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More "Elfin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... 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. ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... so much a genuine hollow as made to seem like one by the semi-circle of huge boulders that backed it. Set below and almost within them, the curving ground showed a more vivid green than the rest of the moor, as of some elfin lawn held in an ancient enchantment by the hoar rocks. They towered above, piled on and against each other as though flung by freakish gods; from the fissures sprang wind-wilted thorns, now in young leaf of a pure rich green, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... long, and it was not till Gilbert had nearly lost his temper that he could be induced to explain the cause of his mirth, and then he said: "Why, man, you have gone clean mad, and no wonder, as this fine lady of yours has been drugging you with Elfin wine to make a fool of you. If you don't mind she'll keep you here like a horse in a mill all the days of your life, running after clouds you mistake ...
— Up! Horsie! - An Original Fairy Tale • Clara de Chatelaine
... talk 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 ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... 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
... out of the window and saw a corner of the rock lit up with the last ray of the setting sun. She knew it was time to prepare for her journey. She loosened her long black and gray elfin locks, and let them fall dishevelled over her shoulders. Her thin, cruel lips were drawn to a rigid line, and her eyes were filled with red fire as she drew the casket of ebony out of her bosom and opened it with a reverential touch, as a devotee would touch a shrine of relics. She took ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... 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
... 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
... the Last). Ladye Margaret, "the flower of Teviot," was the daughter of Lord Walter Scott, of Branksome Hall. She loved Baron Henry, of Cranstown; but between the two families a deadly feud existed. One day the elfin page of Lord Cranstown inveigled the heir of Branksome Hall (then a lad) into the woods, where he fell into the hands of the English, who marched with 3000 men to Branksome Hall; but, being told that Douglas was coming to the rescue with 10,000 men, the two armies agreed ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... 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 ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... until the two walls of the canon meet in the perspective. In a small way you know how it would feel to hear the rumble of an approaching seismic shock. Only there was no terror in this. It was the laughter of the sunbeam fairies as they loosened the architecture of "the elfin builders of ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... 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 did not ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... 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!" ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... 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 ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... was dark, and there was no other light than a solitary bulb, whose hooded rays were concentrated upon the crystal ball, so that the latter shone with a dead-white glare, somehow baleful, like an elfin moon deeply lost in ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... the prying rain busy at her windows; 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 ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... 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
... an earthly knight, As he's an elfin grey, I wad na gie my ain true-love For nae lord that ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... whither his charmed footsteps had brought him, swarming with dwarf phantoms, sprites, elfin creatures of the Bells. He saw them leaping, flying, dropping, pouring from the Bells without a pause. He saw them, round him on the ground; above him in the air; clambering from him by the ropes below; looking down upon ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... when she reached the Cove. In the crystal cup of the sky over her the stars were blinking. Flying flakes of foam were scurrying over the sand like elfin things. A soft little wind was crooning about the eaves of the little gray house where David Spencer was sitting, alone in the twilight, his violin on his knee. He had been trying to play, but could not. His ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... thee speak.... Once, 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 ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... 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 ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... 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
... That gently flouts the grasses and the 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 ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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 ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... 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 campfire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of green ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... to have lost thee also in myself. Am I then become so old? Oh, melancholy reason! Oh, but for one pulsation of that time! one moment of that illusion! But no! alone on the high waste sea of thy bitter flood! and long out of the last cup of champagne the elfin has vanished! ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... seems a suitable character—that is, one who is utterly friendless and parentless, or whose 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 a brief but ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... 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, ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... draw her, and show a hundred little delicate things you would miss in looking at her. But even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow, finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And from the very outset, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... Arise from out the dewy lawn, And there the elfin cricket chants His vespers when the day is gone, And far above, the sky's coquette With all ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... him with filth 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 clothing the neophyte ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 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 ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... 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 ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... 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 ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... fertility 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 to be dragged hither and thither like a slow ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... twittering, 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 ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... been for some time the subject of my reflections. I had been 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
... Ydo's laughter rang out like a chime of bells, full of elfin malice. "But I am going to tell you a secret. He is the distinguished discoverer of a rare and wonderful specimen of almost fabulous value. A specimen which collectors have supposed to ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... 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 it never shelters a snake, and is an antidote to the poison ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... 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 years! Ah, then, what honest triumph flush'd my breast! This truth once known—To ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... of the madrigal and ode, Of rainbow air and cloudless weather, Tell me what ferny, elfin road Will lead ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... tramping and tossing the snow as they run, And laughing and shouting, so 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 garments, press ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... 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 as bound! Loud thy reveille doth sound, When the earth is laid asleep, And her dreams ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... hold you down in the dust of this poor, pitiful world. Wait, only wait till you are well; when your health is restored, you shall be richly repaid for all your present self-denial. Every day I will procure you new pleasures, prepare you new fetes; you shall dance upon carpets of roses like an elfin queen." ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... 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 and eyes peering eagerly ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... must bring Hither, to our elfin king, Ere three days are come and gone, When the moon hath kissed the stone By our fairy monarch's throne. Shouldst thou fail, or she refuse, Death is thine; or thou may'st choose With us to chase the moonbeams bright, Around the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... and well-conditioned Elfin of the Young Unmarried Set, yclept Loretta, emerged into the Sunlight and hit the Concrete Path ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... mortal eyes see 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
... 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 maturity depressed, and, as it were, defaced; no blood of life ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... 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 ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... 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
... leaves still green on them, had been set in the soft earth. Across them other poles had 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 ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... went 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 will give you better ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... 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 ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... was 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
... the serpent now began To change; her elfin blood in madness ran, Her mouth foam'd, and the grass, therewith besprent, Wither'd at dew so sweet and virulent; Her eyes in torture fix'd, and anguish drear, Hot, glaz'd, and wide, with lid-lashes all sear, Flash'd phosphor and sharp sparks, without one cooling tear. The colours all inflam'd ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... 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
... the question 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, where the moonlight fell in little ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... the west bank both above and below Johnsonville, one of the Union army's bases of supplies and a railway terminus, thus blockading the water approach and isolating there eight transports, with barges, and three light-draughts, the Key West, Elfin, and Tawah. Nevertheless, the three boats went down and engaged the lower battery, and though they found it too strong for them they retook one of the transports. Meantime Shirk had telegraphed the Admiral and Fitch, and the latter came to his assistance with three ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... Strand he 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
... in others nothing of this sort is to be observed. For example, in the collection entitled "Lyric Pieces for the Piano," Opus 12, there are a charming arietta, a pretty little waltz, a very serious fanciful piece called "Wachterlied," or the song of the watchers in Shakspere's "Macbeth," an elfin dance, a curious peasant mazurka, a quick Norwegian dance, an album-leaf, and a song of the Fatherland. Here are eight little pieces, all comprised within the compass of eight pages. In point of difficulty no one exceeds the fourth grade, yet they are little poems that the greatest ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... 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
... where tears swam in flood about the lids of her eyes, where the eyes were too heavy for clear sight and the very blood sluggish with sorrow. She grew pale again, hollow-eyed, diaphanous—a prism for an unearthly ray. Her beauty took on its elfin guise; she walked a ghost. Night and day she felt for the ring; though she knew it was not there, her hand was always in her vest, her bosom always numb and cold. Sometimes her urgent need was more than she could bear. A trembling took her, an access of trembling which she could not check. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... 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 frost. ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... refinement of the mould containing the energetic spirit that glanced in her eyes, quivered on her lips, and pervaded every movement of the elastic feet and hands, childlike in size, statue-like in symmetry, elfin in quickness and dexterity. 'Lucile la Fee,' she might well have been called, as she sat manipulating the gorgeous silk and feathers with an essential strength and firmness of hands such as could hardly have been expected from ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... her elfin grot, And there she gazed, and sighed deep, And there I shut her wild wild ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... cannonade, But for a lofty sign Which the Zodiac threw, That the bondage-days are told. And waters free as winds shall flow. Lo! how all the tribes combine To rout the flying foe. See, every patriot oak-leaf throws His elfin length upon the snows, Not idle, since the leaf all day Draws to the spot the solar ray, Ere sunset quarrying inches down, And halfway to the mosses brown; While the grass beneath the rime Has hints of the propitious time, And upward pries and perforates Through the cold slab a thousand ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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.
... 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, ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... 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 ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... were naturally much subdued to my ear by the ship lying in a hollow, and I being in her with the hatches closed; but this very faintness of uproar formed of itself a quality of mystery very pat to the ghastliness of my surroundings. It was like the notes of an elfin storm of necromantic imagination; it was hollow, weak, and terrifying; and it and the thunder of the seas commingling, together with the rumbling blasts and shocks of splitting ice, disjointed as by an earthquake, loaded the inward silence with unearthly tones, which my lonely and quickened ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... Looking at her elfin young face in the flickering light of the hearth fire, he had a realization of vast vistas of "other things" leading backward in her inherited tendencies, the things known by his young comrade but not for the mind of a white man,—not even for the man whom ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... the sun shone, and the laughter from below the fort was too far away and elfin to jar upon us. The world forgot us, and we were well content. There seemed not much to say: I suppose we were too happy for words. I knelt beside her, and she laid her hands in mine, and now and then we spoke. In her short and ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... light, What whisper or gleam or elfin-wild perfumes Thrilled through the night And drew you to this hive of ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... loosed my hold. I found dear old Belle, the 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 ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... if he were gazing through a roof of glass. The moment they got underneath the trees the light rays of the sun continued to come through—white, savage, and blazing—but they were gelded of heat. Then it was not hard to imagine that they were wandering through cool, bright elfin glades. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... 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 own way ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... 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 easy to recognise ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... unremembering we pass our exile from the starry ways: One timeless hour in time we caught from the long night of endless days. With solemn gaiety the stars danced far withdrawn on elfin heights: The lilac breathed amid the shade of green and blue and citron lights. But yet the close enfolding night seemed on the phantom verge of things, For our adoring hearts had turned within from all their wanderings: For beauty ...
— The Nuts of Knowledge - Lyrical Poems New and Old • George William Russell
... 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 moonlight that ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... stood directly in front of him only a few feet away; a 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, and lovely. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 the body of ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... introductions and 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 a curse from ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... 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 than ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 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 ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... who, with his chance, might some day 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 ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... as though she were seeing for the first time beings of her own kind. She spoke—and her voice was elfin distant, chimingly sweet like hidden little golden bells; filled with that tranquil, far off spirit that was part of her—as though indeed a tiny golden chime should ring out from the silences, speak for them, find tongues for them. The words ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... then he stood still for a minute on the terrace, arrested by the exquisite shock of the wonderful early air: the wonderful light, keen air, a fabric woven of elfin filaments, the breathings of green lives: an aether distilled of secret essences, in the night, by the earth and the sea,—for there was the sea's tang, as well as the earth's balm, there was the bitter-sweet of the sea and ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... universe in which minute exquisite 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 actors ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... dust, thirst, and relentlessly rapid marching. In the late afternoon occurred a monstrous piling up of thunder clouds, a whistling of wind, and a great downpour of rain. It beat down the wheat and pattered like elfin bullets on the forest leaves. Through this fusillade the army came down to the west fork of the Shenandoah. Pioneers laid a bridge of wagons, and, brigade by brigade, the army crossed. High on the bank in the loud wind and dashing rain, Jackson on Little Sorrel watched the transit. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... 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 to him in ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... Are interspersed promiscuously, and form A concentration of 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... the briers, Round his holy corse to gre; Elfin-fairy, light your fires, Here my body still shall be. My love is dead, Gone to his death-bed, All under ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... trwm yg kessevin Ef diodes gormes ef dodes fin Ergyr gwayw rieu ryvel chwerthin Hut effyt y wrhyt elwry elfin Eithinyn uoleit mur greit ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... 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 ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... in the gloom Saw that majestic weapon of the light Uptowering like the shaft of some huge gun Through one arched rift of sky. Dark at its base With naked arms, the crew that all day long Had sweated to make ready for this night Waited their captain's word. The switchboard shone With elfin lamps of white and red, and keys Whence, at a finger's touch, that monstrous tube Moved like a creature dowered with life and will, To peer from deep to deep. Below it pulsed The clock-machine that slowly, ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... he heard the 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 ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... 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 be where the white-haired cataract booms, He, faint with sweetness caught from forest smells, Bears thence, unwitting, plunder ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... 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, it ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... range as Herrick) to-day, it is his own native land only which he sees and paints: even the fairy world in which, at whatever inevitable interval, he is second to Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live in an elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity. Within that greater circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and Ariel and their fellows move, aiding or injuring mankind, and reflecting human life ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... back is here better than in most modern symphonies with their pedantic subtleties: in the resurgence of joyous mood, symbolized by the inversion of phrase, as when the prankish elfin ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... 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 ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... other end of the room to this—the scene of action, 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 ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... of Felixstowe, as seen by the local prophet from the neighbouring mountain-peak, does not strike the eye as having anything uncanny about it. At least I imagine that it requires rather careful scrutiny before the eerie curl of a chimney pot, or the elfin wink of a lonely lamp-post brings home to the startled soul that it is really the City of a Fearful Folk. That the inhabitants are not human in the ordinary sense is quite clear, yet it has only just begun to dawn on me after staying a week in the Town of Unreason ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... had but newly come Up from some subterranean palace, 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
... imagination rein, the fairy-like 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. This ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare 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 ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... 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
... time to put new life—bright human life—into this little maid of eleven years old. She grew quite womanly, as it were; tried to help her mother in a thousand little ways, and especially by her own solitary branch of feminine industry—poor darling! She set on a pair of the daintiest elfin socks that ever were knitted. I found them, years after—one finished, one with the needles (all rusty) stuck through the fine worsted ball, just as the child had laid it out of ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... 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 at in their ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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 ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... 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 its echo ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... with pink! And a fourth, that blue star! and then this, too! I think If one brought me this moment an amethyst cup, From which, through a liquor of amber, looked up, With a glow as of eyes in their elfin-like lustre, Stones culled from all lands in a sunshiny cluster, From the ruby that burns in the sands of Mysore To the beryl of Daunia, with gems from the core Of the mountains of Persia (I talk like a boy In ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... linked together by creeping plants and ferns of curious growth. And as the Snarling Princess looked at them, it seemed to her that the stones took dwarf-like shapes, and glared about them with weird elfin faces. The princess seemed rooted to the spot. An invisible power appeared to draw her towards the group, and to attract her by a beautiful flower, whose calyx opened at her approach. Unable to resist the impulse, she stepped into the circle ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... trailed across the hills, he started to his feet, for far away sounded the call for which he had been waiting. It was like the faint blowing of an elfin horn, but ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... joys that ring Through the green deeps of leafy spring; I know the elfin cups and domes That are their small and ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... 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 ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... cynic might liken the wedding-ring to an ancient circus, in which wild animals clawed one another for the sport of lookers-on. Perish the hyperbole! We would rather compare it to an elfin ring, in which dancing fairies made the sweetest ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... 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 ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... orbed 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
... 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 ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... beneath the heavy sky, Nor bends the bulrush, as it loiters by Thro' long green walls of forest trees, that throw Unwavering shadows in the flood below; And droops from topmost boughs (like garlands dight By elfin hands) the gaudy parasite: Crowning the wave with flow'rs; and high above, The tall acacia moves, or seems to move Its feathery foliage in the enamor'd air, That seems, tho' all unheard, to linger there: Might'st fancy all, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... his elfin power and submitting to his dread experience, Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day's banquet, turning an appealing look towards him as the waitress repeats the catalogue of viands and saying "What do YOU take, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... 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 Night more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... sound is heard—the wind which shouted beyond the mountains, "when it sped across the moor it lost its voice, and passed as silently as the dead"—is affected by the fortune of the tale equally with its human and its elfin personages. When the knight arrives at last, "wherever his horse's hoofs struck the ground, grass and flowers sprang up, and great trees with leafy branches rose on every side.... As they rode on beneath the ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... lofty lay To grace Eliza's golden sway; And called to life old Uther's elfin-tale, And roved through many a necromantic vale, Portraying chiefs who knew to tame The goblin's ire, the dragon's flame, To pierce the dark, enchanted hall Where Virtue sat in lonely thrall. From ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... 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
... Opposite the elfin planet, the monster ceased to climb. It hung there in the violet ray, an inch from the surface of ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... had been a flaming sunset behind the turrets of a castle and he had climbed up—up—up to the gabled kingdom, seeking, away from the track of the tourist, relief from the exotic gayety of his rocketing over Europe. And high above the elfin kingdom on a wooded ravine where a silver rivulet leaped and sang along the mountain, a gray and lonely monastery had offered him a ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... the little elfin Christchild resolved by the power of familiarity into the orphan of some German emigrants who had lost their lives in the great flood; nevertheless, strangers never passed him without giving a second glance and never heard him sing in his sweet, odd ...
— A Napa Christchild; and Benicia's Letters • Charles A. Gunnison
... 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 ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... lithe supple young thing was as full of mischief and engaging roguery as any tortoiseshell kitten—with elfin glee her favourite sport was to fill her grandmother's bed with "ouliaries" (Good God! berries, so called because on sudden contact with bare flesh they burst with a loud explosion causing the victim to shout "Good God!" from sheer surprise). For three months this winsome game went ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... companions; such as elfin-women, elfin-men, dwarfs, imps, nightmares, hobgoblins with red-hot fire-tongs, Var-wolves, giants, spectres, which appear to people when they are ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... 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 bewitched ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 it ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... would wander along the brink 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 city child ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... 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
... in form and grouping—for the indulgence of a gorgeous taste in colouring and costume. It represented Thomas the Rhymer in Fairyland, at the moment when its glamour is falling from his eyes, when its magic lustre is dying out on all that glittering pageantry and the elfin is fading to a gnome. The handsome wizard turns from a crowd of phantom shapes, half lovely, half grotesque—for their change is even now in progress—to look wistfully ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... 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 ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... 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 familiar little faces formed ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... 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 ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... ye maun hold your tongue, Whatever ye may hear or see; For if ye speak word in Elfin land Ye'll ne'er get ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... shouting, so 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 garments, press on or retreat, Determined to ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... 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 ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... 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
... 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 several, ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... her slowly up stairs to her own room, where it shut and locked her door. But here her real self resumed control, as she threw herself into an easy chair by the window and stared out at the desolation of December where dead leaves went whirling in elfin eddying clouds. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... the tinkle of a distant piano and the tremolo of a violin, so faint as hardly to be distinguished above the plash and gurgle of the fountains. The court, bathed in soft light, seemed a corner of fairyland, the music vanishing elfin strains of some mischievous troop putting sighs and love dreams into a sleeping maid's breast. The night was rich with stars, warm with summer, serene with the peace of the mountains. He was late. They ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... in hesitating 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 ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... verdure. I have often passed it," he observes, "in the still night, when the moon was shining brightly, and the leaves of the cocoa and palm threw fringe-like shadows on the walls and the floor, and the elfin lamps of the cocullos swept through the windows and door, casting their lurid, mysterious light on every object, while the air was laden with mingled perfume from the coffee and orange, and the tube-rose and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... 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 as the years slip by, ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... 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
... meat in jelly froze! O tender haunch of elfin stag! O rich the odour that arose! O plump with ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... say now that they had these gifts from Odin. I taught them how to fashion the tales of old into rich melodious songs, and with music and sweet-mouthed eloquence to move the minds of their fellow-men. But they say that Bragi taught them this; and they remember me only as Regin, the elfin schoolmaster, or at best as Mimer, the master of smiths. At length my heart grew bitter because of the neglect and ingratitude of men; and the old longing for Andvari's hoard came back to me, and I forgot much of my cunning and lore. But I lived on and on, ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... reigned in the castle. Servants with torches were crossing the 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 ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... far 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 the snowy rocks!—Cuckoo! ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... the children stealing They stood there hand in hand, For the elfin chimes were pealing Aloud ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... set in the soft earth. Across them other poles had 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
... to its close, through heat, dust, thirst, and relentlessly rapid marching. In the late afternoon occurred a monstrous piling up of thunder clouds, a whistling of wind, and a great downpour of rain. It beat down the wheat and pattered like elfin bullets on the forest leaves. Through this fusillade the army came down to the west fork of the Shenandoah. Pioneers laid a bridge of wagons, and, brigade by brigade, the army crossed. High on the bank in the loud wind and dashing rain, Jackson on Little Sorrel watched the transit. By dusk all ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Where elfin vapors swirled and swayed While the wild pipes of witchcraft played Such clutching music 'twould impel A prophet's self to dance to hell— So spun ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... happened that day, that Neykia, she 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 ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... right, Karl," added Max. "I may underrate the power of this girl. As you have said, she is a little witch. But beneath her laughter there is a rare show of tenderness and strength, which at times seems pathetic and almost elfin. You are right, Karl. I will devote myself to Twonette hereafter. She is like a feather-bed in that she cannot be injured by a blow, neither can she give one; but Yolanda—ah, Karl, she is like a priceless ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... shape, making rampant 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 and up ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... friendless and parentless, or whose 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. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... Now lightly tread As if by elfin minstrels led, And fling no sound upon the air Shall rudely wake my slumbering fair. Softly! Now breathe the symphony, So gently breathe the tones may vie In softness with the magic notes In visions heard; music that floats ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... 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 thistledown, Prompting the face grotesque, and antic brisk, With many a lamb-like frisk— (He's got the scissors, snipping ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... she held the lamp near her face, so that her beauty was illumined and transfigured. 'Twas a beauty most tender—most pure and elfin and religious. 'Tis a mean, poor justification, I know, to say that I was in some mysterious way—by the magic resident in the beauty of a maid, and virulently, wickedly active within its sphere, which is the space the vision of a lad may carry—that I was by this magic incapacitated ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... of 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 ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... 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 these ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... 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 ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... blue hose and the pretty bronze slippers, then, with elfin grace, she caught the edge of her skirt, and with rosy, bare feet, tripped across the floor in a ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks
... 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 and took in ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... 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 for years before he found the bones of the last ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... 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
... 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 together on the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... minuteness and refinement of the mould containing the energetic spirit that glanced in her eyes, quivered on her lips, and pervaded every movement of the elastic feet and hands, childlike in size, statue-like in symmetry, elfin in quickness and dexterity. 'Lucile la Fee,' she might well have been called, as she sat manipulating the gorgeous silk and feathers with an essential strength and firmness of hands such as could hardly have been expected from such small members, and producing such lovely ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... seen by the local prophet from the neighbouring mountain-peak, does not strike the eye as having anything uncanny about it. At least I imagine that it requires rather careful scrutiny before the eerie curl of a chimney pot, or the elfin wink of a lonely lamp-post brings home to the startled soul that it is really the City of a Fearful Folk. That the inhabitants are not human in the ordinary sense is quite clear, yet it has only just begun to dawn on me ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... 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 closed to the concord of melodious sounds. My soul was not tuned ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... 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 ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... wife was a girl who had lived in his own home for years was bound to have an additionally injurious effect on his strange and sensitive temperament. Nobody knew that temperament better than Miss Heredith. It was not the Heredith temperament. It had been the heritage of his mother, a strange, elfin, wayward creature, who had died bringing Phil into the world. Like all sisters, Miss Heredith had wondered what her brother had seen in his wife to marry her. Phil had all along been a disappointment to ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... 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 ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... Euphorbia 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
... sustained melody; thrush and mocking bird, thrasher and cardinal, sang from every leafy slope; and through the rushing music of bird and pouring waterfall the fairy drumming of the cock-o'-the-pines rang out in endless, elfin reveille. ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 of his ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... the starlight draw elfin lines across her face, and my heart suddenly cried through my tongue words that ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... 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 drawn ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... his skill, to reach a chosen point With an unswerving line, I fixed my view Upon the summit of a craggy ridge, The horizon's utmost boundary; far above Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky. She was an elfin pinnace; lustily I dipped my oars into the silent lake, And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat Went heaving through the water like a swan; When, from behind that craggy steep, till then The horizon's bound, a ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... love were an earthly knight, As he's an elfin grey, I wad na gie my ain true-love For nae lord that ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... tree-branches as if all the face of 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 than ever came into ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... 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
... shadowy hat, was tied a 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 ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... saw, 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 On the aerial hyaline, Their fluid limbs and ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... weird it seemed, with its fathomless shadows and its wild grottoes, over which hung, silently waving, long pendants of ivy, while dusky gray aloes uplifted their horned heads from great rock-rifts, like elfin spirits struggling upward out of the shade. Nor was wanting the usual gentle poetry of flowers; for white iris leaned its fairy pavilion over the black void like a pale-cheeked princess from the window of some dark enchanted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... said Elfin, "do as you like about it—the dragon will come and hunt you tomorrow, as likely as not. I don't care if he does, ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... goblet thick inlaid With jewels wrought in golden filigree, An opal from some elfin treasury Burning with fire and flashing every shade; While round the dim horizon, wide displayed The clouds pile up their largess tenderly As if to clothe the beauty of the sea In filmy gossamer ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... 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, ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... me 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 ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... Elfin towers, Wild morning-glories light the tangled ways, And, like the rosy rockets of the Fays, Burns the sloped ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... 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 the Woolworth Tower. Also of ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... 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 sound earth, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... one of the pilasters a piece of black ship oak, rudely fashioned into something like human form, and which skilful people declared would have been clothed with seeming flesh and blood, and palmed upon him by elfin adroitness for his wife, had he admitted his visitants. A synod of wise men and women sat upon the woman of timber, and she was finally ordered to be devoured by fire, and that in the open air. A fire ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... glow, which marked him as a spirit not to be 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 to ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... this place 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 ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... quaint, small drawing room which owed its atmosphere quite clearly to Mrs. Camber, for whereas the study was indescribably untidy, this was a model of neatness without being formal or unhomely. Here, in a few moments, Mrs. Camber joined us, an appealing little figure of wistful, almost elfin, beauty. I was surprised and delighted to find that an instant bond of sympathy sprang up between the two girls. I diplomatically left them together for a while, going into Camber's room to smoke my pipe. ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... side The surges of the tumbling tide, When Arthur ranged his red-cross ranks On conscious Camlan's crimsoned banks: By Mordred's faithless guile decreed Beneath a Saxon spear to bleed. Yet in vain a Paynim foe Armed with fate the mightly blow; For when he fell, an elfin queen, All in secret and unseen, O'er the fainting hero threw Her mantle of ambrosial blue, And bade her spirits bear him far, In Merlin's agate-axled car, To her green isle's enameled steep Far in the navel of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... spoke the moody Elfin King,[7] Who woned[8] within the hill,— Like wind in the porch of a ruined church, His ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... and sympathy and a nice 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
... 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
... its orbed 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 ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... distant shores. Oh! leave no little plot of sod 'Mid all her clust'ring vales untrod; But all thy varying gifts unfold In one mad embassy of gold: O'er all the land of beauty fling Bright records of thy elfin wing." ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... Martie had first thought his face odd, then interesting; now 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 ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... patched and ragged over-all, which made the only garment of the men he had hitherto seen, the dress of this person was characterised by all the trappings of the national bravery. Upon his raven hair, the glossy curls of which made a notable contrast to the matted and elfin locks of the savages around, was placed a cloth cap, with a gold tassel that hung down to his shoulder; his mustaches were trimmed with care, and a silk kerchief of gay hues was twisted round a well-shaped but sinewy throat; a short ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 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 swimming without ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... sympathetic lips, much of the incongruity, otherwise no doubt apparent in the narrative, seemed at those times to disappear altogether. The incongruity, we mean, observable between the queer little ticket-porter and the elfin phantoms of the belfry; between Trotty Veck, in his "breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed, tooth-chattering" stand-point by the old church-door, and the Goblin Sight beheld by him when he had clambered up, up, up among the roof-beams of the great church-tower. As the story was ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... rest, in sweet wood-hardiness. Ready to learn of all and utter naught? What breath may move ye, or what breeze invite To odorous hot lendings of the heart? What wind—but all the winds are yet afar, And e'en the little tricksy zephyr sprites, That fleet before them, like their elfin locks, Have lagged in sleep, nor stir nor waken yet To pluck ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... 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 to ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... many companions; such as elfin-women, elfin-men, dwarfs, imps, nightmares, hobgoblins with red-hot fire-tongs, Var-wolves, giants, spectres, which appear to people when they are about ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... which might well follow the time of turmoil in Shelley's career. May not this poem have been his self-vindication as exhibiting what he might have become had he not followed the dictates of his heart? "Pecksie" and the "Elfin Knight" were the names which still stand written at the end of the first journal, ending with Claire's departure. Mary added some useful receipts for future use. One is: "A tablespoonful of the spirit of aniseed, with a small quantity of spermaceti;" to which Shelley adds the following: ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... As long as she keeps her rosy cheeks and is full of life, a little dreaming can't hurt her. You should have seen her doing the elfin dance this morning. She entered into the spirit of it like a little whirlwind. And, besides, there are no children anywhere near that I can allow her to play with. I have only a few acquaintances in the town, and they are too far from us to make visiting ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... 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 ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... up in bed. 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
... gayest will, of their yellow plumes and green ribbons, and let their big hands fall heavily down at their sides. There the white and the purple morning-glories hang their long festoons and open to the soft midnight winds their elfin trumpets. ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... likely she will cultivate tortoises. When we took them all three back to Torquay with us, squashed in anyhow, she talked about running over to Paris and buying a balloon or an aeroplane! We came by way of the Buckland Chase, as it is called—private property; and an elfin glen of beauty, for mile after mile, with the Dart singing below, and the Lover's Leap so close that it seemed painfully realistic—especially after the adventure of the car which leaped ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... moment Mrs. 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 contrary suggestions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... were true what 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 is no ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... 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 ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... her back she bore, Imps, in the 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 years! Ah, then, what honest triumph flush'd my breast! This truth ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... 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
... 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, ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... 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 ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... and below Johnsonville, one of the Union army's bases of supplies and a railway terminus, thus blockading the water approach and isolating there eight transports, with barges, and three light-draughts, the Key West, Elfin, and Tawah. Nevertheless, the three boats went down and engaged the lower battery, and though they found it too strong for them they retook one of the transports. Meantime Shirk had telegraphed the Admiral and Fitch, and the latter came to his assistance with three ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... 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 black hair streaming around ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... using the paddle 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
... 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... 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 whistle ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... 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, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... 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 by ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... 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 of ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... measures five inches and three-quarters in length, and nearly four inches in greatest breadth, yet the capacity of the bowl hollowed in it for the reception of tobacco is even less than in the smallest of the "Elfin Pipes." In contrast to this, a modern Winnebago pipe recently acquired by me, made of the same red pipe-stone, inlaid with lead, and executed with ingenious skill, has a bowl of large dimensions illustrative of Indian smoking usages ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... 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
... beneath the cypress shade, What well might seem an elfin's grave; And every pledge in earth I laid, That ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... said, as she took the chair vacated by the elfin young lady, "you see I can manage it! But perhaps I control myself better when there's no camp-stool to inspire me. You remember my woodland ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... to have been the scene of fairy revels, we should declare that these graceful ferns were well suited to shade the elfin court of Oberon ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... or less made no great difference. But she did understand the sunlit roof, the twilight halls, the patterned floor of the forest. Blossoms drifting down, fleeing shadows, voices of wind and water, and all murmurous elfin life spoke to her. They spoke the language of her land; when she stepped out of the door into the air and faced the portals of her world, they called to her to come. Lithe and slight and light of foot, she ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... 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
... South in it, and all Its importunity of love and pain; And he would wait till the last passionate fall Died on the night, and all was still again, — Then to his upland village wander home, Marvelling whence that flood of elfin song ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... 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 an ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... the Moonlight!" said he, 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 spirits upon the lawn. 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 rustling wings, ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... 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 summer dream ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... they could not 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 ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 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
... but thought they would wander along the brink 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 city child exclaimed ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... get their man handcuffed before that same elfin ten-year-old son of Owen's had tried desperately to fight the officers into letting ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... the morn, When equipped with spear and shield, Oberon, the elfin-born, Winding on his wizard horn, Calls the fairies to the field— I ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... him—very far 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 the ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... the great heights. We found the damp corners where the mushrooms grow like pearls—the mushrooms of which she said—"To me they have always been fairy things. To see them in the silver-grey dew of the early mornings—mysteriously there like the manna in the desert—they are elfin plunder, and as a child I was half afraid of them. No wonder they are the darlings of folklore, especially in Celtic countries where the Little People move in the starlight. Strange to think they are ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... his lofty lay To grace Eliza's golden sway; And called to life old Uther's elfin-tale, And roved through many a necromantic vale, Portraying chiefs who knew to tame The goblin's ire, the dragon's flame, To pierce the dark, enchanted hall Where Virtue sat in lonely thrall. From fabling Fancy's inmost store A rich, romantic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... utterly, with clinging arms And quick, caressing fingers, warm red lips, Where vows, half uttered, drowned in kisses, died; Mine, with the starlight in her passionate eyes; The wild wind of the woodland breathing low To wake the elfin music of the leaves, And free the prisoned odours of the flowers, In honour of young Love come to his throne! While we under the stars, with twining arms And mutual lips insatiate, gave our souls - Madly ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... 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 ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... 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 ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... endeared his art to his uncritical audiences, and his endowment was held as something wonderful. And now it was that Laure-lia, hearing him, far away in the open air, play once a plaintive, melodic strain, fugue-like with the elfin echoes, felt a strange soothing in the sound, found tears in her eyes, not all of pain but of sad pleasure, and assumed thenceforth something of the port of a connoisseur. She said she "couldn't abide a fiddle jes sawed helter-skelter ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... sense of solidarity in Undine; and little Paul's rootlessness, his lack of all local and linear ties, made them (for all the charm he exercised) regard him with something of the shyness of pious Christians toward an elfin child. But though mother and child gave them a sense of insuperable strangeness, it plainly never occurred to them that both would not be gradually subdued to the customs of Saint Desert. Dynasties had fallen, institutions changed, manners and morals, alas, deplorably declined; ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... completely forgotten the elfin child they had met in the slums of New York City; but now she appeared among them just as mysteriously as though she were the fairy ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... 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, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... 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 gallant run Crowds by in all her glory; but the cheer Of men is pass'd ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... In the morning, when Laird Macharg went to the door, he found standing against one of the pilasters a piece of black ship oak, rudely fashioned into something like human form, and which skilful people declared would have been clothed with seeming flesh and blood, and palmed upon him by elfin adroitness for his wife, had he admitted his visitants. A synod of wise men and women sat upon the woman of timber, and she was finally ordered to be devoured by fire, and that in the open air. A fire was soon made, and into it the elfin sculpture was tossed from the ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... woke soon, but we woke soon And drew the nursery blind, All wondering at the waning moon With the small June roses twined: Low in her cradle swung the moon With an elfin dawn behind. ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... 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 ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... her lips and her uplifted chin; he heard again her shrill voice crying, "Ready, about!" and saw the spokes spin as she threw the helm over and crouched from the swinging boom, although it cleared her pretty head by at least three feet. He listened again to her elfin laugh as she let the sloop fall off sufficiently to take the lip of a comber over the starboard counter and force Donald and her father to seek shelter from the spray in the lee of the mainsail, from which sanctuary, with more laughter, she presently routed them by causing the spray ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... 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
... infinitely worse, so ghastly and unchildlike in its cunning—came back as vividly as if but yesterday had intervened. The room in which they used to be; the spot in which his cradle stood; he, old and elfin-like in face, but ever dear to her, gazing at her with a wild and vacant eye, and crooning some uncouth song as she sat by and rocked him; every circumstance of his infancy came thronging back, and the most trivial, perhaps, the ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... It's beautiful! Don't tell me how you did it—" hastily—"I couldn't understand. It's enough that you waved your hand and beauty sprang up! Look at my little faun dancing—we must dance too!" He lilted a swaying air, and whirled her round the room with gipsy glee. His face looked like the faun's, elfin, ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... 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 indefinable, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... ear-drops still glittering in her ears; 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
... 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
... injurious effect on his strange and sensitive temperament. Nobody knew that temperament better than Miss Heredith. It was not the Heredith temperament. It had been the heritage of his mother, a strange, elfin, wayward creature, who had died bringing Phil into the world. Like all sisters, Miss Heredith had wondered what her brother had seen in his wife to marry her. Phil had all along been a disappointment to his father. He had come into the world with a lame foot and a frail frame, and the ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... 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 short and rather shabby skirt revealed a pair ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... my hold. I found dear old Belle, the 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, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... into his books a great deal of all that went to the making of his life," wrote his cousin, "though he had the art of confiding a good deal, but not telling everything." It would have been interesting to see, if Stevenson had taken it into his elfin-locked head to learn to shine in debate, and, instead of incubating a budding Scott, as he said, "the Spec." had trained an able advocate, if the glamour of his personality would have extended to the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... the grave under the mimosa trees, and with a queer elfin gesture he stooped down and kissed the lately disturbed sods, and made the sign of the cross upon his narrow little chest as he had seen his Spanish mother do. The dignity of the action, with its unconscious touch of foreign grace, and the boy's pathetic attempt to keep back his tears as he ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... hesitating 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 ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... way, it never does come except in the evening. In the sun-time, when the world is bounding forward full of life, we cannot stay to sigh and sulk. The roar of the working day drowns the voices of the elfin sprites that are ever singing their low-toned miserere in our ears. In the day we are angry, disappointed, or indignant, but never "in the blues" and never melancholy. When things go wrong at ten o'clock in the morning we—or rather you—swear and knock the furniture about; but if the ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... lamp of brass was dark, and there was no other light than a solitary bulb, whose hooded rays were concentrated upon the crystal ball, so that the latter shone with a dead-white glare, somehow baleful, like an elfin moon deeply lost in ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... sad surprise awaited him. The elfin shadow that was once ever flitting about the dwelling was gone; the little pattering footsteps, the tireless, busy fingers, all gone! and his mother, paler, sicker, sadder than before, clasped him to her bosom, and called him ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of 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 ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... 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 ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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
... 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 ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... and make of your hand a scoop, and you will find that you have captured, not a phantom but a prawn, compact of one bewildering blotch—and that is a word of doubtful propriety in connection with so elfin an organism—a mere shadow tinted the palest violet, and transparencies, with legs and antennae frail ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... cunning wilderness of plaits and natural ringlets. The great charm was the minuteness and refinement of the mould containing the energetic spirit that glanced in her eyes, quivered on her lips, and pervaded every movement of the elastic feet and hands, childlike in size, statue-like in symmetry, elfin in quickness and dexterity. 'Lucile la Fee,' she might well have been called, as she sat manipulating the gorgeous silk and feathers with an essential strength and firmness of hands such as could hardly have been expected from such small members, and producing ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... kingfisher broods, A sentinel among the solitudes; And faints the breeze beneath the heavy sky, Nor bends the bulrush, as it loiters by Thro' long green walls of forest trees, that throw Unwavering shadows in the flood below; And droops from topmost boughs (like garlands dight By elfin hands) the gaudy parasite: Crowning the wave with flow'rs; and high above, The tall acacia moves, or seems to move Its feathery foliage in the enamor'd air, That seems, tho' all unheard, to linger there: Might'st fancy all, the earth, the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... rustics belonging to the part of it in which I was staying, particularly regarded a kind of fossil-stone, which much resembled a sea-egg petrified, and was found frequently in the flinty gravel of that county. They esteemed such stones sacred to the elfin train, and termed them fairy loaves, forbearing to touch them, lest misfortunes should come upon them for the sacrilege. An old woman told me, that as she was trudging home one night from her field-work, she took up one of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... surrounding garden of limitless possibilities which are its birthright, and immediately accessible. And that, indeed, is the essential meaning of the thrill—that Heaven is here and now. The gates of ivory are very tiny; Beauty sounds the elfin horns that opens them; smaller than the eye of a needle is that opening—upon the diamond point of the thrill you flash within, and the Garden of Eternity ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... 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 ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... 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 did not count ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... yet unborn, New springing cycles, strange lands cleft with tarn Or pleasant vale, and green plains stretching far, And quiet bays, and many a shingly bar, And troubled seas, with bitter perils past, And elfin shapes that jeering flitted fast With scornful faces, leering lips that smiled, Or bursts of laughter through that vision wild. Uncertain, then, she stood, half loth to turn. "Against yon deepening sky, ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... 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
... 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 the picket ropes, eager eyes and tilted ears inquiring ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... said. "You wonderful, elfin creature, I shall undoubtedly come back—to your real home, and claim you there. Only I don't believe you do live in Aberlin,—you probably live in some great, gnarled oak hereabouts; and at night its bark uncloses to set you free, and you and your sisters dance out the satyrs' hearts in the ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... offspring with those of mortals, and if the popular tradition did not represent a fairy changeling as an ugly peevish creature, with none of the grace of its parents, I should be half inclined to suspect that Lilian was one of the elfin people. She never seems at home on earth; and I do not think she will ever be contented with a prosaic earthly lot. Now I have told you why I do not think she will suit you. I must leave it to yourself to conjecture how ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Amadis de Gaul a garland and a rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle Venelas; and indeed all the postulates of elfin annals,—that the fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not speak; and the like,—I find true in Concord, however they might ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... creep from the mullen's velvet screen; Some on the backs of beetles fly From the silver tops of moon-touched trees, Where they swung in their cobweb hammocks high, And rock'd about in the evening breeze; Some from the hum-bird's downy nest— They had driven him out by elfin power, And pillowed on plumes of his rainbow breast, Had slumbered there till the charmed hour; Some had lain in the scoop of the rock, With glittering ising-stars inlaid; And some had opened the four-o'clock, And stole ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... 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 time to ...
— A Kindergarten Story Book • Jane L. Hoxie
... bewitching in its alternation of softly 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 swimming without ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... the maiden thou must bring Hither, to our elfin king, Ere three days are come and gone, When the moon hath kissed the stone By our fairy monarch's throne. Shouldst thou fail, or she refuse, Death is thine; or thou may'st choose With us to chase the moonbeams bright, Around the busy ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... plashing, as the massed foliage on a bough dwindles at its edges into more delicate traceries of distinct sprays and leaves. Round some stones the water whispered mysteriously, coiling in and out of gurgling recesses, and against others it broke with a clear chiming tinkle as if elfin anvils rang; here it droned on with a bee's hum soft and steady, and here it chuckled and chirped, bubbling up in sudden little rapids and cascades. At Judy's feet was a thin flat stone, which rested loosely on the top of another, and flap-flapped, ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... 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
... 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 and eyes peering eagerly ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... beach of sand Where the water bounds the elfin land; Thou shalt watch the oozy brine Till the sturgeon leaps in the bright moonshine, Then dart the glistening arch below, And catch a drop from his silver bow; The water-sprites will wield their arms, And dash around, with roar and rave, And vain are the woodland ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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
... hands to her sisters in an agony of despair. There is the still slighter local strain of irony, which lightens the middle of the third act. Here Ibsen comes not to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of an exhausted age, and will bury it quickly, with sexton's songs and peals of elfin laughter, in some chasm of rock above a waterfall. "It is Will alone that matters," and for the weak of purpose there is nothing but ridicule and six feet of such waste earth as nature carelessly can spare ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the books of rhymes which are bound to become favourites with young people and old alike is "Elfin Rhymes." The rhymes are lively and have the proper "jingle;" the illustrations are very ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 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
... will cultivate tortoises. When we took them all three back to Torquay with us, squashed in anyhow, she talked about running over to Paris and buying a balloon or an aeroplane! We came by way of the Buckland Chase, as it is called—private property; and an elfin glen of beauty, for mile after mile, with the Dart singing below, and the Lover's Leap so close that it seemed painfully realistic—especially after the adventure of the car ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... 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 together on ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... 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 ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... 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 death march ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... 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
... persons and things protected by the obnoxious metal, iron may obviously be employed as a charm for banning ghosts and other dangerous spirits. And often it is so used. Thus in the Highlands of Scotland the great safeguard against the elfin race is iron, or, better yet, steel. The metal in any form, whether as a sword, a knife, a gun-barrel, or what not, is all-powerful for this purpose. Whenever you enter a fairy dwelling you should always remember to stick a piece of steel, such as a knife, a needle, or a fish-hook, in the door; ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... homeward, 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 the deeds ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... and all Its importunity of love and pain; And he would wait till the last passionate fall Died on the night, and all was still again, — Then to his upland village wander home, Marvelling whence that flood of elfin song might come. ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... 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. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... dew! Flower in dew! Whisper to me thy dreams, thine own. Does in them lie the same strange air The same wonderful elfin air, As in mine own? Are they filled with whispers and sobbing and sighing Amid radiance slumbering and fragrances dying, Amid trembling ringing, amid rising singing: In longing, In longing, ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... goddesses of classical mythology or our own folk-lore, none were more fascinating than the Nature Spirits—Elves and Fairies, Neckans and Kelpies, Pixies and Ouphes, Mermaids, Undines, Water Spirits, and all the Elfin world ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... bed. 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
... you, at least," he murmured as though to himself. He stood aside and waved a hand courteously, inviting us to pass. We crossed. At the base of the span one of the elfin shells ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... 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 ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... 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 ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... not till Gilbert had nearly lost his temper that he could be induced to explain the cause of his mirth, and then he said: "Why, man, you have gone clean mad, and no wonder, as this fine lady of yours has been drugging you with Elfin wine to make a fool of you. If you don't mind she'll keep you here like a horse in a mill all the days of your life, running after ...
— Up! Horsie! - An Original Fairy Tale • Clara de Chatelaine
... younger, if possible, than when he had first known 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 ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... 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
... the moody Elfin King,[7] Who woned[8] within the hill,— Like wind in the porch of a ruined church, His voice was ghostly ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... hat, was tied a 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. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... 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 ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... he 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 Rot high ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... Estes of Ferrara—over which Lucrezia Borgia laughed when the world was young. It is a pity cats don't drink champagne. I would have made you to-night as drunk as Bacchus. We drink, and in the stillness the glouglou of his tongue forms a bass to the elfin notes of the Pommery in the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... insanity &c.503. [in jest, in science] Maxwell's demon. [person possessed by a demon] demoniac. Adj. demonic, demonical, impish, demoniacal; fiendish, fiend-like; supernatural, weird, uncanny, unearthly, spectral; ghostly, ghost-like; elfin, elvin[obs3], elfish, elflike[obs3]; haunted; pokerish [obs3][U.S.]. possessed, possessed by a devil, possessed by ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... jelly froze! O tender haunch of elfin stag! O rich the odour that arose! O plump with ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... 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 than ever came into ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... 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 drawn ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... Carpeaux is at all events nearer to us, and if he has not the classic detachment of Clodion he substitutes for it a quality of closer attachment and more intimate appeal. He is at his best perhaps in the "Danse" of the Nouvel Opera facade, wherein his elfin-like grace and exuberant vitality animate a group carefully, and even classically composed, exhibiting skill and restraint as well as movement and fancy. Possibly his temperament gives itself too free a rein in the group ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... 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 ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... faith, Jem Armstrong, 'tis the truth, for once in thy life!" quoth he, and stared at Cicely. Her cheeks were flushed, and her panting red lips were fallen apart so that her little white teeth showed through. Her long, dark lashes cast shadow circles under her eyes. Her curly hair in elfin locks tossed all about her face, and through it was tied a crimson ribbon, mocking the quick color of the blood which came and went beneath her delicate skin. "My faith!" cried Tommy Webster, "her face be as fair as a K in a copy-book! Hey, bullies, ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... course. Houdania! A Lilliputian monarchy of ardent patriots. There had been a flaming sunset behind the turrets of a castle and he had climbed up—up—up to the gabled kingdom, seeking, away from the track of the tourist, relief from the exotic gayety of his rocketing over Europe. And high above the elfin kingdom on a wooded ravine where a silver rivulet leaped and sang along the mountain, a gray and lonely monastery had offered him ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... "Oh, well," said Elfin, "do as you like about it—the dragon will come and hunt you tomorrow, as likely as not. I don't care if he ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... to the hill: Do you not catch the tiny clamor, Busy click of an elfin hammer, Voice of the Leprecaun singing shrill As he merrily plies his trade? He's a span And a quarter in height; Get him in sight, hold him fast, And ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... De dry leafs vere bustlin Und visperin deir elfin wild talk, Vhen shlow, mit his veet in dem rustlin, Herr Steinli coomed out for a walk. Wild dooks vly afar in de gloamin, He hear a vaint gry vrom de gang; Und vished he vere off mit dem roamin: De heart-wounded ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... Solomons,—"he be a going to have it hung from the great elfin-tree. And the parson, good mon, is a quoting Scripter agin it; you see he's a taking off his gloves, and a putting his two han's together, as he do when he pray ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have seen, the telephone as Bell invented it, was merely a brilliant beginning in the development of the art of telephony. It was an elfin birth—an elusive and delicate sprite that had to be nurtured into maturity. It was like a soul, for which a body had to be created; and no one knew how to make such a body. Had it been born in some less energetic country, it might have ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... thick inlaid With jewels wrought in golden filigree, An opal from some elfin treasury Burning with fire and flashing every shade; While round the dim horizon, wide displayed The clouds pile up their largess tenderly As if to clothe the beauty of the sea In filmy gossamer ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
... 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 do not show her an onion." The ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... the funniest little place, this room of Star's, the queerest, quaintest little elfin bower! It was built out from the south side of the tower, almost like a swallow's nest, only a swallow's nest has no window looking out on the blue sea. There was a little white bed in a corner, and a neat chest of drawers, and a wash-stand, all made by Captain January's skilful ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... him of Glendowerdy, And shun 'the Spirit's Blasted Tree.' The Highlander, whose red claymore 160 The battle turn'd on Maida's shore, Will, on a Friday morn, look pale, If ask'd to tell a fairy tale: He fears the vengeful Elfin King, Who leaves that day his grassy ring: 165 Invisible to human ken, He walks ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... 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, and discarded ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... 'Soone as the Elfin knight in presence came And false Duessa, seeming ladye fayre, A gentle husher, Vanitie by name, Made roome, and passage did for ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 will give you better food than helpless insects. You shall live in peace, ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... 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 the body ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... were great pals now, Boy and I. I had never met anyone in the least like him. At one moment he was a human boy, almost a child; at another his brain leaped beyond mine, and he became a poet or a philosopher; again he was an elfin sprite, a creature for whom Puck was the one thinkable name. There was a single thing only, about which you could always be sure. He would never ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... 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^, 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... moon is 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
... only seem to move?—a number of tiny figures in green and gold. One sat astride of a snowy pinnacle, another lay stretched at full length in a hollow, his pretty face only peering out; some were chasing each other among the elfin hills, others were standing at ease, their hands on their hearts, their forms bent gracefully as if in salutation. In the middle rose a white throne, and on this sat the prettiest fairy of all, with a crown on her head ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
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