, heightened by embroidery of gold and silver; laces, from Alencon and Valenciennes, whose web was as delicate as though elfin fingers, had spun the threads; muslins, from India, so fine that they could only he woven in water; crapes, from China, with the softness of satin and the sheen of velvet; there were graceful ostrich-plumes from Africa, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... endless long procession, Formless, countless of their kind Circle us in flying coveys Like the leaves in Autumn wind. Now in ghastly silence deathly, Now with shrilling elfin cry— Is it some mad dance of bridal, Or a ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... fields the sky shone like blue glass, and across the east were two long vermilion clouds. Behind the black hill the sun had shouldered up, molten, and the shadow of Vessons, standing monkey-like on the lowest bar of the gate, lay on the stretch of wet clover behind him—a purple, elfin creature, gifted with a prehensile dignity. The cows did not appear after his first call. He lifted his head and called again in a high plaintive tone, as one reasons with a fretful child. 'Come o-on, come o-on!' Then he sank into the landscape ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... supernatural flavour of which overpowered on many occasions the religious scruples of the Presbyterian shepherds, performed wonderful deeds of horsemanship, and marched in midnight processions, when the sound of their elfin minstrelsy charmed youths and maidens into love for their persons and pursuits; and more than one family of Corriewater have the fame of augmenting the numbers of the elfin chivalry. Faces of friends and relatives, long since doomed to the battle-trench or the deep ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... hill, He marshals there his elfin power; Next Monday morn my bridegroom bold Shall bear me to his ...
— Ermeline - a ballad - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... he asked and the answer he received were heard only by the elfin sprites dancing in the brook beside them, so we will leave it to those fairies to tell if they choose. Suffice it to say it was such as filled his heart so full of happiness it could no longer hold a secret, and there, ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... expression in the Jinnee's furtive eyes: a kind of elfin mischief combined with a sense of wrong-doing, like a naughty child whose palate is still reminiscent of illicit jam. "Because," he replied, with a sound between a giggle and a chuckle, "because, in order to overcome ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... same elfin revelry, the same masks, the same music. We seat ourselves, as before, under a gauze tent and sip odd little drinks tasting of flowers. But this evening we are alone, and the absence of the band of mousmes, whose familiar little faces formed a bond ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... like some elfin prowlers were Jane and Dozia, and they made straight through that ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... triangle of tongue, and taught English—commercial college English—in a bombastic voice of finicky correctness, and always smelled of cigar smoke. An active young Jewish New-Yorker of wonderful black hair, elfin face, tilted hat, and smart clothes, who did something on the side in real estate. Finally, a thin widow, who was so busy and matter-of-fact that she was no more individualized than a street-car. Any one of them was considered ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek for shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree? [Footnote: ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... this?" she exclaimed. "Have I dreamed a bad dream? That certainly is my pretty little elfin child lying yonder." And she kissed it and strained it affectionately to her heart; but it struggled, and tried to bite like the ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... and wide apart; for some are of the kin of the Aesir, and some are of Elfin kin, and some there are ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... coming, one small breast showing and hiding among the ragged covert of the laces. At that ambiguous hour, and coming as she did from the great silence of the forest, the man drew back from the Princess as from something elfin. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... agreed; and the Elfin King went to a golden chest whence he took a phial that was filled with a blood-red liquor. And with this liquor he anointed the ears and the eyelids, the nostrils, the lips, and the finger-tips of the bodies of Burd ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... cultivation the columbine nearly doubles its size, it never has the elfin charm in a conventional garden that it possesses wild in Nature's. Dancing in red and yellow petticoats to the rhythm of the breeze, along the ledge of overhanging rocks, it coquettes with some Punchinello as if daring him to reach her at his peril. Who is he? Let us sit a while on the rocky ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... more familiar refuge of the elfin race, (if tradition is to be trusted,) is the glen of the river, or rather brook, named the Allen, 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 ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... parents are worse than dead to him—he is received into the Home, and the work of transformation—both of body and soul—commences. First he is taken to the lavatory and scrubbed outwardly clean. His elfin locks are cropped close and cleansed. His rags are burned, and a new suit, made by the old women workers, is put upon him, after which, perhaps, he is fed. Then he is sent to a doctor to see that he is internally sound in wind and limb. If passed by the doctor, he receives ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... the blows of a tall, swarthy woman was a small girl, so fragile as to appear almost elfin. The woman wore the garb of a gipsy, and the presence of some squalid tents and tethered horses showed our young friends at once that it was a gipsy encampment upon which they ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... stretched on the settee, her settee, was a girl with her hands under her bobbed hair, a blue dress caught up under one knee, her bare arms agleam, her elfin face all white and a smile round ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... canariensis. It is to them—according to Mr. Piazzi Smyth—a demon who would kill them, if it could only run after them; but as it cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it, and pelt it with volleys of stones, "screeching with elfin joy, and using worse names than ever, when the poisonous milk spurts out ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... dreame was to him brought, Unto that Elfin knight he bad him fly, Where he slept soundly void of evill thought, And with false shewes abuse his fantasy, In sort as he him schooled privily: 410 And that new creature, borne without her dew,[*] Full of the makers guile, with usage sly He taught to imitate that Lady trew, Whose ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... fell softly, softly; and the bare trees shook their branches in the keen air. The pleasant glow of the blazing logs lighted up the circle of happy faces, and peopled the distant corners with elfin shadows. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... all lovely things! And far off cities, glittering with the pomp Of spire and pennon, laugh their joyance up In the deep flood of light. Sweet comes the tone Of the touch'd lute from yonder orange bow'rs, And the shrill cymbal pours its elfin spell Into the peasant's being! A sublime And fervid mind was his, whose pencil trac'd The grandeur of this scene! Oh! matchless Claude! Around the painter's mastery thou hast thrown An halo of surpassing loveliness! Gazing on thy proud works, we ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... of elfin annals,—that the fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; and the like,—I find them true in Concord, however they might ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... continued uninterrupted. She swayed like a tall lily to the wind, with a few little steps one way and then a few little steps the other; holding out her cotton skirts; her hair blown all about her like a great, red cloud. There was something elfin, something wild and woodsy, in her manner of dancing; the nymph whose name she bore might so have welcomed a storm in her woods of ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... promptly with a faint echo of the elfin laughter that had so maddened him a little earlier. "No, I won't promise. But I'll show you where I was hiding ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... is absurd. I guess it seems awful foolish to you." He moved his cracked patent-leather pump in a sort of pattern on the floor. Again he looked up, this time with a freakish, an almost elfin flicker of his extravagant eyelashes. "There's something I could be real well," he said. "Only, I guess Poppa's got there ahead of me. I could be a dandy ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... that round her radiant locks repair, In flowing lustre bathe their brightened wings, And elfin minstrels with assiduous care, The ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... appreciation of my honourable discomfort, she laughed; and as her cheeks cooled she laughed the more, tossing back her pretty head while her mirth, now uncontrolled, rippled forth till the wild birds, excited, joined in with restless chirping, and a squirrel sprung his elfin rattle overhead. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... thus beside her as she slept, Jocelyn heard the stream ripple in the shadows like one that laughed soft but very joyously and, as he gazed up at the solitary star with eyes enraptured, this elfin laughter found ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... a bother indeed. The girl was fair enough in her peaked elfin way; but the fact was that he did not love her—nor anybody. He had nothing to say therefore. She waited a little, and then, with her voice sunk to a low murmur, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... romantic glens, filled with greenery, are reputed locally to be the haunts of fairies, Monacelli, as the Sorrentine inhabitants name them. Like the "good folk" of certain country districts in England, the pixies of Devonshire, and the "Tylwyth Teg" of rural Wales, these elfin people of the ravines are not malicious or unkindly in their nature, but they are particular and somewhat exacting in certain matters. They appreciate the attentions of mortal men, and offerings of fresh milk or choice fruit are ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... belonged now I did not know. But I recognised pictures and statuary and a conservatory with palms. And the place shimmered with brilliant ghosts and was haunted by hot perfumes and by the echo of human voices and by elfin music. And the cripple forgot that he was being carried up the stairs in the grip of the old soldier. He was mounting them with heart beating high and the presence of a beloved hand on his arm.... You see, it was all so sudden. It took my breath away and sent my ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... long years ago, stood I in this place and heard a boy speak, an elfin, wolf-eyed child, who came out of the night and spoke with an un-childish tongue. Often since have I thought of him and the power within him, for though I was young in years yet was I old in knowledge, and I knew that never had I seen one like him. Into his hand I put a piece of silver, ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... attending to everything, pronounced it perfect with gay little pats of quaint panniered costumes, fitting of banded sailor hats o'er white coifs, recurling of ringlets, and dainty polishing of slippers. The graceful little figures seemed elfin and fairy-like in the half sleeves and low corsages of tight bodices from which depended enormously full skirts set off ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... chiefs of British song Scorned not such legends to prolong: They gleam through Spenser's elfin dream, And mix in Milton's heavenly theme; And Dryden, in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald king and court Bade him toil on, to make them sport; Demanded for their niggard pay, Fit for their ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... I saw her as plainly as I see you now: a girl in a red cloak, with such an elfin face I shall never forget it; such small piercing black eyes; such black eyebrows, depressed towards the nose, and raised high towards the temples, giving such an eldritch, mischievous, even dangerous expression to the whole dark countenance; and such wild ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... children stealing They stood there hand in hand, For the elfin chimes were pealing ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... dreamed your face, one night, when Heaven seemed resting, Against the troubled fever of the earth; I dreamed that vivid throated birds were nesting, In trees that shook with elfin-hearted mirth. I dreamed that star-like purple flowers were springing A-throb with perfume all about the place, And that there was a far-off sound of singing— And then—I dreamed ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... to her elfin grot, And there she gaz'd and sighed deep, And there I shut her wild sad eyes— So ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... long tail, scamper away from the intruder; for, when allowed to mingle in the sport, he suddenly seizes the fairest child, and hurries away to make a dainty meal off him with his little wives in elfin-land. To the Indian men the fairies profess a real friendship; and when they meet one near their dwellings they invite him in and feast him, and press him to stay all night. He invariably declines the polite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... the sierra, on fearsome dizzy trails, in the somber shadows of virgin forests, in the rustling of wind-blown leaves (the seductive swish of elfin skirts) she heard the voices of Juno's sylvan train. Enchanted she listened to the syren's call, and ere the echo died within her ear she had devoted her talent to literature, a priestess self-ordained in Arizona's temple of ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... Maid! though now the Lily pale Transparent grace thy beauties meek; Yet ere again along the impurpling vale, The purpling vale and elfin-haunted grove, 105 Young Zephyr his fresh flowers profusely throws, We'll tinge with livelier hues thy cheek; And, haply, from the nectar-breathing Rose Extract ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... they were grave. Here, we have already said, that they are merry. There their office was to feel and to think. Here, if there be any trust in apparitions, they drink, and what is more critical for an Elfin ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... that I have stolen. For all the many pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in it—dramatic inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like—you must bless the original author: of these things I have only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic conscience that makes a ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... that star of cities for strength and lustre that must surpass new London and old Thebes? For Rodomant had the mathematical gift of all the highest harmonists, and his brain could magnify and actualize the elfin-sized images under his eye to their just and proper proportion in the real." It must have been like heaven, this city so stilly and so fair,—for, you see, there were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... diamonds in the air, or little flakes of frost; It seemed 'twas golden smoke around, or sunbeams lightly tossed; It seemed an elfin music like to reeds and warblers rose: "Nay!" Lucy said, "it is the wind ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... he in effect that his confreres among the book clerks accepted with difficulty the story that he was married. When it was told that he had a son they gasped their incredulity. And when one day this extraordinary elfin sprite remarked that at the time of his honeymoon he had had a beard they felt (I remember) that the world was without power to ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... the wire-grass creeping over them in a dry tide. The boy had taken off his cap; the sea-wind moving under the mat of his damp hair gave it the look of some somber, outlandish cowl. With the night coming on, his solemnity had an elfin quality. He found what he was looking for at last, and his fingers had ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... watched and listened with their pointed ears lifted alertly, watching with soft gray eyes, or the way they handled objects with their little four-fingered hands. They were so remarkably human-like in their elfin way that the colonists couldn't help but be ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... answer, pulling impatiently at the orchids which she had gathered up again; they seemed akin to her—half elfin flowers. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... when the feast was over, True Thomas, the host, called for the magic harp which he had received from the hands of the Elfin Queen. When it was brought to him a great silence fell on all the company, and everyone sat listening breathlessly while he sang to them song after ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... detection by assuming invisibility, and for this object sought the assistance of certain plants, such as the fern-seed[17]. In Sweden, hazel-nuts were supposed to have the power of making invisible, and it may be remembered how in one of Andersen's stories the elfin princess has the faculty of vanishing at will, by putting a wand in her mouth.[18] But these were not the only plants supposed to confer invisibility, for German folk-lore tells us how the far-famed luck-flower ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... croutes he has for sale, a shabby lot— What do I know of Art? What do I know . . . Well, look! That David Strong so well displayed, "White Sorcery" it's called, all gossamer, And pale moon-magic and a dancing maid (You like the little elfin face of her?)— That's good; but still, the picture as a whole, The values,—Pah! He never painted worse; Perhaps because his fire was lacking coal, His cupboard bare, no money in his purse. Perhaps ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... our time, I fancy; and, till it arrives, neither child nor maiden may safely lay their hand on the cockatrice's den. The ballad tells us that Lady Janet was happy at last; but she paid dearly through months of sorrow and shame for those three red roses plucked in the Elfin Bower. The precise cause of Keene's forbearance it would be very difficult to explain: more than one feeling probably had ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... strong, how beautiful, how un-Saxon it was! I only know that his mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came the intense glowing imagination of the Brontes—so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm of their predecessors? Again, I only know that their mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came this huge elfin creature, George Borrow, with his eagle head perched on his rocklike shoulders, brown-faced, white-headed, a king among men? Where did he get that remarkable face, those strange mental gifts, which place him by himself in literature? Once more, his father was a Cornishman. Yes, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... have had if they had lived a century later, or much earlier; and, although their views were very dissimilar, they both bear the characteristic features of the age in which they lived. Spenser dwelt with animation on the gorgeous scenery which covered the elfin land of knighthood and romance, and present realities were lost in his dream of antique grandeur and ideal loveliness. He was the modern poet of the remote past; the last minstrel of chivalry, though incomparably greater ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... has not realized all the perils of the windy night and the stormy sea with trepidation and horror scarcely surpassed by the occupants of the little craft tossing amid the boiling breakers—Eily, the hapless runaway, Danny, the elfin hunchback, and Hardress, the conscience-stricken victim of conflicting thoughts and passionate impulses? How much more tragic the finding of the dead body of Eily, the "pride of Garryowen," since it occurs on the hunting field, surrounded by the half maudlin squires, and before the ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... Walters, 4 O.K. Heart, 1 Canoka, 1 Slioka, 1 Rover, 2 Calendar, 1 Westoka, 1 Nursoka, 1 Aloka, 1 Symoka, 15 select unnamed bearing seedlings, yet on trial. All are promising. Also we have three of the Elfin paper shell heartnut hybrids. I have failed to find a good pollinator for these Elfins, so they are shy croppers, although producing plenty of the female blooms. All of the above trees are 6 inches in diameter and up to ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... The elfin-faced danseuse puts it over. Her voice sounds like a run-down fifteen-cent harmonica. But that doesn't matter. Not at two a.m. in an all-night cabaret. You don't need a voice to knock us out of our ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... in a nutshell; become small &c. (decrease) 36, (contract) 195. Adj. little; small &c. (in quantity) 32; minute, diminutive, microscopic; microzoal; inconsiderable &c. (unimportant) 643; exiguous, puny, tiny, wee, petty, minikin[obs3], miniature, pygmy, pigmy[obs3], elfin; undersized; dwarf, dwarfed, dwarfish; spare, stunted, limited; cramp, cramped; pollard, Liliputian, dapper, pocket; portative[obs3], portable; duodecimo[obs3]; dumpy, squat; short &c. 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Scudder opened the pantry-door and put an end to this mysterious conversation, which had already so affected Miss Prissy, that, in the eagerness of her interest, she had rubbed up her cap border and ribbon into rather an elfin and goblin style, as if they had been ruffled up by a breeze from the land of spirits; and she flew around for a few moments in a state of great nervous agitation, upsetting dishes, knocking down plates, and huddling up ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... clutches of the ogre! If only fairy tales might be true! If only some gracious spirit of elfin lore might really come at such a time with its magic wand of healing! Then there would be no more little desolate hearts, no more grieved little faces with undried tears upon them in all the earth. Over every threshold where a child's wee feet had pattered in and found a home, it would hang its ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... no obligation that would involve a feeling of gratitude; to pay the piper to the utmost penny whenever she called the tune—these were the only laws that she acknowledged. Though she longed ardently for the admiration of Stephen Culpeper, she would have died rather than relinquish the elfin mockery of her challenge. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits—the Vius of Melanesia, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, the Lares of Rome, the fateful Maerae and Hathors—old imaginings of a world not yet dispeopled of its dreams.' The elfin-folk of the Scottish ballads have some few traits that are local and national; but, on the whole, they conform pretty closely to a type that has now become well marked in the literature as well ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... likewise I beheld Excalibur Before him at his crowning borne, the sword That rose from out the bosom of the lake, And Arthur row'd across and took it—rich With jewels, elfin Urim, on the hilt, Bewildering heart and eye—the blade so bright That men are blinded by it—on one side, Graven in the oldest tongue of all this world, 'Take me,' but turn the blade and ye shall see, And written in the speech ye speak ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... I hear her elfin laughter, but now it comes to me from subterranean depths. The earth has opened; new flames arise and stretch forth ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... shrouded, sad, and still ... Stillness, fogged brakes, and fog on high. Only in me the waters cry Who mourn the hours now slipped for ever, Hours of boding, joy, and fever, When we loved, by chance beguiled, I a boy and you a child— Child! but with an angel's air, Astonished, eager, unaware, Or elfin's, wandering with a grace Foreign to any fireside race, And with a gaiety unknown In the light feet and hair backblown, And with a sadness yet more strange, In meagre cheeks which knew to change Or faint or fired more swift than sight, And forlorn hands and lips ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... men to look at him. They followed his gaze, which passed across them to the main rigging, and saw what he saw, a brown hand and arm, muscular and wet, being joined from overside by a second brown hand and arm. A head followed, thatched with long elfin locks, and then a face, with roguish black eyes, lined with ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... thousand bowls, linking that lonely palm to the remote horizon, a thousand elfin fires arose—blue-tongued and spirituous. Grey pencilings of smoke stole straightly upward to the sky, so that look where she would Rita could discern nothing but these countless thin, faintly ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... exhausted on this subject, as upon most others, a profusion of learning, found the first idea of the elfin people in the Northern opinions concerning the duergar, or dwarfs.[23] These were, however, it must be owned, spirits of a coarser sort, more laborious vocation, and more malignant temper, and in all respects less propitious to humanity, than ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... Haylife, an herbe. Palsgr. Galium aparine, A.S. hegerifan corn, grains of hedgerife (hayreve, or hayreff), are among the herbs prescribed in Leechdoms, v.2, p.345, for "a salve against the elfin race & nocturnal [goblin] visitors, & for the woman with whom ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... achieve greatness, suddenly realized how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, Dexter Allison's daughter. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... in these hills. The sun departs, but the day remains. A sort of weird, dim, elfin day, that dawns at sunset, and envelops and possesses the world. The land is full of light, but it is the light of no heavenly sun. It is a light equal everywhere, as though the earth strove to illumine itself, and ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... technique. She had chosen Chopin for his brilliance, as some will chose Turner in preference to Corot: riots of color, barbaric and tingling. She was as great a genius in her way as Nora was in hers. There was something of the elfin child in her spirit. Whenever she played to Abbott, there was a quality in the expression that awakened a ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... an identical apparatus. [This form was patented January 30, 1877.] In traversing the coil of the latter they reinforce or weaken the magnetism of the pole, and thus make the disc armature vibrate so as to give out a mimesis of the original voice. The sounds are small and elfin, a minim of speech, and only to be heard when the ear is close to the mouthpiece, but they are remarkably distinct, and, in spite of a disguising twang, due to the fundamental note of the disc itself, it is ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... dashed down one of the winding glades of the forest; the remainder of the party spurred their horses into the mad gallop known as the "planter's pace," and in an instant the whole cavalcade had whirled out of sight. A burst of laughter, made elfin by distance, came back to the village on the banks of the Pamunkey, then all was quiet again. The gold-laced, audacious company had vanished like a troop of powerful enchanters, leaving behind them a sullen throng of native genii, kept down by a ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... of his labors and the little progress he had made since she last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall, and condemned, like herself, to reproduce the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... inhabitants of this ethereal country clustered about a portal, whose frame-work was of shining stones, and whose firm, but slender bars, were of purest gold.—"Favoured mortal!" (the speaker was beside me)—"favoured beyond even thine own conception, know that thou art permitted to behold the Elfin Paradise—the true, the veritable Fairy Land. Pollute it not by the tone of mortal speech; to us are thy thoughts not unknown, and partially are we permitted to gratify thy desire for information. Thinkest thou—so indeed hath man taught thee—that this sweet world is but a vain ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm—all this is "Trivia." Where are Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of old time? Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy elfin scamper. It is Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given scenario of that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences—the mind ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... in the convent garden or the chances of the Carlist war. It was all wonderful. It had seemed perfect. And yet—and yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some straying angel—some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had ever realised. She cared for him—how could he doubt it? But was ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... barn with mousing owlet bred, From rifled roost at nightly revel fed; Whose dark eyes flash'd thro' locks of blackest shade, When in the breeze the distant watch-dog bay'd:— And heroes fled the Sibyl's mutter'd call, Whose elfin prowess scal'd the orchard-wall. As o'er my palm the silver piece she drew, And trac'd the line of life with searching view, How throbb'd my fluttering pulse with hopes and fears, To learn the colour of my future ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... through an open hollow The old man led with a smile: "Come, star-hearts, my children, follow To the elfin land awhile." ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... she found it strangely attractive. His eyes, between sandy lashes and under thick sandy brows, were of a sea-blue in colour, his head was covered with a cap of thick, lustreless, sand-coloured hair. Something odd, elfin, whimsical, in his crooked smile lent an actual charm to his face, for Martie at least. She told him he looked ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... the fairy throng, She led the dancing group along Through tangled brakes and fretted bowers, Where grew the richest, rarest flowers, That wooed the bee to banquet there, Or yielded sweets to Summer air. But she who moved with elfin pace, And taught the infant throng to play, Raised to heaven her cherub face, While that bright celestial ray, Which halos the throne of glory round, Illumed her azure, orient eye, That seemed to penetrate the sky. Bending her gaze upon the ground, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... be in the dust ere then, I know where you will be." And shouldering suddenly his spear He faded like some elfin fear, Where the tall pines ran up, tier ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... and my holy, rich, perfume Makes faint your roses of palest bloom; Soul, as I am, of an orient gem, My aroma's too divine for them; I'm come! but mine odorous, elfin wing Rises from earth, and that one fair thing First Love's first sigh, which ye know to be, More exquisite, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... of an elfin rally Sudden I stood alone; Far away over the distant valley Fairies and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... books is unnecessary. We have all read them too recently to need a prompter. The high spirits and elfin humor which play about and support every work justifies ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... courtyard in every direction, and above lights were ascending and descending from landing to landing. I obtained a confused glimpse of vast masses of architecture—columns, arcades, flights of steps, stairways—a royal voluptuousness and elfin magnificence of construction worthy of fairyland. A negro page—the same who had before brought me the tablet from Clarimonde, and whom I instantly recognised—approached to aid me in dismounting, and the major-domo, attired in black velvet with a gold chain about his neck, advanced to meet me, supporting ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... upon his shoulder a ridiculous pair of elfin skates, was much too small a boy, his brother thought, to embark upon the ice, wherefore he stood like a sentinel upon the shore and drummed and ate incessantly, until an orange catapulted from an overcrowded pocket, when he ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... complete than when they were roaming the woods. In them Easter was at home, and her ardent nature came to the surface like a poetic glow from her buoyant health and beauty. Then appeared all that was wayward and elfin-like in her character, and she would be as playful, wilful, evanescent as a wood-spirit. Sometimes, when they were separated, she would lead him into a ravine by imitating a squirrel or a wild-turkey, and, as he crept noiselessly along with ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... the great shimmering, pearl-like sparkle of an evening star in a sky that was pale golden and ethereal rose over gleaming white spaces and dark glens of spruce. The tinkles of sleigh bells among the snowy hills came like elfin chimes through the frosty air, but their music was not sweeter than the song in Anne's heart and ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... light on the grass, like a glowworm, and then Arndt saw the elfin mound open again; but this time the palace looked like a dim, gloomy staircase. On the top stair stood the little Hill-man, holding the glowworm lamp, and making many low bows to his new master. Arndt glanced rather fearfully down ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... things had come to such a pass between the ladies Masham and Bearcroft, that mischief, serious mischief, must have ensued, had not Lady Cecilia, at utmost need, summoned to her aid the happy genius of Nonsense—the genius of Nonsense, in whose elfin power even Love delights; on whom Reason herself condescends often to smile, even when Logic frowns, and chops him on his block: but cut in twain, the ethereal spirit soon unites again, and lives, and laughs. But mark him well—this little happy genius of Nonsense; see ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... came riding by the Elfin court, first over the mound went a troop on black steeds, and then another troop on brown. But in the third court, all on milk-white steeds, she saw the Queen of Elfland, and by her side a knight with a star in his crown, with ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... illumined by the awakened soul within, as some rosy lamp might shine through a flawless vase of alabaster. There were hours when Anne's eyes seemed to ache with the splendor of her. As for Owen Ford, the "Margaret" of his book, although she had the soft brown hair and elfin face of the real girl who had vanished so long ago, "pillowed where lost Atlantis sleeps," had the personality of Leslie Moore, as it was revealed to him in those halcyon ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... live Shaped she to words beneath a knotted look, That held as if for grain the summing sieve. Her judge now brightened without pause, as wakes Our homely daylight after dread of spells. Lips sugared to let loose the little snakes Of slimy lustres ringing elfin bells About a story of the naked flesh, Intending but to put some garment on, Should learn, that in the subject they enmesh, A traitor lurks and will be known anon. Delusion heating pricks the torpid doubt, Stationed for index down an ancient track: And ware of it was he while she ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fair Belzoond in sight of the distant peaks of the Hian Min, and I to find my way by strange means back to those hazy fields that all poets know, wherein stand small mysterious cottages through whose windows, looking westwards, you may see the fields of men, and looking eastwards see glittering elfin mountains, tipped with snow, going range on range into the region of Myth, and beyond it into the kingdom of Fantasy, which pertain to the Lands of Dream. Long we regarded one another, knowing that we should meet no more, for my fancy is weakening ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... strangeness, he could distinguish the tinkle of elfin bells, almost imperceptible, but musical. The whole air was laden with a subdued music, lined, as it were, with a golden vibrancy of tintinnabulary cadence—distant, subdued, hardly more than a whisper, yet part of the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... the festival Thou holdest in the regions of romance, Where dragons lurk and elfin spirits dance, And pearls lie hid within each rose petal. What magic changes in life's crystal ball Shall thus transform earth's dullness at thy glance! Ride then the wind, a feather for thy lance, A pool thy sea, thy heaven a waterfall. So ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... of all sorts of humanlike creatures, such as fishermen and sailors meet and marvel at on the sea, and landsmen see outside the elfin mounds. ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... moody Elfin King, Who woned within the hill,— Like wind in the porch of a ruined church, His ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... a rumbling there is in the elfin hill," said one of the lizards; "I have not been able to close my eyes for two nights on account of the noise; I might just as well have had the toothache, for ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... voice, and I knew that he, too, had been watching those elfin fires. "But it always reminds me of a Mexican teocalli, and the altar ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... cattle are for the first bite of its fields. How it touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the campfire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of green ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... funerals—which, unless he drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a gloom more properly his own. Yet at such times outward things also would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the mental shadow about him, almost as if there were indeed animation in the natural world, elfin spirits in those inaccessible hillsides and dark ravines, as old German poetry pretended, cheerfully assistant sometimes, but for the most part troublesome, to their human kindred. Of late these fits had come somewhat more frequently, and had continued. Often it ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... natural charms, and appeared simply clad in her favorite green.** Moraig, the pretty grandchild of the steward, walked beside her, like the fairy queen of the scene, so gayly was she decorated in all the flowers of spring. "Here is the lady of my elfin revels, holding her little king in her arms!" As the countess spoke, Moraig held up the infant to Lady Mar, dressed like herself, in a tissue gathered from the field. The sweet babe laughed and crowed, and made a spring to leap into Wallace's arms. The chief took him, and with ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... our son," answered the princess, and there stepped forward a dainty elfin boy whose face was the image of ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... Northwest in this. It stood tall and stately, murmuring as the sea does, until it rolled before a stronger puff of breeze in waves of ochre, through which the warm bronze gleamed when its rhythmic patter swelled into deeper-toned harmonies. There was that in the elfin music and blaze of color which appealed to the sensual ear and eye, and something which struck deeper still, as it did in the days men poured libations on the fruitful soil, and white-robed priests blessed it, when the world ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... fashion from one of the strange visitors to the other—Jill with her elfin locks, shabby hat and thick woollen gloves; Jack with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his school cap at the back ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... Columns" in the Court of Ages bring the somber symbolism of this court back to the gay spirit of festival. The sprites are the work of Leo Lentelli; they have a quaint elfin quality that is very engaging. The amusing and lovely group seated about the base of the column have a certain chic habit of pointing elbows, wrists and ankles that lends an unworldly attraction. Their sister sprite at the top of the slender decorated shaft is mischievously ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... was, however, drawn back, and Wyllard, who lay facing the opening, could see a triangular patch of dim blue sky with a sharp sickle moon hanging low above a black fir branch. The night was clear and still, but now and then there was a faint elfin sighing among the stunted trees that died away again. He was then, while still determined, moodily discouraged, for they had seen no sign of human life during the journey, and his reason told him that he might search ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... tread the pavements of the capital. There are no noisy and no beseeching runners; there is no sound of life, but the stillness of a catacomb, only as our footsteps fall dull on the deserted sidewalk, and a funeral troop of echoes bump their elfin heads against the dead walls and closed shutters in reply, and this is Richmond. Says a melancholy voice: "And ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... lush and long like fine green hair, and crept up the hillside and over the roots of the maple and basswood trees. Here lived the elves; she knew them well, and often lay with her head among the violets, listening for the thin sound of their elfin fiddles. Often she had drowsed the summer noon in the coolness, unheeding the dinner call, until busy Martha roused her with the sisterly scolding she knew she deserved and ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... from her stood the least little man I had ever seen; of such admirable proportions no one could call him a dwarf, because with that word we usually associate something of deformity; but yet with an elfin look of shrewd, hard, worldly wisdom in his face that marred the impression which his delicate regular little features would otherwise have conveyed. Indeed, I do not think he was quite of equal rank with the rest of the company, for his dress was inappropriate to the occasion (and he apparently ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... in the dusk and looked out into the veiled and shadowy spaces and the dim singers lifted up their voices. The moon would rise late; there was no light save the tiny pin points of the cigarettes; it gave the music an elfin, eerie quality. ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... setter, shaking herself and looking at me reproachfully. She and I had gone to sleep together on the rug, and had naturally wandered to the dream-forest where dogs and little girls hunt wild game and have strange adventures. We encountered hosts of elfin foes, and it required all the dog tactics at Belle's command to acquit herself like the lady and huntress that she was. Belle had her dreams too. We used to lie under the trees and flowers in the old garden, and I used to laugh with delight when the magnolia leaves ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... Joyce, "that he must have hidden in some strange place,—and one he must have known about, too, for he went straight to it! I'm just curious to find out his 'bunk.'" Joyce was slim and dark and elfin, full of queer pranks, sudden enthusiastic plans, and very vivid of imagination, a curious contrast to the placid, slow-moving Cynthia. Joyce also, as a rule, had her way in matters, and ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... disposing themselves comfortably in wrong cabins, and creating a most horrible confusion by having to turn out again; madly bent upon opening locked doors, and on forcing a passage into all kinds of out-of-the-way places where there is no thoroughfare; sending wild stewards, with elfin hair, to and fro upon the breezy decks on unintelligible errands, impossible of execution: and in short, creating the most extraordinary and bewildering tumult. In the midst of all this, the lazy gentleman, who seems to have no luggage of any kind - not so much as a friend, even - lounges up and ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... walked round to the stables, in which stood ten fine horses. These, the count ordered to be removed at once to a place which he called the Elfin Grotto, giving instructions that the three which were considered to be the fleetest were to be saddled and bridled ready for instant use, Francesca's saddle being required for one of them. He also hunted out Giaccomo—who looked a smart honest fellow ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... Griffin excels to a remarkable extent. What reader of the "Collegians" has not realized all the perils of the windy night and the stormy sea with trepidation and horror scarcely surpassed by the occupants of the little craft tossing amid the boiling breakers—Eily, the hapless runaway, Danny, the elfin hunchback, and Hardress, the conscience-stricken victim of conflicting thoughts and passionate impulses? How much more tragic the finding of the dead body of Eily, the "pride of Garryowen," since it occurs on the hunting ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... glinting In the deep, dim wood, There's a fairy piper playing To the elfin brood; They dance and shout and turn about, And laugh and swing and sway— The droll folk, the knoll folk, the folk that ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... is a little airy, elfin animal in these woods, and in all the evergreen woods of the Pacific Coast, that is more influential and interesting than even the beaver. This is the Douglas squirrel (Sciurus Douglasi). Go where you will throughout all ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... 'T was as if every image that mirrored lay In his depths serene through the summer day, Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, Lest the happy model should be lost. Sad been mimicked in fairy masonry By the elfin builders ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the centre of the polished floor, the strange child, whom Lady Rose had gone to fetch after lunch, with its high crest of black hair, its large, jealous eyes, its elfin hands, and the sudden smile with which, after half an hour of silence and apparent scorn, it had rewarded Sir Wilfrid's advances. He saw himself sitting ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... settee, her settee, was a girl with her hands under her bobbed hair, a blue dress caught up under one knee, her bare arms agleam, her elfin face all white and a smile round her too ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... arrival and Martin's return, was gradually subsiding. These two important events, both happening on the same day, sadly upset the domestic economy of Mrs Kelly's establishment. Sally had indulged in tea almost to stupefaction, and Kattie's elfin locks became more than ordinarily disordered. On the following morning, however, things seemed to fall a little more into their places: the widow was, as usual, behind her counter; and if her girls did not give her as much assistance as she desired of them, ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... her head promptly with a faint echo of the elfin laughter that had so maddened him a little earlier. "No, I won't promise. But I'll show you where I was hiding if you like. ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... observation, viewing the matter at close range, that nearly always fat, like old age or a thief in the dark, steals upon one unawares. I take my own case. As a youngster and on through my teens and into my early twenties—ah, those romping elfin twenties!—I was, in outline, what might be termed dwindly, not to say slimmish. Those who have known me in my latter years might be loath to believe it, but one of my boyhood nick-names—I had ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... in doing this they discovered all sorts of wonderful things in what Florence called the Fairy Dell: moss-grown rocks from which sprung tiny bell-shaped flowers; a circle of wee pink toadstools, which indeed seemed fit for the elfin folk; a wild grapevine with a most delightfully arranged swing on which the two girls "teetered" away in great joy; shining pebbles, bits of rose-colored quartz, a forest of plumy ferns, and all such like things, over which the ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... creeping along like some elfin prowlers were Jane and Dozia, and they made straight through that bold moonlight for ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... "Many there be and wide apart; for some are of the kin of the Aesir, and some are of Elfin kin, and some there are who ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... solid-built, crisply outlined man of forty, carrying himself with a practical erectness, upon whose face there was a rather disturbing half-smile. The stranger's hand was clasped in that of a little girl, wide-eyed, elfin, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... one finishes a long day's run, thinking it will suffice for many a day to come; the evening is scarce over before elfin suggestions of possible rides for the morrow are floating about in the air, and when morning comes the automobile is taken out,—very much as the toper who has sworn off the night before takes his morning dram,—it just can't ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... was being hurled toward the south in a condition of the wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the wan, elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing itself into spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... the hill, He marshals there his elfin power; Next Monday morn my bridegroom bold Shall bear ...
— Ermeline - a ballad - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... her would kiss She call'd on Mary's son; Then he became a lovely knight, His elfin shape ...
— Ellen of Villenskov - and Other Ballads • Anonymous
... trees; Where every flying thing doth seem to be Instinct with sweetly sensuous melody; Where hills and dales assume their warmest phase, With here and there a scarf of opal haze To soften their luxuriant attire; Where one can almost hear the elfin choir Across the meadow-land, down in the wood, In songs of gladness—there are all things good. Ah! ye who seek the spot where joys abide, Awake! Awake! Seek out the country-side, And through the blue-gray July haze see life All free from care, ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... modern Fairy, were, supernatural wisdom and prescience, and skill in the mechanical arts, especially in the fabrication of arms. They are farther described, as capricious, vindictive, and easily irritated. The story of the elfin sword, Tyrfing, may be the most pleasing illustration of this position. Suafurlami, a Scandinavian monarch, returning from hunting, bewildered himself among the mountains. About sun-set, he beheld a large rock, and two dwarfs, sitting before the mouth of a cavern. The king drew his sword, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... grim, hard-featured face. He sat down in a low chair near his guest and drew to his side a small table that bore a tray of refreshments. He poured out a glass of wine and held it towards the queer, elfin figure crouched ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... themselves for this atom in Creation's myriads, they hover round me now, they bear me up, they teach me how to fly! Deprived now of their human props, how the angry fragments leap and tumble and chase one another through the echoing abyss below! These reverberations seem freighted with elfin voices that jeer the insensate rocks for their baffled scheme ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... were oddly swathed in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to the fingers and feet: I have never seen men so wrapped up before, and women so only in the East. They wore turbans too, and thereunder peered out their elfin faces at me,—faces with protruding lower-jaws and bright eyes. They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen. The white-haired man, who I knew was a good six feet in height, sat a head ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... blows of a tall, swarthy woman was a small girl, so fragile as to appear almost elfin. The woman wore the garb of a gipsy, and the presence of some squalid tents and tethered horses showed our young friends at once that it was a gipsy encampment upon ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thous not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... peered into the radiating glow this quintessential brain looked very much like an opaque, featureless bladder with dim, undulating ghosts of convolutions writhing visibly within. Then beneath its enormity and just above the edge of the throne one saw with a start minute elfin eyes peering out of the glow. No face, but eyes, as if they peered through holes. At first I could see no more than these two staring little eyes, and then below I distinguished the little dwarfed body and its insect-jointed limbs shrivelled and white. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... evening of excitement. Edith sang, and Margaret played some of her elfin strains, and Mr. Regulus made music leap joyously from the sounding violin. There was one in the lonely library who might have made sweeter music than all, whose spirit's chords were all jangled and tuneless, and whose ear seemed ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... old heathenism antagonistic to Christianity. Before that holy rite was performed, the child lay exposed to all their machinations. Baptism was the armour of the infant against the assaults of Satan and his angels, against the cunning of the wanderers from elfin-land, the fairy-sprites, with their changelings and ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... penny whenever she called the tune—these were the only laws that she acknowledged. Though she longed ardently for the admiration of Stephen Culpeper, she would have died rather than relinquish the elfin mockery of ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... she exclaimed. "Have I dreamed a bad dream? That certainly is my pretty little elfin child lying yonder." And she kissed it and strained it affectionately to her heart; but it struggled, and tried to bite like the kitten of ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... The haunt of fairy or of gnome, With its waxen taper still alight, And beaming in its leafy chalice, That lit the revellers down below, When the nights were long, and the moon was low You might have heard, far-off and sweet, The sound of the elfin revelries, Like a bugle strain blown over seas, And the patter and beat of dancing feet,— If you had been like me awake, What time the Great Bear seems to shake, Down through the trackless realms of air, Frost-lances from his shaggy hair; And all around—beneath—across, ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... covered with powdered chalk that the baronet had dusted over it in the hope of developing criminal finger prints. Now under the drumming of his palm the particles of white dust whirled like microscopic elfin dancers. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... 261: Haylife, an herbe. Palsgr. Galium aparine, A.S. hegerifan corn, grains of hedgerife (hayreve, or hayreff), are among the herbs prescribed in Leechdoms, v.2, p.345, for "a salve against the elfin race & nocturnal [goblin] visitors, & for the woman with whom the ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... might well have walked, and I can still see Raffles in full-length silhouette upon a panel of palms and tree-ferns. I see the silhouette grow tall and straight again before my eyes, the door open, and Raffles listening with an alert lift of the head. I, too, hear something, an elfin hiss, a fairy fusillade, and then the sudden laugh with which Raffles rejoined us in ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... in there is a wide triangular spread, and this, gentle friends, is Finn Park, named for a New York boy who was killed in France. The name reminded us also of Elfin Finn, the somewhat complacent stage child who poses for chic costumes in Vogue. We were wondering which was a more hazardous bringing up for a small girl, living on Thompson Street or posing for a fashion magazine. From Finn Square there is a stirring view of ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... had made since she last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall, and condemned, like herself, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... course of time the Countess presented him with a daughter. Scarcely had Hermann received intelligence of this event before a very diminutive old crone entered the apartment and informed him that the elfin bride, whom he had seen in the miniature procession on the night of his nuptials, had given birth to a daughter. Hermann was very friendly to the visitor, wished all happiness to the mother and child, and the old woman took her departure. The Count did not, however, mention this ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... bowls, linking that lonely palm to the remote horizon, a thousand elfin fires arose—blue-tongued and spirituous. Grey pencilings of smoke stole straightly upward to the sky, so that look where she would Rita could discern nothing but these countless thin, faintly wavering, vertical lines ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... fellowship was, in consequence, never more complete than when they were roaming the woods. In them Easter was at home, and her ardent nature came to the surface like a poetic glow from her buoyant health and beauty. Then appeared all that was wayward and elfin-like in her character, and she would be as playful, wilful, evanescent as a wood-spirit. Sometimes, when they were separated, she would lead him into a ravine by imitating a squirrel or a wild-turkey, and, as he crept noiselessly along with bated breath ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... coquetry; but it is something very like it. Many a time the little girl, who looked up to and admired the big boy who could compel her to anything when he was so minded, would, for her own ends, work on his sense of responsibility, taking an elfin delight in his discomfiture. ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... shadowy underwood and the woodbine flaunted its tall head proudly among the leaves. A gentle breeze rustled the fern, and breathed upon the quaking grass, setting its beautiful spikelets in motion until they seemed like fairy bells rung by elfin fingers. The flutter and hum of the wild things served but to intensify the stillness ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... be with you in a minute, papa, dear," was the response, in a sweet, childlike voice, as the speaker ran up the broad staircase with elfin grace and gaiety. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... dreamed in a haze. Through one distant patch a farmhouse struck a muffled note of grey. On the left the ribbon of road glistened white between the sentinel poplars silhouetted against the sky. The hot smell of the earth filled the air like spice. A thousand elfin sounds, the vibration of leaves, the tiny crackling of cornstalks, the fairy whirr of ground insects, melted into ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... the dusk and looked out into the veiled and shadowy spaces and the dim singers lifted up their voices. The moon would rise late; there was no light save the tiny pin points of the cigarettes; it gave the music an elfin, eerie quality. ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... dim light on the grass, like a glowworm, and then Arndt saw the elfin mound open again; but this time the palace looked like a dim, gloomy staircase. On the top stair stood the little Hill-man, holding the glowworm lamp, and making many low bows to his new master. Arndt glanced rather fearfully down the staircase; but then he thought of Reutha, and his love for ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... not Lienhard, was the sole cause of her misfortune. Her prayer on the rope that the saints would destroy the hated child, and the idea which then occupied her mind, that she was really a grown maiden, whose elfin delicacy of figure was due to her being one of the fays or elves mentioned in the fairy tales, had made a deep impression upon ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... lifting to the seas with joyous motion, shaking the water from her bows in flashing brine that sparkled jewel-like in the early sun, her every timber thrilling to the buffets of the waters that rushed bubbling astern all rainbow-hued and with a sound like elfin laughter, until what with all this and the strong, sweet air, even I felt the joy of it; but though my black humour lifted somewhat, my shame was sore upon me, wherefore I kept my gaze for the peak of the sail, the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... be here! If," and he caught Theos's hand in his own warm palm and pressed it, while his voice sank to a soft and infinitely caressing sweetness, "if it is good to climb the dizzy heights of joy and drowse in the deep sunshine of amorous eyes, . . to slip away on elfin wings into the limitless freedom of Love's summerland, ... to rifle rich kisses from warm lips even as rosebuds are rifled from the parent rose, and to forget! ...—to forget all bitter things that are ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... and thoughtfuller. These two years had lengthened it to a perfect oval, adding a touch of strength to the brow, a touch of decision to the chin; and, lest these should overweight it, had removed from the eyes their clouded trouble and left them clear to the depths. The elfin Diane, the small woodland-haunting Indian, no longer looked forth from those windows; no search might find her captive shadow behind them. She had died young, or had faded away perhaps and escaped back to her ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... earth is so like magic and elfin-work as when women burst forth into improvised melody. The bird only "sings as his bill grew," or what he learned from the elders; yet when you hear birds singing in woodland green, throwing out to God or the fairies irrepressible floods of what seems like ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... greatness, suddenly realized how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... young, each eager, hungry and noisy; and over all, with moonlight calmness and steadiness, Mary Pitkin ruled and presided, dispensing to each his portion in due season, while Diana, restless and mischievous as a sprite, seemed to be possessed with an elfin spirit of drollery, venting itself in sundry little tricks and antics which drew ready laughs from the boys and reproving glances from the deacon. For the deacon was that night in one of his severest humors. As Biah Carter afterwards ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... her nestled Tara, a vivid, eager slip of a girl, with wild-rose petals in her cheeks and blue hyacinths in her eyes and sunbeams tangled in her hair, that rippled to her waist in a mass almost too abundant for the small head and elfin face it framed. In temperament, she suggested a flame rather than a flower, this singularly vital child. She loved and she hated, she played and she quarrelled with an intensity, a singleness of aim, surprising and a little disquieting in a creature not yet nine. She was the despair of nurses ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... all, when the feast was over, True Thomas, the host, called for the magic harp which he had received from the hands of the Elfin Queen. When it was brought to him a great silence fell on all the company, and everyone sat listening breathlessly while he sang to them song after song of ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... her as plainly as I see you now: a girl in a red cloak, with such an elfin face I shall never forget it; such small piercing black eyes; such black eyebrows, depressed towards the nose, and raised high towards the temples, giving such an eldritch, mischievous, even dangerous expression to the whole dark countenance; ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... she pictured to herself the days, and months, and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins—sorting them as food for a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child. Doubtless a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born. But Mr. Casaubon's theory of the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... shadowy hat, was tied a large quantity of the herb called in English rosemary, in Spanish romero, and in the rustic language of Portugal ellecrin, which last is a word of Scandinavian origin, and properly signifies the elfin plant. [It was probably] carried into the south by the Vandals or the Alani. The [man seemed] frantic with terror, and said that the witches had been pursuing him, and hovering over his head, for the last two leagues. He came from the Spanish frontier with meal and ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... glided on and on. The blue, sunlit arch overhead, the waving trees that sent dancing shadows like troops of elfin sprites over the water, the fret in one place where a rock broke the murmurous lapping, the swish somewhere else, where grasses and weeds and water blooms rooted in the sedge rocked back and forth with the slow tide—how peaceful ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... is to them—according to Mr. Piazzi Smyth—a demon who would kill them, if it could only run after them; but as it cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it, and pelt it with volleys of stones, "screeching with elfin joy, and using worse names than ever, when the poisonous milk spurts ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... buzz z z z! sounded close to Ethel's ear. She opened her eyes and looked about. There she sat upon a bench in the park. The sun had gone down behind the tall buildings, and it was almost dark. The pretty elfin in green had vanished. Her country friends were nowhere to be seen. A bee's gauzy wings and yellow legs were disappearing in the distance. "There goes another of my friends," said Ethel, "I think he must have come to tell me that it is ...
— A Kindergarten Story Book • Jane L. Hoxie
... this, his daughter wrote with an elfin mockery. Her brilliant eye of youth saw through the inconsistency of the beliefs he strove to reconcile. She learned his lore, read his books, ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... off to her fairy spring. It's really a lovely little nook she's found and she's made a doll's house in the hollow of an old tree. She's a funny little thing—almost elfin, isn't she? Are you sure she isn't too much trouble for you and ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... fairy throng, She led the dancing group along Through tangled brakes and fretted bowers, Where grew the richest, rarest flowers, That wooed the bee to banquet there, Or yielded sweets to Summer air. But she who moved with elfin pace, And taught the infant throng to play, Raised to heaven her cherub face, While that bright celestial ray, Which halos the throne of glory round, Illumed her azure, orient eye, That seemed to penetrate the sky. Bending her gaze upon the ground, Her gentle bosom ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... the transition to a type of tale wherein one special characteristic of elfin gifts is presented. For in this case, when the mannikin asked the midwife what her charge was, she modestly replied: "Oh, nothing; the little trouble I have had does not call for any payment." "Now then, lift ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... dangerous office of pilot, told her about divers and coral reefs, and some adventures of his—a little apocryphal—in the China Seas. Frere resumed his smoking, half angry with himself, and half angry with the provoking little fairy. This elfin creature had a fascination for him which he could not ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... The spirit of it—weird, elfin—was abroad, the air was full of it as, alone out in the gusty darkness of the autumn night, at eleven o'clock, Judith walked swiftly toward the Lusk place. Wrapped in a little packet she carried bread and ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... that dreams and rambles Through his own elfin air, Knows that the street's a prison, Knows that the gates are there: Still he that scorns or struggles Sees, frightful and afar. All that they leave of rebels ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... hair the sunshine In showers; it touches, see, Her high bright cheeks in turning; Ah, Elfin Company, ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... for itself that boyhood makes, O happiness to roam the sighing shore, Plough up with elfin craft the water-flakes, And track the nested rail with cautious oar; Then floating lie and look with wonder new Straight up in the great ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... well as its appearance. Its movements, its individuality, its posing as a little furry mass of concealed mysteries, its elfin-like elusiveness, all combined to justify its name; and a subtle painter might have pictured it as a wisp of floating smoke, the fire below betraying itself at two points only—the ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... In a sense every romancer is a child—such was Ludwig Tieck, such was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. But each is something more—he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows, at least, some of Elfin Land as ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... her elfin laughter, but now it comes to me from subterranean depths. The earth has opened; new flames arise and stretch forth ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... of woodland grace and beauty, was strolling in the sunshine with her Little Pine; while on every side the trees were shaking their heads and it seemed gossiping about the hunting plans of that reckless little elfin hunter, Hymen, who was hurrying overland and shooting his joyous arrows in every direction, till the very air felt charged with the whisperings of countless lovers. It made me think of the shy but radiant ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... you as we see a face That trembles in a forest place Upon the mirror of a pool Forever quiet, clear and cool; And in the wayward glass, appears To hover between smiles and tears, Elfin and human, airy and true, And backed ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I to the festival Thou holdest in the regions of romance, Where dragons lurk and elfin spirits dance, And pearls lie hid within each rose petal. What magic changes in life's crystal ball Shall thus transform earth's dullness at thy glance! Ride then the wind, a feather for thy lance, A pool thy sea, thy ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... is the most wonderful fairy story in the world, but Shakespeare did not create it out of hand; he found the fairy part of it in the traditions of the country people. One of his most intelligent students says: "He founded his elfin world on the prettiest of the people's traditions, and has clothed it in the ever-living flower ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... the Elfin King went to a golden chest whence he took a phial that was filled with a blood-red liquor. And with this liquor he anointed the ears and the eyelids, the nostrils, the lips, and the finger-tips of ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... fellow, with a handsome figure and face, though the latter was very dark, and he walked with a stoop and an awkward slouching gait. He wore his long black hair in straight elfin locks; those in front having been cut across the forehead just above the eyebrows, as being the simplest method of clearing the way for vision. He was clad in a very dirty soiled hunting-shirt and leggings of leather, with moccasins of the same, ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... long, but took their vengeance in the end, and that was in the person of the last descendant, Jean. She bore the name of the Rutherfords, but she was the daughter of their trembling wives. At the first she was not wholly without charm. Neighbours recalled in her, as a child, a strain of elfin wilfulness, gentle little mutinies, sad little gaieties, even a morning gleam of beauty that was not to be fulfilled. She withered in the growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her mothers) came to her ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he saw before him Jarvis Barrow. Dismounting, he met the old man beside a cairn, placed there so long ago that there was only an elfin story for ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... not the goblin train Whose bells sound faintly on the passer's ear,— Who dares attempt a secret sight to gain Feels the sharp prick of many an elfin spear, And hears, too late, the low, malicious jeer, As long thorn-javelins his body gore, Until, defeated, breathless, bruised, and sore, He turns him from the haunted ground to flee, And murmurs low, as grace he doth implore, "The Queen ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... softly; and the bare trees shook their branches in the keen air. The pleasant glow of the blazing logs lighted up the circle of happy faces, and peopled the distant corners with elfin shadows. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... almost spiritual tokens as the cattle are for the first bite of its fields. How it touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of green that ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... and back again with swift alternation. He pinched a bit of the cosmetic between thumb and finger, and dressed his eyelashes with it. Then he carefully drew an arched eyebrow, and paused to look at Paul again. The single brow gave him a comically elfin look, and Paul grinned; Herr Pauer drew another eyebrow, touched up his moustache, obliterated the gray upon his temples, and combed and twisted moustache and hair to his own satisfaction. Then he sat down on the table, and looked once more at his companion. Paul looked back ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... of Stevenson's books is unnecessary. We have all read them too recently to need a prompter. The high spirits and elfin humor which play about and support every work justifies ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... sailor Dantes to the dark, noisome dungeon of the Chateau d' If and given her to the arms of Fernand, the Catalan. Haydee had fluttered over the page of his stormy, agitated history, leaving him Esperance and Zuleika as reminders of a happy, but all too brief dream, an elfin vision of enchantment that had vanished as swiftly as it had come. But his son and daughter had twined themselves about the fibres of his heart as the clinging ivy twines about the shattered fragments of some grand and imposing ruin, and ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... haze and through its mazy ringlets, Titania may have led her elfin rout, Or Ariel fanned it with his gauzy winglets, Or Puck danced in the bowl ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... hair, and crept up the hillside and over the roots of the maple and basswood trees. Here lived the elves; she knew them well, and often lay with her head among the violets, listening for the thin sound of their elfin fiddles. Often she had drowsed the summer noon in the coolness, unheeding the dinner call, until busy Martha roused her with the sisterly scolding she knew she deserved ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... you to understand how deeply it has interested me to meet you," he said. "Allow me, from the bottom of my heart, to wish you success." Whereupon, before Maurice could say "damn!" he was gone again, leaving his elfin laugh behind him in the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... precipices amidst which the Avon-Dhu, or River Forth, has its birth, are still, according to popular tradition, haunted by the Elfin people, the most peculiar, but most pleasing, of the creations of Celtic superstitions. The opinions entertained about these beings are much the same with those of the Irish, so exquisitely well narrated by Mr. Crofton Croker. An eminently ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... that hall, and my lips were mute, And my spirit entranced with the elfin lute; And the eyes that look'd on me seem'd fraught with love, As the stars that make ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... the children stealing They stood there hand in hand, For the elfin chimes were pealing Aloud in ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... my holy, rich, perfume Makes faint your roses of palest bloom; Soul, as I am, of an orient gem, My aroma's too divine for them; I'm come! but mine odorous, elfin wing Rises from earth, and that one fair thing First Love's first sigh, which ye know to be, More exquisite, and more brief ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... (decrease) 36, (contract) 195. Adj. little; small &c (in quantity) 32; minute, diminutive, microscopic; microzoal; inconsiderable &c (unimportant) 643; exiguous, puny, tiny, wee, petty, minikin^, miniature, pygmy, pigmy^, elfin; undersized; dwarf, dwarfed, dwarfish; spare, stunted, limited; cramp, cramped; pollard, Liliputian, dapper, pocket; portative^, portable; duodecimo^; dumpy, squat; short &c 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... shade, What well might seem an elfin's grave; And every pledge in earth I laid, That erst ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... is caused by the entry of an elfin-tressed little girl, who stares at us half impudently, half shyly, with bright black eyes, hesitates at the botanist's clumsy smile and nod, and then goes and stands by her father and ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... floor: Coldness awoke me; through the waning darkness I heard far hounds give shivering aery tongue, Remote, withdrawing, suddenly faint and near; I leapt and saw a pack of stretching weasels Hunt a pale coney in a soundless rush, Their elfin and thin yelping pierced my heart As with an unseen beauty long awaited; Wolf-skin and cloak I buckled over this night-gear, And took my honoured spear from my bed-side Where none but I may touch its purity, And sped as lightly ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... earthly knight, As he's an elfin grey, I wad na gie my ain true-love For nae lord ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... on high. Only in me the waters cry Who mourn the hours now slipped for ever, Hours of boding, joy, and fever, When we loved, by chance beguiled, I a boy and you a child— Child! but with an angel's air, Astonished, eager, unaware, Or elfin's, wandering with a grace Foreign to any fireside race, And with a gaiety unknown In the light feet and hair backblown, And with a sadness yet more strange, In meagre cheeks which knew to change Or faint or fired more swift than sight, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... over night, nothing but burial could save it from marauding coyotes, though the wagon might have baffled the buzzards. The two set to work digging a shallow trench down to bedrock, rolling up loose boulders for a cairn. The whirring chorus of the cicadas drummed an elfin requiem. Now and then there came the chink of bit, or hoof on rock, from the waiting horses in the broken road. The sun was low, horizontal rays piercing the flood of violet haze in the canyon. Across the gorge the cliff, above ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... to look at him. They followed his gaze, which passed across them to the main rigging, and saw what he saw, a brown hand and arm, muscular and wet, being joined from overside by a second brown hand and arm. A head followed, thatched with long elfin locks, and then a face, with roguish black eyes, lined with the ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... of victory," our acquaintance "Come if you Dare, the Trumpets Sound." The rest of the work is mainly enchantments and the like. More fairy-like music has never entered a musician's dreams than Philidel's "Hither this way," and the chorus which alternates with the solo part is as elfin, will-o'-th'-wispish, as anything of Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn is Purcell's only rival in such pictures. At the beginning of the celebrated Frost Scene, where Cupid calls up "thou genius of the clime" (the clime being Arctic), we get a specimen ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... about the geraniums in the convent garden or the chances of the Carlist war. It was all wonderful. It had seemed perfect. And yet—and yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some straying angel—some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had ever realised. She cared for him—how could he doubt it? But was the ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... doth borrow melody. I would not do the lordly masters wrong By filching fair words from the shining throng Whose music haunts me as the wind a tree! Lo, when a stranger in soft Syrian glooms Shot through with sunset treads the cedar dells, And hears the breezy ring of elfin bells Far down by where the white-haired cataract booms, He, faint with sweetness caught from forest smells, Bears thence, unwitting, ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... own Northwest in this. It stood tall and stately, murmuring as the sea does, until it rolled before a stronger puff of breeze in waves of ochre, through which the warm bronze gleamed when its rhythmic patter swelled into deeper-toned harmonies. There was that in the elfin music and blaze of color which appealed to the sensual ear and eye, and something which struck deeper still, as it did in the days men poured libations on the fruitful soil, and white-robed priests blessed it, when ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... stretched before them in unbroken silvery sheen; and the straight young corn dared to rustle its green ribbons boastfully. Fowls still uncaptured crowed lustily in adjacent barnyards; and now and again, sweet as echoes from elfin horns, came the tinkling music of cow-bells. Here and there, the little shock-headed boys who were driving their charges afield paused knee-deep in rosy clover to watch ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... been placed cunningly woven in and out. Still other branches, criss-crossed above, and piled high with foliage, offered a thick mat of verdure to shield one from the hot rays of the sun. Within the elfin chamber was a rustic seat; everywhere, their roots enwrapped in wet earth, ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... winged creatures flashed like flakes of fire, through dusky places. She heard their small faint voices in the whisper of the leaves, and every broad toadstool was to her a resting place for weary elfin messengers hurrying on some mission for their queen. Her own imaginings, like her favorite books, were all of magic wands, golden garments and crystal palaces. Sceptered kings, and jeweled princesses trailing robes of satin were the chief ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of this ethereal country clustered about a portal, whose frame-work was of shining stones, and whose firm, but slender bars, were of purest gold.—"Favoured mortal!" (the speaker was beside me)—"favoured beyond even thine own conception, know that thou art permitted to behold the Elfin Paradise—the true, the veritable Fairy Land. Pollute it not by the tone of mortal speech; to us are thy thoughts not unknown, and partially are we permitted to gratify thy desire for information. Thinkest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... first hushed enchantment, blent with a sort of religious awe, as in his earliest love affair he awakens to the delicious mystery we call woman, a being half fairy and half flower, made out of moonlight and water lilies, of elfin music and thrilling fragrance, of divine whiteness and softness and rustle as of dewy rose gardens, a being of unearthly eyes and terribly sweet marvel of hair; such, too, through life, and through the ages, however confused or overlaid by use and wont, is man's ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... from out the bosom of the lake, And Arthur rowed across and took it—rich With jewels, elfin Urim, on the hilt, Bewildering heart and eye—the blade so bright That men are blinded by it—on one side, Graven in the oldest tongue of all this world, "Take me," but turn the blade and ye shall see, And written in the speech ye speak yourself, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... quality of these visions was patent to Miss Willis, for she possessed a quiet sense of humor as a sort of east-wind supplementary to the sentimental and poetic properties of her nature. She had a way of poking fun at herself, which, when exercised, sent the elfin figures scattering with a celerity suggestive of the departure of her own pupils at the tinkle of the bell for dismissal. Then she was left alone with her humor and her New England conscience, that stern adjuster of real values and enemy of spiritual dissipation. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... saddle Bevis! I cannot rest. The air must cool my brow. I fain would ride to view the elfin scene of chivalry of which we heard to-night. Rouse none from their slumbers, for I would not have those prating knaves know that I could credit so wild a tale as our landlord ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... on their long, fragile hind legs, the way they stroked their pointed chins as they sat and watched and listened with their pointed ears lifted alertly, watching with soft gray eyes, or the way they handled objects with their little four-fingered hands. They were so remarkably human-like in their elfin way that the colonists couldn't help but be ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... last. Toinette set the casement open, and lay a long time waiting and watching; then she fell asleep. She waked with a sneeze and jump and sat up in bed. Behold, on the coverlet stood her elfin friend, with a long train of other elves beside him, all clad in the beetle-wing green, and wearing little pointed caps. More were coming in at the window; outside a few were drifting about in the moon rays, which ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... of the waters of forgetfulness. In a brief space we were laughing right merrily, no longer remembering our wrongs at the hands of those cruel grown-ups. Our laughter echoed back from the barns and the spruce grove, as if elfin denizens of upper air were sharing in ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... brimful of fun; While the ten-year-old twins, in a somersault mood, Have measured their length from the barn to the wood. A dozen times, yes, or it may be a score, Till their cheeks are as red as the roses, and more; Then the elfin of twelve and the boy of fifteen, Are pelting each other with snowballs so keen, That we, who are older, forget to be staid, {245} And shout, each with each, as the youngsters, arrayed In feathery ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... together without distinction. Thus there was George Macdonald, a Scot of genius as genuine as Carlyle's; he could write fairy-tales that made all experience a fairy-tale. He could give the real sense that every one had the end of an elfin thread that must at last lead them into Paradise. It was a sort of optimist Calvinism. But such really significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius. Of the Victorian Age as a whole it is true to say that it did discover ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousand memories. And the Place de la Concorde lies silver blue under springtime skies. And up the Champs Elysees the elfin lamps shimmer in the moist leaves like a million topaz tears. And the boulevards are a-thrill with the melody of living. Are you, now far away and deep in the American winter, with me once again in memory over the seas in this warm and wonderful and fugitive world? And do ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... the midst of an elfin rally Sudden I stood alone; Far away over the distant valley Fairies and elves ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... long procession, Formless, countless of their kind Circle us in flying coveys Like the leaves in Autumn wind. Now in ghastly silence deathly, Now with shrilling elfin cry— Is it some mad dance of bridal, Or a ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... down upon the forest pond, An elfin tarn green-shadowed in the fern; Nine yews ensomber the wet bank, beyond The autumn branches of the beeches burn With yellow flame and red amid the green, And patches ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... power of her natural charms, and appeared simply clad in her favorite green.** Moraig, the pretty grandchild of the steward, walked beside her, like the fairy queen of the scene, so gayly was she decorated in all the flowers of spring. "Here is the lady of my elfin revels, holding her little king in her arms!" As the countess spoke, Moraig held up the infant to Lady Mar, dressed like herself, in a tissue gathered from the field. The sweet babe laughed and crowed, and made a spring to leap ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... better suited to its nature, such as the melodious notes of the birds which made their homes year after year amid its bordering thickets, or the gathering together in springtime of thousands of primroses, whose pale, small, elfin faces peeped out from every mossy corner,—or the scent of secret violets in the grass, filling the air with the delicate sweetness of a breathing made warm by the April sun. Or when the thrill of summer drew the wild roses running quickly from the earth skyward, twining their stems together ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... of the country. Ursula nestled near him, into his constant warmth, and watched the pale-lit revelation racing ahead, the visible night. Sometimes it was a wide old road, with grass-spaces on either side, flying magic and elfin in the greenish illumination, sometimes it was trees looming overhead, sometimes it was bramble bushes, sometimes the walls of a crew-yard and the butt of ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... quiver under the finger-tip caress in rhythmic vibrations that became whisperings and rustlings and mutterings of sound—but of sound so different; so elusively thin that it was shimmeringly sibilant; so mellow that it was maddening sweet, piping like an elfin horn, which last was just what Bassett decided would be like a peal from some bell of the gods ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... growths and carrying a heavy crop. These include: 2 Walters, 4 O.K. Heart, 1 Canoka, 1 Slioka, 1 Rover, 2 Calendar, 1 Westoka, 1 Nursoka, 1 Aloka, 1 Symoka, 15 select unnamed bearing seedlings, yet on trial. All are promising. Also we have three of the Elfin paper shell heartnut hybrids. I have failed to find a good pollinator for these Elfins, so they are shy croppers, although producing plenty of the female blooms. All of the above trees are 6 inches in diameter ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... is on the wide And moving waters, and it draweth nigh Like a sea-cloud. The elfin billows fly Before it, in their armories enthrall'd Of radiant and moon-breasted emerald; And many is the mariner that sees The lone boat in the melancholy breeze, Waving her snowy canvass, and anon Their stately vessel with a ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... forgotten. So tenderly boyish was he in effect that his confreres among the book clerks accepted with difficulty the story that he was married. When it was told that he had a son they gasped their incredulity. And when one day this extraordinary elfin sprite remarked that at the time of his honeymoon he had had a beard they felt (I remember) that the world was without power ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... mountain were all gold, And each particular tree a band of jewels, And from its womb the Niebelungen hoard With elfin wardens called me, 'Leave thy love And be our Master'—I would turn away— And know ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... me reproachfully. She and I had gone to sleep together on the rug, and had naturally wandered to the dream-forest where dogs and little girls hunt wild game and have strange adventures. We encountered hosts of elfin foes, and it required all the dog tactics at Belle's command to acquit herself like the lady and huntress that she was. Belle had her dreams too. We used to lie under the trees and flowers in the old garden, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... clear and silvery, voices of raindrops,— 'We struck with silver claws, we struck her down. We are the ghosts of the singing furies . . . ' A chorus of elfin voices blowing about me Weaves to a babel of sound. Each cries a secret. I run among them, reach out vain ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
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