"Fairy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with an enchanted air, "Ah, the good pot-au-feu! I don't know anything better than that," she thought of dainty dinners, of shining silverware, of tapestry which peopled the walls with ancient personages and with strange birds flying in the midst of a fairy forest; and she thought of delicious dishes served on marvelous plates, and of the whispered gallantries which you listen to with a sphinx-like smile, while you are eating the pink flesh of a trout or the wings of ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... over and affectionately patting the hand I held, "a little fairy-tale has been running through my head all day, and I have decided that you shall be the first to hear it and pass on its merits. And because," I added gayly, "if it has your approval I may wish to publish ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... a-bloom; and as far as the eye can reach, the green velvet of billowing acres is blended with the passion of wild poppies; the olive, the orange, and the lemon abound; yonder a vineyard lies fast asleep in the glorious noonday; the giant rubber trees in all this remarkable fairy-land are close at hand; and the pepper, the eucalyptus, the live oak, and the palm are here, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... least an eye for the facts of the case, and were compelled to give up the chase and retire from the scene. Bridget Royce remained as if in a trance, staring at the sunlit garden in which a man had just vanished like a fairy. She was still in a sinister mood, and the miracle took in her mind a character of unfriendliness and fear, as if the fairy were decidedly a bad fairy. The sun upon the glittering garden depressed her more than the darkness, but she continued to stare at it. Then the world itself ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... their valseuse, before making a start, omitting the preliminary paces that get you well into the swing. It was all plain sailing then, and swift sailing, too; the rest of the performance was completed with perfect unanimity, much to my own satisfaction, and, I trust, not to the discontent of my fairy-footed charge. ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... blank, for he sank into the deep sleep of exhaustion, and lay at last open-eyed, wondering, and asking himself whether the foaming water that was plunging down a few yards away was part of some dream, in which he was lying in a fairy-like glen gazing at a rainbow, a little iris that spanned in a bridge of beauty the sparkling water, coming and going as the soft breeze rose and fell, while the sun sent shafts of light through the dew-sprinkled leaves of the many shrubs and trees that overhung the ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... the great red entrance arch, along a smooth path bordering the central stretch of still, translucent water, the lovely dome rose fairy-like from the masses of trees that, in their turn, formed a background of solemn green for gorgeous patches of colour, in bloom and leaf, which glowed on ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... would be a queer man that couldn't with such a breakfast before him! I guess some fairy must have blessed my cradle when I was born. I never knew, before, I was heir to good luck. Well, there might be worse things than burned hands. Now do me up in fresh rags, Mother Keep, and you shall have as long a nap as you like. I won't even ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... more vigorous competitors. But they would eventually be extinguished inevitably, as pointed out by Bentham, by the exhaustion of at any rate some one necessary constituent of the soil. Gilbert showed by actual analysis that the production of a "fairy ring" is simply due to the using up by the fungi of the available nitrogen in the enclosed area which continually enlarges as they seek a fresh supply on the outside margin. Anyone who cultivates a ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... the Virgin Birth, Elizabeth, the cousin of Mary, Zacharias and the Angel Gabriel, Jesus and the Sinner, are on par with the eroticism of the Old Testament. The interpolations, the myth, and fable also compare with the first revelation, and, in his opinion, he prefers Andersen's Fairy Tales, or AEsop's Fables. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... we passed some fairy mere Embosomed in the leafy screen, And streaked with tints of heaven's sheen, Where'er the water's surface clear Bore not the hues of verdant light From myriad boughs on mountain height, Or near the shadowed banks were seen ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... under me nose, an' me eyes square on her, too. These people are too keen for me. They ain't a fairy in New York that could 'a' touched me without d' dope, lemme tell you. I t'ought I knowed a t'ing er two, but I don't know buttons from fishhooks. I'm d' easiest t'ing 'at ever ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... it," said I. "It's all about the princess a fellow found in the snow, and how he took her to his home for shelter, and set her on her way in the morning, and then spent his poor life trying to find her again. Anyway, one doesn't tell fairy-tales to fairies, and—and I'd rather you watched the fire. He'll tell you a finer story than ever ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... severities which the Coercion Act had brought into force, as wholesome food becomes distasteful when some bitter compound has been sprinkled over it. We were deeply mortified at this result of our efforts. What was the malign power which made the boons we had conferred shrivel up, "like fairy gifts fading away"? We still believed the Coercion Act to have been justified, but lamented the fate which baffled the main object of our efforts, the winning over Ireland to trust the justice and the capacity of the Imperial ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... 'Mid the ranks of mortals wending, Searching for a missing mate. Years passed on, and when the morning Of a summer's day gave warning Of the sweets it held in store, By the dancing waves surrounded, Like a fairy one she bounded To her lover's arms once more. Villagers thus tell the story, And they say a light of glory Hovereth above the spot Where for days and years she waited, With a love all unabated, And a faith that faltered not. There's a stone that is uplifted, Where the wild sea-flowers ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... gazed, Lord Ernest Strathmore came up, said something, and whirled her off in the waltz. Away they flew. Lord Ernest waltzed to perfection, and she—a French woman or a fairy only could float ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... hallow'd green? None but fairies here are seen. Down and sleep, Wake and weep, Pinch him black, and pinch him blue, That seeks to steal a lover true! When you come to hear us sing, Or to tread our fairy ring, Pinch him black, and pinch him blue! O thus our nails ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... a quaint old fairy tale of a friendly pitcher that came and took up its abode in the home of an aged couple, supplying them from its magic depths with food and drink and many other comforts. Of this tale one is reminded in considering the place of the milk pitcher ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... between Christian and Pagan champions; journeys through undiscovered lands and over untracked oceans; fantastic hyperboles of desire, ambition, jealousy, and rage, employed as motive passions. Enchanted forests; fairy ships that skim the waves without helm or pilot; lances endowed with supernatural virtues; charmed gardens of perpetual spring; dismal dungeons and glittering palaces, supply the furniture of this romance no less than of its predecessors. Rinaldo, like any ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... knows the Ringed Plover loves to watch him. He is one of the daintiest, most fairy-like birds. When he is picking up worms and sand-hoppers on the wet sand he is easily observed. But wait! He flies off and settles on the shingle not far away. You walk nearer, to watch him. Alas! he is gone. You know just where he settled, ...
— On the Seashore • R. Cadwallader Smith
... features which we find separately in Nos. 3b (ba); 162 and 198. The first story, the Envier and the Envied, is very common in folk-lore, and has been sometimes used in modern fairy-tales. The reader will remember the Tailor and the Shoemaker in Hans Christian Andersen's "Eventyr." Frequently, as in the latter story, the good man, instead of being thrown into a well, is blinded by the villain, and abandoned in a forest, where he afterwards recovers his ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... stood so sadly in the parlour, the city stage came whirling along the dusty turnpike. It stopped for a few minutes opposite the lane which led to John Greylston's place. The door was opened, and a grave-looking young man sprang out. He was followed by a fairy little creature, who clapped her hands, and danced for joy when she saw the white chimneys and vine-covered porches of ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... home use, and for this reason the classification has been made according to the age, and not the school grade, of the child. But as children differ so greatly in capacity, it should be understood that in this respect the arrangement is only approximate. The endeavor has been made to choose those fairy tales which are most free from horrible happenings, and to omit all writings which tolerate unkindness to animals. Humorous books are designated by a star and the few sad ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... conscious of being in the presence of several strange but kindly faces. There was an old man and woman with some young people of his own age. Then he noticed among them a beautiful, fairy-like little creature, some four years younger than himself, who, at sight of the white-haired man, rushed toward him and, placing her arms ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... not guess that I am ready and willing to take them under my care, to teach them common sense with a smattering of intelligence—to be, as one might say, a father to them. They look at me. There is nothing about me to tell them that I know what is good for them better than they do themselves. In the fairy tales the wise man wore a conical hat and a long robe with twiddly things all round the edge. You knew he was a clever man. It avoided the necessity of explanation. Unfortunately, the fashion has gone out. We wise ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... currency. Your standard or measure, for instance, must, in the first place, possess a certain uniformity; if it be a measure of capacity, it must not be of the size of a thimble in the morning, and as big as a haystack at night, like the mystic bottle of the fairy tale; if a measure of length, it must not be made of caoutchouc, as long as your finger to-day, and as long as the Atlantic Cable to-morrow; and so, if a measure of value, it must not equal one thousand at ten ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... poetry, as a whole, epic and lyric, was interwoven with a hazy network of suggestive myth and legend; and moral elements, which in mythology were hidden by the prominence of Nature, stood out clear to view in the fate and character of the heroes. The germ of many of our fairy tales is a bit of purest poetry of Nature—a genuine Nature myth transferred to human affairs, which lay nearer to the child-like popular mind, and were therefore more readily understood ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... once and off we go, unless we're anxious to exhibit Our fairy forms all in a row, strung ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... my dainty little fairy. You have nothing to blame yourself for—except for being so bewitchingly sweet whether you are laughing or crying. You exhale sweetness like a flower. I want your influence to pervade every place where I am, to distract me when I am moody and laugh away my ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... of delight and plenty, which is proverbial to this day! By the Celts it was called 'Dunna feadhuigh,' a fairy land, &c. But all these notions have earlier foundations, since the English Druids put their paradise in a remote island in the west, called {344} 'Flath-Innis,' the flat island", &c.—American Nations, vol. ii. p. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... moral wisdom and knowledge of the human soul, appear to us almost to be dictated by the voice of inspiration. The prince of philosophers too, the great miner and sapper of the false systems of the middle ages, Francis Bacon, then commenced his career, and Spenser dedicated to Elizabeth his "Fairy Queen," one of the most truly poetical compositions that genius ever produced. The age produced also great divines; but these did not occupy so prominent a place in the nation's eye as ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... it left off so soon, and would, I believe, "have been glad to hear more and more, and for ever." The continuation you have longed for lies in a wide and magnificent book, which contains more wonderful and glorious things than all our favourite fairy tales put together. But to read in that book, so as to discover all its beautiful meanings, you must have pure, clear eyes, and an humble, loving heart; otherwise you will complain, as some do, that it is dim and puzzling; or, as others that it is ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... to see the countenance or the man, when he found his fancied victim vanish from his sight like the wizard of a fairy tale. ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... most beautiful and touching of all fairy tales is the one known to the readers of Grimm's collection by the title of "Faithful John," and which has such a charming parallel in the story of "Rama and Luxman," in Miss Frere's "Old Deccan Days." There are seven Italian versions of this interesting story, which we shall mention briefly, ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... Beauty and the Beast, which stands in the Court of Flowers, was designed to be set here, while Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney's Fountain of the Arabian Nights was to have found a place in the Court of Flowers. These two courts were planned as the homes of the fairy tales, one of Oriental, the other of Occidental lore. Many beautiful things were designed for them. The attic of the Court of Flowers, which was intended as the place of Oriental Fairy Tales, was to have carried sculptured stories from the Arabian Nights. But none of these things ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... began to paint. Barbarina assumed the light, gracious, and graceful attitude, which the artist has preserved for us in her beautiful portrait. She was, indeed, indescribably lovely; her rounded arms, her taper fingers, which slightly raised the fleecy robe and exposed the fairy foot, the small aristocratic head, slightly inclined to one side, the flashing eyes, the sweet, attractive smile, were irresistible; every one admired, and every glance ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... frosty painter Who soon will come around To put a silver edging on The grasses on the ground, Upon the window pane he'll paint A fairy landscape, strange and quaint, And some cold morning you'll awake To find he's ...
— Little Jack Rabbit and the Squirrel Brothers • David Cory
... satisfactory frame of mind when, on the next afternoon, he shouldered his gun and set out for the country. He went directly to the fairy pool, and waited there in a very fever of anxiety. Despite the coolness and peace of the place, he felt his pulses throb and his face burn. If she came, it would mean everything to him. If she stayed away-why, then he would have to believe that, after ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... therefore could not tell her what she thought of her behavior; but she privately determined to cut short her visit and get away from this disagreeable old creature. In the meantime Mrs. Parry, smiling like the wicked fairy godmother with many teeth, advanced to meddle with the Christmas tree and set the children by the ears. She was a ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... the excited Government now sits. It is a wonderful contrast to the rest of the country, and the first impression of the visitor is that there is little change between its life now and in the days of peace. I approached it by water, and in the early morning it rose before me like a fairy city. Its skyline was beautifully broken by the spires and towers of its churches, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... One flower fairy alone lifted up her tiny cheek from the gold-strewn sand, and cried, "Presumptuous! thou ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... hire my house to play the fool in, 226] Or does it stand on Fairy ground, we are haunted, Are all men and their ...
— Rule a Wife, and Have a Wife - Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (3 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... Something clutches me—here." She laid her hand upon her bosom. "It's so new I can't express it yet, except—well, all of my dreams came true in a night. Some fairy waved her wand and, lo! poor ugly little me—" She laughed, although it was more like a sob. "I had no idea my part was so immense. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... psychoanalytic interpretation of this narrative. Like the dream, the fairy tale is regularly a phantastic fulfillment of wishes, and, of such indeed, as we realize, but which life does not satisfy, as well as of such as we are hardly aware of in consciousness, and would not entertain if we knew them clearly. Reality denies much, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... will come when you are old, when the body will dwindle and some beautiful sunshiny day, when everything laughs and rejoices, you will lie like a withered straw! I do not believe what the priests say, that there is a life beyond the grave! It is a pretty fancy, a fairy tale for children, delightful to think upon. I do not live in imagination, but in reality! Come with me! Become ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... precisely that—a Chinese peasant, born to labour in the fields all his days like a beast, but fated to escape from the fields like the prince in a fairy tale. Ah Chun did not remember his father, a small farmer in a district not far from Canton; nor did he remember much of his mother, who had died when he was six. But he did remember his respected uncle, ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... so bewitching, the wonder is that pleasure-seekers ever consent to land except when denied the companionship of the silver goddess of night. Whether she races with the clouds, silver tips the waves, or with her borrowed light floods the world with fairy-like beauty, it is only that her admirers may exchange sorrow for ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... It seems like a fairy tale—or like the story of Mexico and Peru 1800 years later—to read of 276 golden bowls which were brought to Scipio's tent, countless vessels of silver, and 18 tons of coined ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... Eve laid along its side a branch of unsullied day-lilies that had been filling the room with their heavy fragrance. The image-boy interested her; he was a visible creature of those foreign fairy-shores of which she had dreamed; that she did anything but show kindness to a vagrant whom she would not see again never crossed her mind; perhaps, too, she liked that Italy, in his person, should admire her,—that was pardonable. But, at the action, the shadow swept away from the boy's face ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... most touching and edifying fairy-tale imaginable, this true story of H.M. Albert I. and H.M. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the Sand-fairy crossly. No one could think of anything, only Anthea did manage to remember a private wish of her own and Jane's which they had never told the boys. She knew the boys would not care about it—but still it was ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... home in the Middle West. While waiting in the parlor, I noticed how peculiarly it was furnished. Every corner of the little square room contained a monument of symmetrical design, all different, but each some three or four feet high, and all built of books, as a child might build a fairy castle out of his wooden blocks. A closer inspection showed that all the volumes were copies of the same book bound in "half morocco"! The explanation came later when I was incidentally informed that "Willie had tried canvassing, but most of 'em ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... changed aspect of the place in Lincolnshire are those occasions, rare and widely separated, when something is to be done for the county or the country in the way of gracing a public ball. Then, indeed, does the tuckered sylph come out in fairy form and proceed with joy under cousinly escort to the exhausted old assembly-room, fourteen heavy miles off, which, during three hundred and sixty-four days and nights of every ordinary year, is a kind of antipodean lumber- room full of old chairs and tables upside down. Then, indeed, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... Gondremark. I am become perfectly unscrupulous: to save my wife I will do all, all he can ask or fancy. He shall be filled; were he huge as leviathan and greedy as the grave, I will content him. And you, the fairy of our ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 'This Italy is made of gold,' she writes from Florence, 'the gold of dawn and daylight, the gold of the stars, and, now dancing in weird enchanting rhythms through this magic month of May, the gold of fireflies in the perfumed darkness—"aerial gold." I long to catch the subtle music of their fairy dances and make a poem with a rhythm like the quick irregular wild flash of their sudden movements. Would it not be wonderful? One black night I stood in a garden with fireflies in my hair like darting restless stars caught in a mesh of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... has its peculiar colouring; Marly showed that of Louis XIV. even more than Versailles. Everything in the former place appeared to have been produced by the magic power of a fairy's wand. Not the slightest trace of all this splendour remains; the revolutionary spoilers even tore up the pipes which served to supply the fountains. Perhaps a brief description of this palace and the usages established there by ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... an abandon and a feline languor that imposed respect. One of the San Martino girls, dressed in white, like a vaporous fairy, danced with an officer in a blue uniform, a slim, distinguished person with languid eyes and rosy cheeks, who caused a veritable sensation among ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... line, cluchi erail (lit. "excess") ar fidchill, is a difficult allusion. Perhaps the allusion is to the capture of Etain by Mider as prize at chess from her husband. Fand may be claiming superiority over a rival fairy beauty. ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... fairy-tale," commented Ricky. "A sword with magic powers beaten out of two other swords found in a tomb. And the whole thing done under the ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... Mont St. Michel is strange and weird in the extreme. A vast ghostlike object of a very pale pinkish hue suddenly rises out of the bay, and one's first impression is that one has been reading the "Arabian Nights," and that here is one of those fairy palaces which will fly off, or gradually fade away, or sink bodily through the water. Its solemn isolation, its unearthly color, and its flamelike outline fill ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... do they go, All the Little Ones we know? They "grow up" before our eyes, And the fairy spirit flies. Time the Piper, pied and gay— Does he lure them all away? Do they follow after him, Over ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... thing looks like a fairy tale. The readers may have heard stories like this themselves and thought them as ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... the photograph in the envelope, and unfolded the letter. It was written in a beautiful hand, which looked as soft and delicate as the fair fingers which had penned the lines. He glanced at it as a whole, admired the penmanship, and the fairy-like symmetry that make up the tout-ensemble of the page, and was about to dissolve into another rhapsody, when Hapgood, who was not half so sentimental as the sergeant, became impatient to know the contents ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... myth did not seem to me to be like one of the fairy tales that we have seen so gracefully and quaintly modernised; and at the risk of seeming to travestie the Farnese statue in a shooting-coat and wide-awake, I could not help going on, as the notion grew ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... snakes with double tongue, Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen; Newts and blind-worms do no wrong, Come not near our fairy queen. Philomel, with melody Sing in our sweet lullaby, Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby; Never harm. Nor spell nor charm, Come our lovely lady nigh So goodnight ...
— Sleep-Book - Some of the Poetry of Slumber • Various
... bottom of the sea! Worn and rounded crags; bloated mud-plains; noisome reaches of ooze which once were the cold and dark and silent ocean floor, caked and drying in the sun. And off to the south the little fairy mountain tops of the West Indies ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... life; his love for and pride in his children; the calm haven of that comfortable hearth by which he sat to-night, with his slippered feet stretched luxuriously upon a fender-stool of his wife's manufacture, and his daughter sitting on a hassock close to his easy-chair, reading in a book of fairy tales. ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... that children's literature, like that for adults, presupposes much supplementing, is strong reason for presupposing that ability on their part. Any moral lessons that belong to fairy tales must be reached by the children's own thought; the same usually applies to fables also. Hawthorne understood the child mind as few persons have. Yet it is astonishing how much ability to supplement seems to have been expected by him. It would be surprising if such experts ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... They are very like the 'Little' Russians, so called to distinguish them from the people of 'Great' Russia on the north. They live in the same neat, thatched and whitewashed cottages. They have the same gayly colored national costumes still in wear, and the same fairy tales, the same merry lilting songs, so different from the melancholy strains of northern folk ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... the point is that Maltby's fancifulness went far and well. In telling how Ariel re-embodied himself from thin air, leased a small house in Chesterfield Street, was presented at a Levee, played the part of good fairy in a matter of true love not running smooth, and worked meanwhile all manner of amusing changes among the aristocracy before he vanished again, Maltby showed a very pretty range of ingenuity. In one respect, ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... the rail, looking out over the water. The moon was quite full. Out on the horizon to the south its light shone on the sea, making it look like the silver beach of some distant fairy island. The girl appeared to be wrapped in thought, and it was not till the sharp crack of Sam's head against an overhanging stanchion announced his ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... out to Chevy Chase," she said, "and I was just thinking of paying poor old General Lathom a visit. He does look so well in bronze, poor old dear, and all that ice round him will make him seem like an ogre in fairy-land. He wasn't a bit of an ogre, he was downright ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... in air, She acts a palpable lie, She's as little a fairy there As unpoetical I! I hear you asking, Why - Why in the world I sing This tawdry, ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... seem a most curious place to choose to live in; but then a Brownie is a curious creature—a fairy, and yet not one of that sort of fairies who fly about on gossamer wings, and dance in the moonlight, and so on. He never dances; and as to wings, what use would they be to him in a coal cellar? He is a sober, stay-at-home household elf—nothing ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... where the growth was thicker, and where the wattles and willows made many a fairy grove, a small creek ran. The widest end of it ran into their grandfather's grounds, and had at one time in its career broken down the two-rail dividing fence, which now lay submerged in its waters and formed the "dangerous coral islands" alluded to ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... like silver mats on the brown carpet of the woods, the flickering shadows, the ghostly trunks of the trees, the slowly swaying, plume-like branches, sounded only like faint echoes or gleamed only like soft reflections of a fairy world! ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... however, the wren is (or at least was) cruelly hunted on certain days. In the Isle of Man the wren-hunt took place on Christmas Eve and St Stephen's Day, and is accounted for by a legend concerning an evil fairy who lured many men to destruction, but had to assume the form of a wren to escape punishment at the hands of an ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... splendor, the glamour and mystery of the world of fashion dazzled and delighted him. It was to him what fairy tales of prince and princess are to children. For even he, prosaic, phlegmatic, with nerves of iron and brain of shallows, had in him that germ of the picturesque which in some natures shoots to high and full-flowered ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... cliff. From that fearful summit the billows were but as the waving of a summer cloud, undulating on the quiet atmosphere. The fishing bark, with its dun, squat, picturesque sail, looked as though floating in the sky—a fairy boat poised on the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... entered the cabin, which, as is the case in most large ships, was on deck, we found a most sumptuous meal prepared. Whatever other dangers the little fairy might have been exposed to, it was quite evident that Miss Brand had been in no ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... always.... You've lighted pantries, you've honoured servants' halls, you've turned a third-class carriage into a bower.... And, when I came to know you, the face of the earth was changed. I didn't know there was such a being in all the world. I don't think you ever were born: I think you stepped out of a fairy tale some midsummer eve." He stopped to lay his head reverently upon the blue silk knees. "And you—are—to be—my wife.... In a few short weeks' time you're going to take my name—stand all in white by my side—put off your glorious girlhood for the last time, and go away—to live with me—for ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... it; an' when I looks over the side an' sees every reed standin' on its other self, so to speak, an' follers the under one down till my eyes git lost in the blue sky an' clouds below us, I do sometimes feel as if we'd got into the middle of fairy-land,— was fairly afloat on the air, an' off on a voyage through the univarse! But it's them reflections as I like most. Every leaf, an' stalk, an' flag is just as good an' real in the water as out of it. An' just look at that there frog, sir, that one on the big leaf which has swelled hisself ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... was simply maddening. As he looked from his window and saw that vast limit of London laid peaceably before him, as his imagination ran out over Europe and saw everywhere that steady triumph of common sense and fact over the wild fairy-stories of Christianity, it seemed intolerable that there should be even a possibility that all this should be swept back again into the barbarous turmoil of sects and dogmas; for no less than this would be the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... mighty fine. Some of de 'omans would wuk fancy eyelets what dey punched in de scallops wid locust thorns. Dem pantalettes was buttoned on to our drawers. Our Sunday dresses for winter was made out of linsey-woolsey cloth. White ladies wore hoopskirts wid deir dresses, and dey looked lak fairy queens. Boys wore plain shirts in summer, but in winter dey had warmer shirts and quilted pants. Dey would put two pair of britches togedder and quilt 'em up so you couldn't tell what sort of cloth dey was made out of. Dem ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... curve my banks I fret By many a field and fallow, And many a fairy foreland set With ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... was shaking hands with big Tom upstairs. He regarded him with interest, remembering the morning he had evaded an interview with him. The little room was interesting; the two beautiful young people suggested the atmosphere of a fairy story. ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... its vaults and galleries hung with glittering crystals, its underground river and dark lake, was so like a fairy tale, that Johnnie felt as if she must go right back and tell the family at home about it. She relieved her feelings by a long letter to Elsie, which made them all laugh very much. In it she said, "Ellen Montgomery didn't have any thing half so nice ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... where they were often penniless. Indeed, if it had not been for the intermittent mercies of madame Cochard, the concierge, they would have starved under the slates. However, they were sure that the pictures which Julien painted would some day make him celebrated, and that the fairy-tales which Juliette weaved would some day be as famous as Hans Andersen's. So they laughed, and painted and scribbled, and spent their money on bonbons, instead of saving it for bread; and when they had no dinner, they would kiss each other, and ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... seemed to him, not resident in particulars but breathing to him from the whole. He surprised himself by a sudden impulse to write poetry - he did so sometimes, loose, galloping octo-syllabics in the vein of Scott - and when he had taken his place on a boulder, near some fairy falls and shaded by a whip of a tree that was already radiant with new leaves, it still more surprised him that he should have nothing to write. His heart perhaps beat in time to some vast indwelling rhythm of the universe. By the time he came to a ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... picture galleries are just like that, only the people that painted them didn't invent the stories but merely illustrated stories which, at the time those painters lived, every one knew. Some of the stories were true and some were just a kind of fairy tale, and it didn't matter to the painters, and it doesn't matter to us, which was true and which wasn't. The only thing that matters is whether the story is a good one and whether the picture is a nice one. There is ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... in with a panel that seemed made of moonlight. "How on earth did you do it?" I said. "It is as though you had drawn up the moon in a silver bucket from the bottom of a fairy well." ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moony sphere; And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... all; but the inhabitants of the Canaries, who always saw it in the same place, were so convinced of its reality that they petitioned the King of Portugal to allow them to go and take possession of it; and several expeditions were in fact despatched, but none ever came up with that fairy land. It was called the island of the Seven Cities from a legend of seven bishops who had fled from Spain at the time of the Moorish conquest, and, landing upon this island, had founded there seven ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... hold forth to you in the style he prefers, you would get sick of me in twenty minutes. Let it suffice that my lonely vigils are spent in severe studies and profound meditations, the fruit whereof, in a somewhat indirect and roundabout way, may make smooth and safe the path that is traversed by your fairy feet. In the expressive language of the poet, Be happy; tend thy flowers; ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... entail the writing of the whole chapter on this subject. For the same reason I must reluctantly pass over the abundant evidence of mother-right that is furnished in folk-lore, in heroic legends, and in the fairy stories of our children. These stories date back to a time long before written history; they are known to all of us, and belong to all countries in slightly different forms. We have regarded them as fables; they are really survivals of customs and practices once common to all society. Wherever ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... their mothers from their mammies or their uncles by blood from their "uncles" by courtesy, had the freedom of the kitchen and the cabins, and the black ones were their playmates in the shaded sandy yard the livelong day. Together they were regaled with folklore in the quarters, with Bible and fairy stories in the "big house," with pastry in the kitchen, with grapes at the scuppernong arbor, with melons at the spring house and with peaches in the orchard. The half-grown boys were likewise almost as undiscriminating among themselves as the dogs with which they chased ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly, Down to tower'd Camelot: And by the moon the reaper weary, Piling sheaves in uplands airy, Listening, whispers "'Tis the fairy ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... with a rare facility not only of execution but of invention, with a spontaneity, a freshness, a liveliness in telling a story that wake the child in us, and the lover of the fairy tale. Later in life, his more precious gifts deserted him, but who wants to resist the fascination of his early works, painted, as they seem, by a Fra Angelico who had forgotten heaven and become enamoured of the earth and the spring-time? In his ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... nose, and, all the while, went on pillaging the cartouches, emptying the cartridge-boxes, and filling his basket. The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him with their eyes. The barricade trembled; he sang. He was not a child, he was not a man; he was a strange gamin-fairy. He might have been called the invulnerable dwarf of the fray. The bullets flew after him, he was more nimble than they. He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death; every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... (3) Stealing, in company with another person, 50 yards of green mantua, value L10, the goods of John Autt, May the 5th, 1725; (4) Stealing 63 yards of modena and pink italian mantua, the goods of Joshua Fairy, February 24, 1724/25. These dates were all of them somewhat more than a twelvemonth before the time of her apprehension, and she insisted on it that she had left off committing any such thing for a considerable ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... feeling her chances in Tawnleytown so few, counting the soil there so barren, driven by an ambition beyond the imagination of staid, stodgy, normal Tawnleytown girls, she felt she must create opportunities where none were? She was very lovely, Harber tells me, in a fiery rose-red of the fairy-tale way; though even without beauty it needn't have been hard for her. Young blood is prone enough to adventure; the merest spark will set it akindle. I should like to have known that girl. She must have been very ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Porter," added the little "fat fairy," which was Flossie's pet name. "An' I saw the wagons, all lookin' glasses, an' Freddie an' I are goin' to be gypsies when we grow up." Flossie was so excited that she dropped a lot of "g" letters from the ends ...
— The Bobbsey Twins on Blueberry Island • Laura Lee Hope
... toil? Heap your broken reapers and binders a mountain high, and I'll stand on top of them before nightfall, with my hammer held defiantly to the heavens and shout "Excelsior, the work is done." The Fairy Princess has stopped in her procession; she looks my way; she smiles: her galloping courier brings a perfumed favour; she beckons me. Ah, surely! what a Paradise, after all, ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... the course of which they spend the whole night in prowling about the streets, and crossing over the bridges and back again. At such a time the streets are alive with story-tellers, magicians and comedians, who delight the nocturnal sight-seers with wonderful fairy-tales, jokes ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... go—and—and—O—O—law, how beautiful!" She shrank back as she spoke, starting with wonder and delight as she saw the Royal Gardens blaze before her with a hundred million of lamps, with a splendor such as the finest fairy tale, the finest pantomime she had ever witnessed at the theater, had never realized. Pen was pleased with her pleasure, and pressed to his side the little hand which clung so kindly to him. "What would I not give for a little of this pleasure?" ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was displayed to the greatest advantage; the sportive breeze now playing amidst her luxuriant hair, which occasionally concealed a countenance beaming in loveliness, and hushed in soft repose, imparted a degree of fairy grace and delicate freshness to her charms. One of her arms was carelessly thrown over her, and with the other she supported her head, while, unconscious of the fate with which she was threatened, she slept on in security. And now a tinge of animation illumined ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... a story about the elder tree, but it is not very clear what position the fairy of the elder tree ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... talked until the moon appeared from behind the dark mountains that, against her light, were silhouetted on the sky. And, as the old gentlewoman watched the queen of the night rising higher and higher on her royal course, and saw the dusky landscape transformed to a fairy-scene of ethereal loveliness, Auntie Sue forgot the letter ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... given, we doubt if we shall find a better than that we advance, and the considerations arising from it justify the opinion that the Irish Celts were not idolaters like all other peoples of antiquity. They possessed no mythology beyond harmless fairy- tales, no poetical histories of gods and goddesses to please the imagination and the senses, and invest paganism with such an attractive garb as to cause it to become a real obstacle to ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... hardly possible that a boat can go on floating, suspended as she seems over gleaming gulfs of liquid space, down through which at every moment it seems she must dizzily fall, Tom drew my attention to the indescribably lovely "sea-gardens" over which we were passing—waving purple fans, fairy coral grottoes, and jewelled fishes, lying like a rainbow dream under our rushing keel. Well might the early mariners people such submarine paradises with sirens and beautiful water-witches, and imagine a fairy realm down ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... he said, trying to speak cheerily. "No mistaking your fairy footsteps, Tummus. I thought you'd come ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... mind whether he wanted to be a sane architect—he despised questions of housemaids' closets and sanitation and lifts and hot-water supply—or a scene painter. I think he might have had a great career at Drury Lane over fairy palaces or millionaire dwellings. But I turned him out of my studio, though I put the fact less brutally before his father—said I should be absent a long while in Italy and that I feared the boy was too undisciplined. Afterwards I think he went into ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... her room, she pulled up the blind, leaned her brow against the cool pane, and hummed Elizabeth's song from "The Fairy-hill." At sunset a light breeze had begun to blow and a few tiny, white clouds, illumined by the moon, were driven towards Camilla. For a long while she stood regarding them; her eye followed them from a far distance, and she sang louder and louder as they drew nearer, ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... famous preacher. A peasant woman in Mecklenburg who ventured to sleep without a light was attacked by an elf-woman. The stranger seized the child, but was baffled by the woman's determination; for she struggled and shrieked for her husband, and when he hurried in with a light the fairy vanished.[70] ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... have already declared, was really in love with Clara. It seems incredible, at first glance, that a man who had no conscience could have a heart. But the assertion is not a fairy story; it is founded in solid philosophy. It is true that Coronado's moral education had been neglected or misdirected; that he was either born indifferent to the idea of duty, or had become indifferent to it; and that he was ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... her presence there— Each heart, expanding, grew more gay; Yet something loftier still than fair Kept man's familiar looks away. From fairy gardens, known to none, She brought mysterious fruits and flowers— The things of some serener sun— Some Nature more ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... queen, or even before her Majesty, as the world said, though she never could be got to say a civil word to Beatrix, whom she had promoted to her place as maid of honour, took her brother into instant favour. When young Castlewood, in his new uniform, and looking like a prince out of a fairy-tale, went to pay his duty to her grace, she looked at him for a minute in silence, the young man blushing and in confusion before her, then fairly burst out a-crying, and kissed him before her daughters and company. "He was my boy's friend," she said, through her sobs. "My Blandford might ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and looked out. The band at the barracks had just begun their nightly serenade, and the music traveled across the bay to strike upon our ears so softly, that it sounded like strains from fairy land. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... out of the splash-churn, which was amongst the household stuff, and said, 'Ay, we're flitting'. Whereupon the farmer decided to give up the attempt to escape from it and remain where he was." The same story is told of a Cluricaune in Croker's 'Fairy Legends and Traditions' in the South of Ireland. See 'The Haunted Cellar' in p. 81 of the edition of 1862, and as Tennyson has elsewhere in 'Guinevere' borrowed a passage from the same story (see 'Illustrations of Tennyson', p. 152) it is probable that that was the source of ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson |
