"Elves" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their nightly watchful spheres, Lead in swift round the months and years. The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove, Now to the moon in wavering morrice move; And on the tawny sands and shelves Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves. By dimpled brook and fountain-brim, The wood-nymphs, decked with daisies trim, 120 Their merry wakes and pastimes keep: What hath night to do with sleep? Night hath better sweets to prove; Venus now wakes, and wakens Love. Come, let us our rights begin; 'Tis only daylight that makes ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... Renaissance both in England and in Italy had a similar craving. But the aspect under which these ancient dreams are regarded by them is most significantly different. With Spenser and Ariosto, fairies and elves, gods and demons, are regarded in their fancied connection with man. Even in the age of Pope, when the gods and the Rosicrucian Sylphs have become alike "poetical machinery," this is their work. But among the moderns it is as connected with Nature, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... may put amongst the number of elves the spirits which are seen, they say, in mines and mountain caves. They appear clad like the miners, run here and there, appear in haste as if to work and seek the veins of mineral ore, lay it in heaps, draw it out, turning the wheel of the crane; they seem to be very busy ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... quoted Hartley Coleridge, who said, "No boy ever imagined himself a poet while he was reading Shakespeare or Milton." And speaking of Landor's oaths, he said, "They are so rich, they are really nutritious." Talking of criticism, he said he did not believe in spiteful imps, but in kindly elves who would "nod to him and do him courtesies." He laughed at Bishop Berkeley's attempt to destroy the world in one octavo volume. His doctrine to mankind always was, "Enlarge your tastes, that you may enlarge your hearts." He believed in reversing original propensities ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... nest, Robin-redbreast! Sing, birds, in every furrow; And from each hill, let music shrill Give my fair Love good-morrow! Blackbird and thrush in every bush, Stare, linnet, and cock-sparrow! You pretty elves, amongst yourselves Sing my fair Love good-morrow; To give my Love good-morrow Sing birds, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... a notion to speak for themselves, And are wielding the tongue and the pen; They've mounted the rostrum; the termagant elves, And—oh horrid!—are talking to men! With faces unblanched in our presence they come To harangue us, they say, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Nicholas, what how man, loke adoun: Awake and think on Cristes passioun I crowche the from Elves and from Wightes.' There with the night-spel seyde he anon rightes On the foure halves of the hous aboute And on the threissh-fold ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... so fair a night as this, methinks, the old fables and romances might well be true that tell of elves that dance on moony nights, and of shapely nymphs and lovely dryads that are the spirits of the trees. Aye, in the magic of so fair a night as this ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... world that smoky mist of magic were elves, and they did so because Conaire's tabus ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... spot of earth, you might, I ween, Have guessed some congregation of the elves, To sport by summer moons, had ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... The heart of Edwin, which no human terror could appal, sunk within him; his nerves trembled, and the objects that surrounded him, swam in confusion before his eyes. But it is not for virtue to tremble; it is not for conscious innocence to fear the power of elves and goblins. Edwin presently recollected himself, and a gloomy kind of tranquility assumed the empire of his heart. He was more watchful than ever for his beloved Imogen; he gazed with threefold earnestness upon ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... search of me, to whom I called. And, what is strange, these sights and sounds were all about the natural and not the supernatural. For instance, I did not see the visage of a grinning goblin just within a little chink of The Rock, as I ought to have seen. I did not see "faëry elves" dancing in the moonlit beams, as I ought to have seen. Then boldly I took a direct course from the mountain over the plain, believing I should intercept our encampment. I continued this line for two hours, or not quite so much, but I found myself ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... descent of Bram Stoker's infamous vampire Dracula may be traced back through centuries of legend. Hobgoblins, demons, and witches mingle grotesquely with the throng of beautiful princesses, queens in glittering raiment, fairies and elves. Without these ugly figures, folk-tales would soon lose their power to charm. All tale tellers know that fear is a potent spell. The curiosity which drove Bluebeard's wife to explore the hidden chamber lures us on ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... to try to imagine what tune it was that could call from the mountain air the 'flower sprites' and 'sunshine elves' of morning on ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... unable to see dryads dancing in the moonlight (as she and I saw them in the same spot to-night), careless that Nature was distilling magic perfume for us from tree and fern and wild flower, our eyes shut to the fact that elves disguised as Indian lilies were using ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... skin—but it had a green tint, and its colour was very soothing to the eye. All at once I saw approaching a set of the most beautiful little people, so little that they would only have reached to my knee; they looked like men and women, but they were better proportioned. They called themselves Elves, and their garments were composed of the leaves of flowers, trimmed with the wings of gnats and flies—not at all ugly. They seemed as if they were searching for something—what I did not know; but when they came a little nearer ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... freely as he descended the stairs. "Before I would call that gray carle my father, or his child my wife, may I feel all the hammers of the elves and sprites he keeps tortured within that ugly little prison-house playing a death's march on my body! Holy Saint Dunstan, the timbrel-girls came in time! They say these wizards always have fair daughters, and their love can be ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... yet, that he be alive, and dwelling in Avalon with the fairest of all elves: still look the Britons for the day of ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... now awakened in me no surprise or even curiosity. It simply sounded homelike and familiar. I gazed abstractedly out of the window at the brilliant blossoms in the garden, that nodded their heads at me like so many little elves with coloured caps on, but I said nothing. I felt that Cellini watched me keenly ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... bad," said Babie. "Now are they, Mr. Ogilvie? I know elder women are, and erl kings and mist widows, but poor Neck, that sat on the water and played his harp, wasn't bad, and the dear little kobolds were so kind and funny. Now are they bad elves?" ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bother me with such rot!" he cried. "Faeries and elves and ideas and the devil knows what—that's all played out. That's worse than iambics. Go hang, you idiot, and ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there, 25 My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair; And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves, Go dancing round the china plates ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... but now one jagged, fixed mass of awkward arms and cruel thorns; the third, a beautiful, spacious pine-wood, climbing over cliffs to the far verge of the cape where the lighthouse flashes. These were like woods in a fairy tale, and may well have had each their own particular elves and spirits. Each had a separate character: the first as of the earth, homely, full of gentle russet colours from the juniper and the wild fruit; the second, haggish, full of witches whose finger-nails had never been clipped; the third, queenly, as ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... who laughed now at Blue Aloes, merry and free as elves in a wood. There was a glow came out of Christine Chaine that communicated itself to all. She and Saltire were to be married as soon as a Quentin aunt, who was on her way, had settled down comfortably with ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... this for both of them!" shouted Cloudesley, as he vigorously laid about him. "Strike for Hay Hill and vengeance! Let them have it, my men! And you, little fellows! Small young gentlemen, with the souls of heroes, and the bodies of elves, who can't strike a very hard blow, aim where your blows will tell! Aim at their faces. This for Fanny! This for Edith!" shouted Cloudesley, raining his strokes right and left, ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... most charming little people came marching forth. They were only tall enough to reach to my knee. They looked like men, but were better proportioned: they called themselves elves, and had delicate clothes on, of flower leaves trimmed with the wings of flies and gnats, which had a very good appearance. Directly they appeared, they seemed to be seeking for something—I know not what; but at last some of them came towards me, ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... opposed, displaying equal fancy and imagery. Shall we mention the remonstrance of Helena to Hermia, or Titania's description of her fairy train, or her disputes with Oberon about the Indian boy, or Puck's account of himself and his employments, or the Fairy Queen's exhortation to the elves to pay due attendance upon her favourite, Bottom; or Hippolita's description of a chace, or Theseus's answer? The two last are as heroical and spirited as the others are full of luscious tenderness. The reading of this ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... gazed on, and never lifted Himself to see the broken clouds, that drifted One after one, like infant elves at play Amid the night-winds, in their lonely way— Some whistling and some moaning, some asleep, And dreaming dismal dreams, and sighing deep Over their couches of green moss and flowers, And ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... the end of fifteen years some of these circles acquire a diameter of fifteen to twenty feet or more. These are known as fairy rings. Before science dispelled the illusion they were believed to have been the work of witches, elves, or evil spirits, ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... came up, a great golden moon, shouldered over the rim of the world by the backs of the crooked elves. The horse and the two persons made a black, distorted shadow that jerked along as though it were a thing evil and persistent. Far off in the thickets of the hills an owl cried, eerie and weird like a creature in some bitter sorrow. The lane ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... given, Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless—like that pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount; or faery elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth Wheels her pale course: they, on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... must be for elves Who have to do up their clothes themselves; And the tailor fairies use Fairy Shears, Long cutting-grasses that grow by meres; And they mend their things with the Spider-stitches, Faint white flowers that you find in ditches, And Shepherd's Needle, which you'll see plain In ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 13, 1920 • Various
... the ages' gain, the ages' loss, A wealth of wonders and so much away— When now hears one the woodland elves at play, Or angry dryads where tall tree-tops toss. No more they lightly tread the dewy moss As danced they through cool haunts in ecstasy; But rank and lost the paths in lone decay Where fairy footsteps once ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... the Rhine and the Black Forest and all the other haunts of elves and fairies and hobgoblins; but for good honest spooks there is no place like home. And what differentiates our spook—Spiritus Americanus—from the ordinary ghost of literature is that it responds to the American sense of humour. Take Irving's stories for example. The ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... such a laugh, big and loud and rollicking, and he said, "Wants a ride, does she? Well, well, shall we take her, Little Elves? Shall we take her, Little Fairies? Shall we take her, ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... she had been born among white flowers in the moonlight, and because the afterglow of the sunrise, from which the elves flee, crimsoned her cheeks when I ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... eyes of hers! Drenched irises. And they used to dance like elves of delight. And all through a foolish misunderstanding about a shark. What a tragedy misunderstandings are. That pretty romance broken and over just because Mr. Glossop would insist ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... then the silence. That was the most compelling charm of all. It helped him to feel. And he felt that he was not alone, though he heard nothing and saw nobody. The garden was full of flower-fairies, invisible elves and sprites whose mission it was to guard the flowers, and who loved the moonlight more than they loved the day; dainty, diaphanous creatures who were wafted across the smooth lawns on summer breezes, and washed the thirsty petals and drooping leaves in the ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... knack of in regard to these mine articles, in virtue of which my wife and daughters never hear or see the little personalities respecting them which form parts of my papers. By a particular arrangement which I have made with the elves of the inkstand and the familiar spirits of the quill, a sort of glamour falls on their eyes and ears when I am reading, or when they read the parts personal to themselves; otherwise their sense of feminine propriety would be shocked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... hero's path, who rode In harness and helmet bright, Through a wood where hostile elves abode, In the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... bwye ye dun Elves! who, on whings made o'leather, Still roun my poorch whiver an' whiver at night; Aw mAc naw hord-horted, unveelin disturber, DestrAcy your snug nests, an your ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... thoughts. This faith in the visionary world of poets is instilled into us (and it is for this reason that Rousseau, in his masterly work on education, the "Emile," reprobates the custom as promotive of superstition) in early infancy by our parents and nurses with their stories of nymphs, fairies, elves, dwarfs, giants, witches, hobgoblins, and the like fabulous beings, and, as soon as we are able to read, by the tales of genii, sorcerers, demons, ghouls, enchanted caves and castles, and monsters and monstrosities of every name. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... plenty of amusement for them on this broad reach of sand and shingle. Some are groping for shells or for pebbles, which the lapidary will transform for a trifle into dazzling jewels; others are playing ducks and drakes on the waves, or entertaining themselves like Prospero's elves, ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... impression he must be stunned because of a surging in his ears, and because all the voices of the people about him had become small and remote. They were shouting like elves inside a hill. ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... with the demon that surrounds (swallows) the waters of the sky. The Vedic parallel is rather Ras[a], the far-off great 'stream.' It is rarely that one finds Aryan equivalents in the land of fairies and fays. Yet are the Hindu clever artizan Ribhus[24] our 'elves,' who, even to this day, are distinct from fairies in their dexterity and cleverness, as ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... tummy ache your arnium fishing bumps. Got them us elves. Tooking longthier, more hurtful, but can. Few don't gives high dragon bump tweddy ...
— High Dragon Bump • Don Thompson
... indeed he, shook his head. "Nay, nay, gaffer," he answered. "I am wise; I know my business. I think I have been asleep in the green wood a thousand years and waited upon by elves and fairies and all manner of pygmies, and they taught me the speech of birds, and what the trees whisper to each other from dawn to dusk, and the war-cries of the winds, with other much delectable knowledge which would have made me wiser than the wisest—but now that I am awake ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... "faery elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth Wheels her pale course; they, on their mirth and dance Intent, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... prove for many a boy and girl (of any age up to a hundred) the Golden Bridge over which they can plunge into that marvelous world of fairies, elves, goblins, kobolds, trolls, afreets, jinns, ogres, and giants that fascinates us all, lost to this world till some one wakes us up to ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... cried Lottie to one of these sportive zephyrs. "De you call that a gust of wind? I declare it was a viewless sprite, or a party of snow elves, playing their mad pranks ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... answered: "O King, so be it. And I will tell you something more. Listen. When anyone tells or hears with proper respect even a part of these puzzle-stories, he shall be immediately free from sin. And wherever these stories are told, elves and giants and witches and goblins and imps ...
— Twenty-two Goblins • Unknown
... sleep from his eyes; and in the spaces between there were a hundred fleeting visions of little and big things to torture him—remembrances of incidents when debts and disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman's face. It was not his wife's face, not a face that belonged to the old life, but one which had been part of his daily existence for over four years. It was the first ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "'"Witches, wizards, elves, gnomes, bull-beggars, fiends, an' devils is debarred the Bloo Grass Country," says Squar' Alexanders, speakin' for himse'f an' his fellow selectmen, "an' they're not goin' to be allowed to hold their black ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... but cheered himself as he rode on by calling to mind some of the beautiful stories of the old religion of his land. He thought of the elves and fairies who were said to dwell in these very forests, and at midnight to creep up from their hiding-places and gambol and play tricks among the flowers and dewdrops with the wild bees and the summer insects, or dance in magic circles on the greensward. And it did his ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... spirits, to whom were assigned peculiar employments. The chief of these were the Fairies, concerning whom the reader will find a long dissertation, in Volume Second. The Brownie formed a class of beings, distinct in habit and disposition from the freakish and mischievous elves. He was meagre, shaggy, and wild in his appearance. Thus, Cleland, in his satire against the Highlanders, compares ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... though aspiring Rite, the still, the multitudinous, the mystical, prospers!—Gratefully, as for the boon inexpressibly worth—easily, as of their own transcending power—promptly, as though fearing that a benefit received could wax cold, the joyful Elves crown upon the bright hair of their graciously natured, but humanly and womanly weak benefactress—the wedded felicity of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... Stephen and Philip, or sturdy and straight like Tom; but he was a very happy little boy all the same, after a strange, quiet fashion of his own, and he liked best of all to be alone with Norah in the woods or by the river, when they would make up all sorts of fancies about queer little elves and fairies who, they said, lived in the trees or bushes, and in the sticklebacks' ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle
... branches; crystal streams lisping through banks purple with violets, rosy with eglantine, or sweet with wild thyme; thickets where the rabbits hide; sequestered nooks on which the elms and alders throw long shadows; circles of green grass made by dancing elves; rounded hills shut in by oaks, pines, birches, and laurel, where shepherds pipe on oaten straws, or shag-haired satyrs frolic and sleep; and meadows, whose carpets of cowslip and mint are freshened daily by ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... of Cain crushed with His vengeance; In the feud He rejoiced not, but far away drove him From kindred and kind, that crime to atone for, Meter of Justice. Thence ill-favored creatures, 60 Elves and giants, monsters of ocean, Came into being, and the giants that longtime Grappled with ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... In his sorrowful situation. Said he, "My friends, pray let me die In the right way, nor shed such tears." Not at all, the consolers, With many a tear, and many a sigh, Had come resolved by him to lie; And when they left they helped themselves Upon his lands, the greedy elves! And drank from out his brook, And every one of them such suppers took, That when the stag revived, He found his meals reduced; So that while his friends had thrived, He had to fast or die ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... had many superstitions. He believed in good giants and bad giants, in dark elves and bright elves, in superhuman beings who tilled the wide gulf which existed between himself and the gods. He believed, too, in wraiths and fetches and guardian spirits, who followed particular persons, and belonged to certain families—a belief which ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... the house had been oppressively lively, thanks to a visit from the Dugdale children; which little elves were sent out of the way while their mother performed the not unnecessary duty of putting her establishment in order. For Harrie was determined that her house, and none other, should have the honour of receiving Uncle Brian. As Nathanael had taken for granted the same thing, and as Mary Harper ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Asia to north-western Europe, and since all the pedigrees of their chieftains were traced back to Woden, it is not improbable that he may have been really a deified ancestor of the principal Germanic families. The popular creed, however, was mainly one of lesser gods, such as elves, ogres, giants, and monsters, inhabitants of the mark and fen, stories of whom still survive in English villages as folk-lore or fairy tales. A few legends of the pagan time are preserved for us ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... read "The Return of The Birds," written in the early spring of 1864, when, as you know, the country was in great trouble, and the birds saw many a sorry sight. If you like a beautiful fairy-tale in verse, all about children and the elves or sprites that children love, read his "Little People of The Snow." There also is the pretty legend of "The White-footed Deer"; or if you bigger boys and girls wish something more weird and exciting, read his tragic story of "The Strange ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... elves, within and out; Strew good luck, ouphes, on every sacred room; That it may stand till the perpetual doom, In state as wholesome, as in state 'tis fit, Worthy the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... be; In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours: I must go seek some dewdrops here, And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear. Farewell, thou lob of spirits, I'll begone; Our queen and all our elves come here anon. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... Southampton, for some observations, which I have since repeated. The best plan for observing the order is to make a person first raise his eyebrows, and this produces transverse wrinkles across the forehead; and then very gradually to contract all the muscles round the elves with as much force as possible. The reader who is unacquainted with the anatomy of the face, ought to refer to p. 24, and look at the woodcuts 1 to 3. The corrugators of the brow (corrugator supercilii) ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... elves, Brimful of pride, of nothing, of yourselves, Survey Eugenio, view him o'er and o'er, Then sink into yourselves, and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... other. When people had banished the old professional clown from the stage, they felt the necessity of running about themselves as clowns. The sober, enlightened age protested against the old folk-tales with goblins, gnomes, elves, and other kindred sprites, but, to make up for it, thousands of living caricatures played in their own rooms the part of goblins and gnomes, and lady shepherdesses appropriated the roles of the elves, nixies, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... doors, out upon balconies, hither and thither, after the manner o' my little lady on her most unquiet days, till at last, for the sake o' peace, I did slyly lead him in the direction o' the great nursery. There, catching sight o' a little red petticoat, he enters, where stand my truant elves confessed, Mistress Marian frowning and biting o' her dark hair, but my little lady like to stifle, with both hands over her mouth to hide her smiles, and her blue eyes dancing a very Barley Break o' mirth among the yellow sheaves o' ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... and the little mare went into it. They went through the cave. Then Svadilfare caught up on the little mare and the two went wandering together, the little mare telling Svadilfare stories of the Dwarfs and the Elves. ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... Betty suddenly. She was walking ahead with Alice Waite. "I can see two people. They're stooping over the fire. Why, Alice, it's two dear little brown elves." ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... down upon the sleeping earth, while far away from mortal eyes danced the Fairy folk. Fire-flies hung in bright clusters on the dewy leaves, that waved in the cool night-wind; and the flowers stood gazing, in very wonder, at the little Elves, who lay among the fern-leaves, swung in the vine-boughs, sailed on the lake in lily cups, or danced on the mossy ground, to the music of the hare-bells, who rung out their merriest peal in ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... never go back—I might be frightened, but I'd be ashamed to run. Going to aunt Mirandy's is like going down cellar in the dark. There might be ogres and giants under the stairs,—but, as I tell Hannah, there MIGHT be elves and fairies and enchanted frogs!—Is there a main street to the ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... as dainty and airy as if the elves themselves had led her to their bowers and discovered to her their secrets; and this is truly what her poetic sense has done, for the poet is a seer and singer of the secrets ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... our fairy stories, dwarfs and elves live below the earth and deal with mines and their dark belongings; the fairies live above. So none of us are surprised to find few women in this line of exhibitors. My work as a member of the department jury confined ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... these presents be it known, To all who bend before our throne, Fays and fairies, elves and sprites, Beauteous dames and gallant knights, That we, Oberon the grand, Emperor of fairy-land, King of moonshine, prince of dreams, Lord of Aganippe's streams, Baron of the dimpled isles That lie in pretty maidens' smiles, Arch-treasurer of all the graces Dispersed through fifty ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... its feathers, and seemed thoroughly to enjoy itself alone in the shady nook which it had chosen—a place overshadowed by broad leaves of ferns and Heliconiae. I thought, as I watched it, that there was no need for poets to invent elves and gnomes while Nature furnishes us with such marvellous little sprites ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... light laugh and little snatches and echoes of gay talk came back like heartless elves ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the muse steps in and cheer his despondency, by assuring him of undying fame. "Halloween" is a strain of a more homely kind, recording the superstitious beliefs, and no less superstitious doings of Old Scotland, on that night, when witches and elves and evil spirits are let loose among the children of men: it reaches far back into manners and customs, and is a picture, curious and valuable. The tastes and feelings of husbandmen inspired "The old Farmer's Address to his old mare Maggie," which exhibits some pleasing recollections ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... I say, the tasteless envious elves; Malicious fancy makes them so expert, They write 'bout dinners, who ne'er dine themselves, And boast of linen, who ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... and you will go elf-wild!—so say the Danes. I had unconsciously laid myself down on haunted ground; and I am willing to imagine that what I then experienced was rather connected with the world of spirits and dreams than with what I actually saw and heard around me. Surely the elves and genii of the place were conversing, by some inscrutable means, with the principle of intelligence lurking within the poor uncultivated clod! Perhaps to that ethereal principle the wonders of the past, as connected with that stream, the ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... sylphs and sylphids, to your chief give ear! Fays, fairies, genii, elves, and demons, hear! Ye know the spheres, and various tasks assigned By laws eternal to th' aerial kind. Some in the fields of purest aether play, And bask and whiten in the blaze of day. Some guide the ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... broken ends, as the mule carriage began to recede from the fixed roller beam, and to see them at leisure, after a few seconds' exercise of their tiny fingers, to amuse themselves in any attitude they chose, till the stretch and winding on were once more completed. The work of these lively elves seemed to resemble a sport, in which habit gave them a pleasing dexterity. Conscious of their skill, they were delighted to show it off to any stranger. As to exhaustion by the day's work, they evinced no trace of it on emerging ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... breath upon my cheek; I vainly searched for words I long'd to speak, But could not utter lest the sound thereof Should scare away the elves that wait on love. And when I spoke to thee 'twas of the spot Where we were seated,—things that matter'd not,— Uncared for things,—the weather,—the new laws! And, sudden-loud, ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... I take real live little girls into the kingdom of the elves and gnomes and pixies? ...
— Jimmy, Lucy, and All • Sophie May
... green velvet dress barred with grey fur, which I should have called artistic, but that she hated all the talk about art; and she had an attractive face, which I should have called elvish, but that she hated all the talk about elves. But what was arresting and almost blood-curdling about her, in that social atmosphere, was not so much that she hated it, as that she was entirely unaffected by it. She never knew what was meant by being "under the influence" of Yeats or Shaw or Tolstoy or anybody else. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... all this time that the rolling and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about his ears; shut up in the dark, he began to remember all the tales that had been told in Yule round the fire at his grandfather's good house at Dorf, of gnomes and elves and subterranean terrors, and the Erl King riding on the black horse of night, and—and—and he began to sob and to tremble again, and this time did scream outright. But the steam was screaming itself so loudly that no one, had there been any one nigh, would have heard him; and in another ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... use of talking-birds as messengers; that they would repeat the plots current in other countries, and display the same non-Christian idea of death and of the future world (see "The Lyke-wake Dirge"), the same ghostly superstitions and stories of metamorphosis, and the same belief in elves and fairies, as are found in the ballads of Greece, of Provence, of Brittany, Denmark and Scotland. We shall now examine these supposed common notes of all genuine popular song, supplying a few out of the many instances of curious identity. As to brusqueness of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... bold Sir Bedivere and spake: "O me, my King, let pass whatever will, Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field; But in their stead thy name and glory cling To all high places like a golden cloud For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass. Light was Gawain in life, and light in death Is Gawain, for the ghost is as the man; And care not thou for dreams ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... folk-lore, appear to belong rather to elves than to fairies[81]—the elves that haunt hills, and are known all over Europe; dwarfs, trolls, kobolds, pixies, and so forth. Teutonic witches are called horn-blowers. Again, the fairy-train or fairy-hunt is supposed to carry horns; we have seen it already in Sir Orfeo,[82] and in ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... If any elves had been hovering about the dingy hall just then, they would have seen the mother's tired face brighten beautifully when she discovered the gifts, and found that her little girls had been so kindly remembered. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... an effort was now made to hark back to the ages of faith; to recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and popular superstitions; to believe, at all hazards, not only in God and the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to give a fair and not unfavourable impression of the style, but I have reserved for separate consideration what I consider to be the most striking portions of the play. The first of these is the string of Latin songs in which the would-be elves comment on their nefarious proceedings in Jocastus' orchard. I ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... Reidmar was to name the sum. Then Otter was flayed, and the Aesir were to fill the skin with red gold, and cover it without, that not a hair could be seen. To fetch the gold Odin sent Loki down to the abodes of the Black Elves; there in a stream he caught Andvari the Dwarf, and made him give up all the gold which he had hoarded up in the stony rock. In vain the Dwarf begged and prayed that he might keep one ring, for it was the source of all his wealth, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... but the grey north has its marshes, and fenny ground, and fetid mists, which produce agues, low fevers, and moping madness, and are as fatal to cattle as to man. Such disorders are attributed to elves and fairies. This superstition still lingers in some parts of England under the name of elf-shot, whilst, throughout the north, it is called elle-skiod, and elle- vild (fairy wild). It is particularly prevalent amongst shepherds and cow-herds, the people ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... Astrologer, who was master of ceremonies, gave the order to form in line; and at ten minutes to eleven the splendid procession started for the church. The road was lined with the King's vassals shouting, "Hurrah, hurrah!" Countless little elves with gauzy wings watched from the branches of the trees; and the great cathedral bells went clang, bang, clang, as ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... brother Shepherds, as men thought, Have somehow fallen out and fought, Though each your welfare swore he sought; Flock-herding elves, What can this bickering have ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... movement,—such sensitive teeth and fingers and wheels and points of steel,—such fairy knives of sapphire, with which King Oberon the first might have been beheaded, had he insisted upon levying dew-taxes upon primroses without the authority of his elves,—such smooth cylinders, and flying points so rapidly revolving that they seem perfectly still.—such dainty oscillations of parts with the air of intelligent consciousness of movement,—that a machinery ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... abounded with mountain spirits, mermaids, giants, dwarfs, dragons, elves and mandrakes. These reappear in the songs of the Crusades, and are elements of the old Northern and Persian superstitions. All that the East contributed to the song of the chivalric period was a Southern magic, and ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... about their own affairs. Rather more than a hundred years ago, for instance, a war broke out in Fairyland because the King of the Fairies, whose name is Oberon, and the Queen of the Fairies, whose name is Titania, had asked the Trolls to dinner. The Gnomes were very much annoyed at this, and the Elves still more so, for the chief glory of the Elves was that being elfish got you to know people; and it was universally admitted that the Trolls ought never to be asked out, because they were trollish. King Oberon said that all that ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... time Tord thought that some one went behind him. He often looked round. Sometimes he stopped to listen, but he understood that it was the leaves and the wind, and went on. As soon as he started on again, he heard some one come dancing on silken foot up the slope. Small feet came tripping. Elves and fairies played behind him. When he turned round, there was no one, always no one. He shook his fists at the rustling leaves and ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... desolate mother! was terrified into giving my babe that name. Great Hyldemoer, be propitiated! Holy Virgin!" and the widow's prayer became a curious mingling of superstition and piety, "Blessed Mary! let not the elves have power over my child! Have I not kept her heart from evil? does not the holy cross lie on her pure breast day and night? Do I not lead her every Sunday, winter and summer, in storm, sunshine, or snow, to the chapel in the valley? And this day ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... woods, limpid, serene, Puffing its fans the Nautilus went its way, And from a hundred salt and weedy shelves Peered little horned faces of sea-elves: The prawn darted, half-seen, Thro' watery sunlight, like a pale green ray, And all around, from soft green waving bowers, Creatures like fruit out-crept from ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... where the bad wood elves dwell," whispered Anne. "They are impish and malicious but they can't harm us, because they are not allowed to do evil in the spring. There was one peeping at us around that old twisted fir; and didn't you see a group of them on that big freckly toadstool ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... moment, and never stopped dancing. Hence their hard doom; they are condemned to live until the Day of Judgment.[19] Many of them were turned into mice or rabbits; as the Kow-riggwans for instance, or Elves, who meeting at night round the old Druidic stones entangle you in their dances. The same fate befell the pretty Queen Mab, who made herself a royal chariot out of a walnut-shell. They are all rather whimsical, and sometimes ill-humoured. But can we be surprised at them, remembering their ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... the wild laborers they must meet. A moment more, and the pale fugitives Stood at the bottom of those countless steps, Peering into the lowest deep of all. A hell-like spot! and spirits of the doomed Were scarce more haggard than the clumsy elves Who here pursued their coarse ...
— The Arctic Queen • Unknown
... seen there frequently, just as in the Highlands. To hear them talk, it would have been more extraordinary if nothing of the kind appeared. Could there indeed be a better place than a dark and deep coal mine for the freaks of fairies, elves, goblins, and other actors in the fantastical dramas? The scenery was all ready, why should not the supernatural personages come there to play ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... has invested its popular fictions with the same common marvels—all acknowledge the agency of the lifeless productions of nature; the intervention of the same supernatural machinery; the existence of elves, fairies, dwarfs, giants, witches, and enchanters; the use of spells, charms, and amulets, and all those highly-gifted objects, of whatever form or name, whose attributes refute every principle of human experience, which are to conceal the possessor's ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... elves and frolic flower-sprites we see, And fairies weaving rings of gossamer, And angels floating through the ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... century these ideas of the personel of supernatural agencies had become slightly modified in this country at least, giants and dragons having given way to fairies, brownies, elves, witches, etc. The Rev. Mr. Kirk, of Aberfeldy, published a work descriptive of these supernatural beings. He says they are a kind of astral spirits between angels and humanity, being like men and women ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... saw by the light of the moon a host of little men running to meet them. They were dressed all in grey, except for their caps, which were red; they had red eyes, too, and black tongues, which never ceased chattering. These were the mountain elves, and when they came near they formed themselves into a fairy ring, and sang while they ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... too I saw some mighty pretty shows; A revolution, without blood or blows, For, as I understood, the cunning elves, The people all revolted ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... Beambright were pretty well matched. Merry, merry fellows they were, and I should certainly fail most lamentably did I attempt to tell you how prettily they danced upon the greensward of the meadowlands throughout the summer nights. Sometimes the other fairies and elves joined them,—delicate little lady fairies with gossamer wings, and chubby little lady elves clad in filmy spider webs,—and they danced and danced and danced, while the three crickets went "Chirp-chirp, chirp-chirp, chirp-chirp," all night long. Now it ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... from the north. They will grow bolder as the days go by, and spread and come all down the slopes of sunny hills. Then the anemones will come, like a shy pale people, one of the tribes of the elves, who dare not leave the innermost deeps of the wood: in those days all the trees will be in leaf, the bluebells will follow, and certain fortunate woods will shelter such myriads of them that the bright fresh green of the beech trees will flash between ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... beliefs of all countries, the beliefs cherished by the non-literary classes whose ballads and fairy tales have only recently been collected, would probably reveal a general identity, concealed by diversity of name, among the 'lesser people of the skies,' the elves, fairies, Cyclopes, giants, nereids, brownies, lamiae. It could then be shown that some of these spirits survive among the lower beings of the mythology of what the Germans call a cultur-volk like the Greeks or Romans. It could also be proved ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... her figure: Was it regal as Juno's own? Or only a trifle bigger Than the elves who surround the throne Of the Faery Queen, and are seen, I ween, ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... hapless wight a while had kept since the Creator his exile doomed. On kin of Cain was the killing avenged by sovran God for slaughtered Abel. Ill fared his feud, {1f} and far was he driven, for the slaughter's sake, from sight of men. Of Cain awoke all that woful breed, Etins {1g} and elves and evil-spirits, as well as the giants that warred with God weary while: but their ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... quickly again beneath the surface. "How beautiful and blue are the reflections on their glittering wings, how transparent their tiny bodies, how light their movements!" observed Emily; "they look like ocean elves, as they float through the air. What a happy life they must lead—now in the pure ocean, now getting an uninterrupted sight of the glorious sun and the clear ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... enjoy half an hour, or perhaps an hour, of moonlight, and yet be blighted or otherwise injured by a whole night of it." [387] In Denmark a superstition is current concerning the noxious influences of night. The Danes have a kind of elves which they call the "Moon Folk." "The man is like an old man with a low-crowned hat upon his head; the woman is very beautiful in front, but behind she is hollow, like a dough-trough, and she has a sort of harp on which she plays, and lures young men with it, and then kills them. The man is also ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... king and queen of sprites there happened, at this time, a sad disagreement: they never met by moonlight in the shady walks of this pleasant wood, but they were quarrelling, till all their fairy elves would creep into acorn-cups ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... finer specimens to be found than in this old Hampshire park. Three great avenues of them run round a triangle half a mile across, and outside the shade of their black branches the purple heather and waving bracken form a carpet fit for elves and fairies. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... "flower not onely in the spring, but for the most part all sommer thorowe, even untill autumne;" the "sweet musk-roses and the eglantine," also in flower then, though the musk-roses, being rather late bloomers, would show more of the "musk-rose buds" in which Titania bid the elves "kill cankers" than of the full-blown flower; while the thistle would be exactly in the state for "Mounsieur Cobweb" to "kill a good red-hipped humble bee on the top of it" to "bring the honey-bag" to Bottom. Besides these there are the flowers on the "bank where the wild ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... brings Within him, where'er he comes or goes,— A fount that for ever flows! The world's to him like some playground, Where fairies dance their moonlight round;— If dimmed the turf where late they trod, The elves but seek some greener sod; So, when less bright his scene of glee, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... took Ygaerne for queen; Ygaerne was with child by Uther the king, all through Merlin's craft, before she was wedded. The time came that was chosen, then was Arthur born. So soon as he came on earth, elves took him; they enchanted the child with magic most strong, they gave him might to be the best of all knights; they gave him another thing, that he should be a rich king, they gave him the third, that he should live long; they gave to him ...
— Brut • Layamon
... hedges, and other topiarian adjuncts which comport so well with the starch prudery of things Elizabethan; but they are still replete with grotto, fountain, labyrinth, and alcove—a very paradise for the more court-bred rank of sylphs, and the gentler elves of Queen Titania. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... possibly result (it is not my purpose here to prove that it will) in the drilling of the English people into hordes of humanely herded serfs; and this again may mean the fading from our consciousness of all those elves and giants, monsters and fantastics whom we are faintly beginning to feel and remember in the land. If this be so, the work of Dickens may be considered as a great vision—a vision, as Swinburne said, between a sleep and a sleep. It can be said that between ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... tak hooam a bride, 'At nowt nobbut sunshine wi' them will abide, An' think 'at noa sorrow will iver oppress, They'll find ther mistak aght, yo'll easily guess. For th' mooast fascinatin an' lovable elves, Are all on 'em mortal, just th' same as ussels, An' show tempers 'at sometimes are net ovver pleasant, They find fault whear ther's room, an' sometimes whear ther isn't, An' to get there own way, why they'll kiss, coax, ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... We shall inform ourselves Into all sensuous life; the goat-foot faun, The centaur, or the merry, bright-eyed elves That leave they: dancing rings to spite the dawn Upon the meadows, shall not be more near Than you and I to Nature's mysteries, for we ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... first thing that suggested itself. If Miss Matty could teach children anything, it would throw her among the little elves in whom her soul delighted. I ran over her accomplishments. Once upon a time I had heard her say she could play "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman?" on the piano, but that was long, long ago; that faint shadow of musical acquirement had died out years before. She had also once been able to trace out ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell |
