"Faerie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opposite: it is a fundamental law. Geography will re-become, what it was in the times we call ancient, an esoteric science; the races will be isolated, and there will be no liners on the seas, and Europe and Asia will be fabulous realms of faerie for our more or less remote descendants. Then what will have become of the once universal English language?—It will have split into a thousand fragment tongues, as unlike as Dutch and Sanskrit; and philology—the great expansion having happened ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... "Thomas the Rhymer," a fragment of which is given in the preface to the General Edition of the Waverley Novels (1829). This old legendary poet and prophet, who flourished circa 1280, and was believed to have been carried off by the Queen of Faerie into Eildon Hill, fascinated Scott's imagination strongly. See his version of the "True Thomas'" story in the "Minstrelsy," as also the editions of this very beautiful romance in Child's "Ballads," in the publications ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... opposite of Hope. By Giotto she is represented as a woman hanging herself, a fiend coming for her soul. Spenser's vision of Despair is well known, it being indeed currently reported that this part of the Faerie Queen was the first which drew to it the attention of Sir ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... to point out that this piece is an imitation of The Faerie Queene, Bk. ii, Canto X, ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... passed the gateway in a slight paling beyond which the wood changed only faintly to a garden. It was as if the curious courtesy and fineness of that character I was to meet went out from him upon the valley; for I felt on all these things the finger of that quality which the old English called "faerie"; it is the quality which those can never understand who think of the past as merely brutal; it is an ancient elegance such as there is in trees. I went through the garden and saw an old man sitting by a table, looking smallish ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... Rushton quotes several instances in its fuller form, "fee simple,"—we have but to turn back a few stanzas in this same canto of the "Faerie Queene," to find one in which the term is used with the completest apprehension ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the paneled attic space above, are by August Jaegers. All are gracefully molded women's figures, and all alike are emblematic of the richness of the harvest. The signs of the zodiac letter the cornice between the arches and the attic. The inscription above the eastern gateway is from Spenser's "Faerie Queene," and that over the western from "The Triumph of Bohemia" by ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a labyrinth of faerie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific age comes first and the mythological age after it. One working example, ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... is to place before the general reader our two early poetic masterpieces — The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queen; to do so in a way that will render their "popular perusal" easy in a time of little leisure and unbounded temptations to intellectual languor; and, on the same conditions, to present a liberal and fairly representative selection from the less important ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... coming down," he says, "it galloped so hard that, in my opinion, I never saw hare, deer, sheep, or any other animal, I declare to you for a certainty, run with such speed as it did." Edmund Spenser, the poet of The Faerie Queene, writing in 1596, bears this striking testimony to the Irish horse-soldier and inferentially to the Irish horse: "I have hearde some greate warriours say, that, in all the services which they had seene abroade in forrayne countreys, they never sawe a more ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... between soaring canyon walls, we raced eastward into the creeping twilight. Here and there the banks widened out into valleys of wondrous beauty, flanked by jagged miniature mountains transfigured in the slant evening light. It seemed the "faerie land forlorn" of which Keats dreamed, where year after year come only the winds and the rains and the snow and the sunlight and ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... by the storyteller who has not read widely. Stories from the Norse and Greek Mythology, from the Niebelungen Lied, the Arthurian legends, and from Robin Hood; stories of Roland and of Charlemagne; stories from the Faerie Queene, and from the Canterbury Tales; historical and biographical stories are generously represented in the five hundred titles, but such stories should not be attempted without sufficient reading and feeling for the subject to enable the storyteller to bring it ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... grass, To which there went one narrow pass Through the dark hills, but seldom trod. Rarely did horse-hoof press the sod About the quiet weedy moat, Where unscared did the great fish float; Because men dreaded there to see The uncouth things of faerie; Nathless by some few fathers old These tales about the place were told That neither squire nor seneschal Or varlet came in bower or hall, Yet all things were in order due, Hangings of gold and red and blue, And tables with fair service set; Cups that had paid the Caesar's debt ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... of Raleigh and the west country folk he brought over here when he became lord of the land, just three hundred years ago. Edmund Spenser came here in those days to see him, and talk over the events of that senseless rising of the Desmonds, which gave the poet of the "Faerie Queen" his awful pictures of the desolation of Ireland, and made the planter of Virginia master of more than forty ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... sought him high, they have sought him low, They have sought him over down and lea; They have found him by the milk-white thorn That guards the gates o' Faerie. ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... another, that he was a Trinitarian, and so forth. But we know almost as little with respect to many men of comparatively modern times. Thus, how little do we know of the lives of Spenser, author of 'The Faerie Queen,' and of Butler, the author of 'Hudibras,' beyond the fact that they lived in comparative obscurity, and died in extreme poverty! How little, comparatively, do we know of the life of Jeremy ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... you not provoked with yourself for being so old as to regard that bewitching sprite, and marvel whence comes the cost of those robes of the woof of Faerie? ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... good-natured verse, crowded in his footsteps, and the abundance of their labours only showed that even the "toothless" satires of Hall could bite more sharply than those of servile imitators. After Spenser's "Faerie Queen" was published, the press overflowed with many mistaken imitations, in which fairies were the chief actors—this circumstance is humorously animadverted on by Marston, in his satires, as quoted by Warton: every scribe now falls ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... might, women are valued for their beauty alone. Adventures are to the adventurous, and the world is full of them. Every place but that in which one is born is equally strange and wondrous. Once beyond the bounds of the city walls and none knows what may happen. We have stepped forth into the Land of Faerie, but at least we are ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris |
