"Faery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... make a decent show for itself after you've chopped all the rhyming tails off. That's my advice, Gifted Hopkins. Is there any book you would like to have out of my library? Have you ever read Spenser's Faery Queen?" ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... then said Fergus to his varlets, "and guard him well"; for he misdoubted some mischief of Faery was on foot. ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... gorgeously "ornamented," and in which "Faith" in Isaiah, "Thanksgiving" in Moses, "Penitence" in David, and "Supplication" in Jeremiah, had uttered themselves in sublime, or lively, or subdued, or tender strains —the poetry of the "Divine Commedia," of the "Jerusalem Delivered," of the "Faery Queen," of the "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," of the "Night-Thoughts," of "Smart's David," all poetry, let it be observed, not defending religion merely, or confining itself to the praise of God's lower works, but entering into the depths of divine ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... eyes closed while I still inhabited a universal death. Still I would not hurry on; I would pause for ever on the recollections of these happy weeks; I would repeat every word, and how many do I remember, record every enchantment of the faery habitation. But, no, my tale must not pause; it must be as rapid as was my fate,—I can only describe in short although strong expressions my precipitate and irremediable change from ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... dangled neat pouches and what looked like tools, although their use was obscure. There appeared to be the tip of a tail protruding from behind one of the squat legs. Behind the creature towered the faery spires of the city they'd ...
— Missing Link • Frank Patrick Herbert
... and of the brave St. George. And from the foot of the altar flowed forth a marvellous stream, whose waters healed all manner of sickness; so that for many a long year no man died in that city. Such is the legend of the patron saint of England,—a legend reproduced in Spenser's poem of the "Faery Queen," wherein St. George appears as the Red Cross Knight, and the Princess as Una, the mystical maid, who, after the overthrow of the dragon, becomes the bride of her champion. Need I recall to any student of classic story the resemblance ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... recruited from the regions of humanity by a sort of crimping system, which extended to adults as well as to infants. Many of those who were in this world supposed to have discharged the debt of nature, had only become denizens of the 'Londe of Faery'" (Scott). ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... a being of faery. Her single loose garment, serrated at the edges, knee-length, and armless, left slits at the back for a pair of wings to emerge. Tiny these wings were, and yet they were perfect in form; they soared above her head, soft, fine, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... writings would safelier stand the test of Mr. Wordsworth's theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say, that the style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from prose, and the language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and that the stanzas are blots in THE FAERY QUEEN? ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the flowers did freshly spring, The trees did bud and early blossoms bear, And all the quire of birds did sweetly sing, And told that garden's pleasures in their caroling." —SPENSER'S FAERY QUEEN ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... grow Beneath thy feet iambic. Southward go O'er Thamesis his stream, nor halt until Thou reach the summit of a suburb hill To lettered fame not unfamiliar: there Crave rest and shelter of a scholiast fair, Who dwelleth in a world of old romance, Magic emprise and faery chevisaunce. Tell her, that he who made thee, years ago, By northern stream and mountain, and where blow Great breaths from the sea-sunset, at this day One half thy fabric fain would rase away; But she must take thee faults and all, my Verse, Forgive thy better and forget thy worse. Thee, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... leaves, one, two, and three, From the lofty Elder-tree! Through the calm and frosty air Of this morning bright and fair, Eddying round and round they sink Softly, slowly: one might think, 10 From the motions that are made, Every little leaf convey'd Sylph or Faery hither tending, To this lower world descending, Each invisible and mute, In his wavering parachute. —But the Kitten, how she starts, Crouches, stretches, paws, and darts; First at one and then it's fellow Just as light and just as yellow; 20 There are many now—now ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... last man in the world from whom one would expect such teaching to emanate. He seems, in his social moments, a scholar who is scarcely aware of humanity in his delicious pursuit of pure truth, a man who inhabits the faery realm of ideas, and drinks the milk of Paradise. But approach him on other ground and you find, though his serenity never deserts him, though he is always imperturbable and unassertive, that his interest in humanity and the practical problems of humanity is ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... O'Donnell was born, Timothy Moran was thirty-three years old, a faery number, as he often told himself afterward. When he was forty and she was seven, another mystic number, he dedicated his life to her and she gave him back his lost kingdom of enchantment. It was on the evening of her seventh birthday that she led him to the Land ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... daisies to a munching cow; Just a cheery pleasant season, Daisy buds to live at ease on. He's forgotten how he smiled And shrieked at snowdrops when a child, Or wept one evening secretly For April's glorious misery. Wisdom made him old and wary Banishing the Lords of Faery. Wisdom made a breach and battered Babylon to bits: she scattered To the hedges and ditches All our nursery gnomes and witches. Lob and Puck, poor frantic elves, Drag their treasures from the shelves. Jack the Giant-killer's ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... people, as a production in which the information and amusement of one and all are equally kept in view. We know that instances have occurred of authors tiring out their patrons. A pleasant story is told of Spencer, who sent the manuscript of his Faery Queen to the Earl of Southampton, the Mecaenas of those days; when the earl reading a few pages, ordered the poet to be paid twenty pounds; reading further, another twenty pounds; and proceeding still, twenty pounds more; till losing all patience, his lordship cried, "Go turn that fellow ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - No. 555, Supplement to Volume 19 • Various
... be weeping, Frank, from older eyes, Or e'er again that blessed time shall come. Hearts strong and glad now, must be broke ere then: Wild tragedies, that for the days to come Shall faery pastime make, must yet ere then Be acted here; ay, with the genuine clasp Of anguish, and fierce stabs, not buried in silk robes, But in hot hearts, and sighs from wrung souls' depths. And they shall walk in light that we have made, ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... time, before the faery broods Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods, Before King Oberon's bright diadem, Sceptre, and mantle, clasp'd with dewy gem, Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip'd lawns, The ever-smitten Hermes empty left His golden ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... enter into the magic water of that lake (and there were very few of those who were mortal who were allowed to come to those meadows of Faery that were there concealed beneath those enchanted waters) he would behold before him a wide and radiant field of extraordinary beauty. And he would behold that that field was covered all over with such a multitude of exquisite ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... when he went into the street after reading it, men seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the translation of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written by Homer before he arrived at years of discretion; and Coleridge declares the version of the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman himself evidently thought that he was the first translator who had been admitted into intimate relations with Homer's soul, and caught by direct contact the sacred fury of his inspiration. He says finely of those who had attempted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... look, the low wail of the sad music is in our ears, the scene changes to a weird world of faery, the story merges in a dream, and Rip Van Winkle smiles at us from a realm beyond the diocese of conscience. If conscience, indeed, will obtrude, conscience shall be satisfied. It is a sermon if you will, but if you will, ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... that he had thought profoundly. But what minor item of insufficiency or feebleness was discernible? She discovered that he could be easily fretted by similes and metaphors they set him staggering and groping like an ancient knight of faery ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of the old, flowers dutifully blush at the make-believe of faery legends, and broken dolls confess that they are ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... Black Mountain was in possession of the platform. The golden windows shone comfortably in the cold spring evening, and Hazel ran towards them as she would have run towards the wide-flung onyx doors of faery. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... toes up, on the grass I proceeded to lead Jane into the most cherished realms of my fancy. Together we sailed those "perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," dabbling our hands in the fountain, while the golden August sunshine ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... ribaldry is learned by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen'; A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... in a twinkling the ring of Faeries was going round and round, till it looked just like a glittering ring, perfectly still; then all in a moment they had stopped, and each Faery in turn ran across the ring, ducked between two Faeries, was back again, then between two more, and so on, till I got perfectly confused, and couldn't tell one from another, they seemed so mixed up; they kept ...
— Seven Little People and their Friends • Horace Elisha Scudder
... And the jocund rebecks sound To many a youth and many a maid, Dancing in the chequer'd shade; And young and old come forth to play On a sun-shine holy-day, Till the live-long day-light fail: Then to the spicy nut-brown ale, With stories told of many a feat, How faery Mab the junkets eat; She was pinch'd and pull'd, she said; And he, by friar's lantern led, Tells how the drudging Goblin sweat To earn his cream-bowl duly set, When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath thresh'd ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... I have caves Of pearl beneath the azure waves, And tents all woven pleasantly In verdant glades of Faery. Come, beloved child, with me, And I will bear thee to the bowers Where clouds are painted o'er like flowers, And pour into thy charmed ear Songs a mortal may not hear; Harmonies so sweet and ripe As no inspired shepherd's pipe E'er breathed into Arcadian glen, Far ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... as Pearson has pointed out.[754] It is not unlikely that she was originally the same as the Queen of Elfhame; in Scotland, however, in the seventeenth century, there is a Maiden of the Coven, which was an important position in the Esbat but entirely distinct from the Queen of Faery, while in other places a woman, not the Queen, is often the officer and holds the highest place after ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... sad heart may hear Your voice of faery laughter— What matters though the heavens fall, And hell come ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... opportunities. I own I should like to see both ISABELLA and the EVE thus illustrated; and then there's HYPERION - O, yes, and ENDYMION! I should like to see the lot: beautiful pictures dance before me by hundreds: I believe ENDYMION would suit you best. It also is in faery-land; and I see a hundred opportunities, cloudy and flowery glories, things as delicate as the cobweb in the bush; actions, not in themselves of any mighty purport, but made for the pencil: the feast of Pan, Peona's isle, the 'slabbed margin of a well,' the chase of the butterfly, the nymph, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the lover of poetry, from his connexion with Spenser, who loved and revered him. He is the Hobynol whose poem is prefixed to the "Faery Queen," who introduced Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney: and, besides his intimacy with the literary characters of his times, he was a Doctor of Laws, an erudite scholar, and distinguished as a poet. Such a man could hardly be contemptible; and yet, when some ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... original power of vivid representation that even in this form he gains the reader's interest. But, if we ask what is the main thing which he celebrates, we find that it is precisely the course of the great war in which his nation is engaged against the Papacy and the Spaniards. The Faery Queen is his sovereign, whose figure under the manifold symbols of the qualities which she possessed, or which were ascribed to her, is always coming forward afresh in his verse. With wonderful power Elizabeth united around her all the aspiring ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... dost armes professe, And through long labours huntest after fame, Beware of fraud, beware of ficklenesse, In choice and change of thy beloved dame. Spenser, FAERY QUEENE ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The minds of men had sported forth, not toward any sound investigation of facts, but toward an eclectic resuscitation of Neoplatonism; which endured, not without a certain beauty and use—as let Spenser's 'Faery Queen' bear witness—till the latter half of ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... and said: "Well then, I will speak. Tell me what thou art. Art thou of the Faery? for thou art too well shapen to be of the Dwarfkin." She clapped her hands together and laughed; then she said: "I laughed not as mocking thy question, but for joy to hear thy voice again. Nay, nay, I am no faery, but of the children of men. But thou, art ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... her rose-winged fancies, From shadowy shoals of dream, To clothe her in the wistful hour, When girlhood steals from bud to flower. Bring her the tunes of elfin dances, Bring her the faery Gleam! ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... the Musical Courier, discussing the compositions of Chopin, in his delightful and inspiring book, "Chopin, the Man and His Music," calls the studies Titanic experiments; the preludes, moods in miniature; the nocturnes, night and its melancholy mysteries; the ballades, faery dramas; the polonaises, heroic hymns of battle; the valses and mazurkas, dances of the soul; the scherzos, the work of Chopin the conqueror. In the sonatas and concertos he sees the princely Pole bravely carrying his banner amid ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... for the "Faery Queene," if I must confess it, I can never read far without a sense of suffocation from the affluence of its beauties. It is a marvellously fair sea and broad,—with tender winds blowing over it, and all the ripples are iris-hued; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... for the slow sun to set: and when at last a tint on the walls of Lowlight came with the magic of Earth's most faery hour he rode in slowly not perhaps wholly unwitting, for all his anxious thoughts of Serafina, that a little air of romance from the Spring and the ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... so many men, so many fancies. My fancy was for an island. Perhaps boyhood's glamour hung still round sea-girt rocks, and "faery lands forlorn" still beckoned me; perhaps I felt that London was too full, the Highlands rather fuller, the Swiss mountains most insufferably crowded of them all. "Money can buy company," and it can buy retirement. The latter ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... device of Faery That mocked my steps with many a lonely glade, And fancied wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid? Have these things been? or what rare witchery, Impregning with delights the charmed air, Enlighted up the semblance of a smile ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... excellence of the thing they mock at. When we get schools that teach nothing but games, then will the sun definitely refuse to set on the roast beef of old England. May it be soon. Some day, mayhap, I shall gather my great-great-grandsons round my knee, and tell them—as one tells tales of Faery—that I can remember the time when Work was considered the be-all and the end-all of a school career. Perchance, when my great-great-grandson John (called John after the famous Jones of that name) ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... then a lovelier life of the imagination rushed in to fill the vacuum. Since the engineer had erred who built the reservoirs over by Carlops and had made them useless for that purpose, better things than water came along the stone waterways; meadowsweet choking the disused channel looked like a faery army defiling down to the plains, and locks were empty and dry and white, like chambers of a castle keep, or squares of dark green waters from which at any moment a knight would rise with a weed-hung harp in his arms and a tale of ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... straitened; till, the signal given, Behold a wonder! They but now who seemed In bigness to surpass Earth's giant sons, Now less than smallest dwarfs, in narrow room Throng numberless—like that pygmean race Beyond the Indian mount; or faery elves, Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side Or fountain, some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth Wheels her pale course: they, on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear; At once with ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... reine, to put in a Prince Charming and a Princess Graciosa, and good fairies and bad fairies, and magicians and ogres and talking beasts, and the like. It was not so easy to make all these things work together to produce the peculiar spell which belongs to the true land of Faery, and to that land alone. Still more unfortunately, wrong ways of attempting the object (or some other object) were as easy as the right ways were difficult. They cannot avoid muddling the fairy tale with ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... gathering darkness what a faery view was there! Glad as he was to know that after to-night he would never again see this living room in its present familiar guise—for he had arranged with a furniture dealer to come and take everything ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... time of Elizabeth and James, of the alarming fertility of the press, were as loud as they are at present— yet look at the shore over which the inundation of that age flowed, and it resembles now the Rich Strand of the Faery Queen— ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... by him. A few minor poets, like Folengo, [Sidenote: Folengo, 1491-1544] showed traces of his influence, but Ariosto and Tasso were bitterly hostile. [Sidenote: Ariosto, 1531] The former cared only for his fantastic world of chivalry and faery, and when he did mention, in a satire dedicated to Bembo, that Friar Martin had become a heretic as Nicoletto had become an infidel, the reason in both cases is that they had overstrained their intellects in the study of metaphysical theology, "because when the mind soars up ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... except your own, And advocates for folly dead and gone. Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold. Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the Faery Queen; A Scot will fight for Christ's Kirk o' the Green: And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at the devil. Though justly Greece her eldest sons admires, Why should not we be wiser than our sires? In every public ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope |
