"Changeling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is my mother's sister," says Miss Wynter calmly. "I have seen my mother's picture. It is lovely! Aunt Jane was a changeling—I'm sure of it. But never mind her. You ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... mettest with things dying, I with things new-born. Here's a sight for thee; look thee, a bearing-cloth for a squire's child! look thee here; take up, take up, boy; open't. So, let's see:—it was told me I should be rich by the fairies: this is some changeling:—open't. What's ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... his employment, lo! both mother and daughter were weeping. He looked at them with a wondering stare; and then, as if he felt he had been harsh, he flew again to his Familiar. And now you thought you heard the lullaby which a fairy might sing to some fretful changeling it had adopted and sought to soothe. Liquid, low, silvery, streamed the tones beneath the enchanted bow. The most stubborn grief would have paused to hear; and withal, at times, out came a wild, merry, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... crisp and cheery as the twitter of a bird, and yet forever ran an undercadence through it like a low-pleading prayer. Half garrulously, and like a shallow brook might brawl across a shelvy bottom, the rhythmic little changeling thus began: ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... thank the creature for leaving such a unique specimen, at least," laughed Mr. Garth, completely mollified; (if you will not accuse us of an insane desire to make a pun). "Come, fairy changeling, and let's ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... first purely religious, rapidly developed a comic side, which by degrees became their central theme. The moral purpose of the performance was forgotten; and the Church disowned its evil changeling. To none of these early plays can the term "drama" be accurately applied; for each and all of them lack plot. They are merely a series of disconnected scenes, pictures having small connection and less development. The idea of pursuing a single, slowly developing story to its climax and conclusion ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... for they all were eager to see the man who was to win the Princess. So the two elder brothers set off with the rest; but as for Boots, they said outright he shouldn't go with them, for if they were seen with such a dirty, changeling, all begrimed with smut from cleaning their shoes and sifting cinders in the dust-hole, they said folk ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... under Edward the Sixth; he was a papist again under Mary, and once more became a Protestant in the reign of Elizabeth.[59] When this scandal to the gown was reproached for his versatility of religious creeds, and taxed for being a turncoat and an inconstant changeling, as Fuller expresses it, he replied, "Not so neither; for if I changed my religion, I am sure I kept true to my principle; which is, to live and die ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... himself release Titania while Puck is made to minister to the other victims of the charm? Is Oberon's explanation of the Fairy Queen's sudden change of heart about the changeling quite satisfactory, or does it simply appear so by a sort of artistic sleight-of-hand characteristic of Shakespeare in small touches at ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... butterfly happenings in this pleasant land of larvae, few are so spectacular as the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his bien. However, to none, one must believe, is the changeling such gazing-stock as ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... author's only claims to remembrance and honor, they might not suffice to place him on a higher level among our tragic poets than that occupied by Marston and Dekker and Middleton on the one hand, by Fletcher and Massinger and Shirley on the other. "Antonio and Mellida," "Old Fortunatus," or "The Changeling"—"The Maid's Tragedy," "The Duke of Milan," or "The Traitor"—would suffice to counterweigh (if not, in some cases, to outbalance) the merit of the best among these: the fitful and futile inspiration of "The ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... little fellow, full of quaint fancies and a delicate humour. His chatter amused them immensely, yet there was an element of pathos through it all; he looked so frail and delicate, like a fairy changeling, or some being of another world. They wondered if he would ever be able to run ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... death, I have long hesitated, I was long before I could tell my mind; and now I know it, and can but say that I am glad. If we could have had my father, that would have been a different thing. But to keep that changeling - suffering changeling - any longer, could better none and nothing. Now he rests; it is more significant, it is more like himself. He will begin to return to us in the course of time, as he was and ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thy butterfly wings in thy light summer garment, thou that hoverest aloft, and flittest over the mountains, and sweepest along the earth! from the airy changeling of the caterpillar, up or down to the lion and to man, ye all of you, fostering a brief momentary spark in you, like the glance from the flint and steel ... gone is the red bubbling up of the spark ... and again a mere slough is lying ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... Augustus! Still do I doubt whether Augustus will ever come forth again. Is this a peace patched up by Livia for the sake of her children, seeing the imbecility of her husband? or is Augustus to own he has been acting changeling, like the first Brutus, for near two years? I do not know, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... has embodied so many Runic secrets, explained to me what I have often felt toward myself, when he tells of the poor changeling, who, turned from the door of her adopted home, sat down on a stone and so pitied herself that she wept. Yet me also, the wonderful bird, singing in the wild forest, has tempted on, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... misfortune not to have two eyes like other people. Moreover, setting aside the affair of my eye, I had a very ugly countenance; my mouth being slightly wrung aside, and my complexion rather swarthy. In fact, I looked so queer that the gossips and neighbours, when they first saw me, swore I was a changeling—perhaps it would have been well if I had never been born; for my poor father, who had been particularly anxious to have a son, no sooner saw me than he turned away, went to the neighbouring town, and did not return for two days. I am by no means certain that I was not the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... and Mr. Duroy hurried me on board the boat before sunrise. I told no one what I had done; but it filled me with remorse then, and has troubled me ever since. I resolved to atone for it, as far as I could, by taking the tenderest care of the little changeling, and trying to educate him as well as his own mother could have done. It was that which gave me strength to work so hard for musical distinction; and that motive stimulated me to appear as an opera-singer, though the publicity was distasteful ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... me tell thee now another tale: For Bleys, our Merlin's master, as they say, Died but of late, and sent his cry to me, To hear him speak before he left his life. Shrunk like a fairy changeling lay the mage; And when I enter'd told me that himself And Merlin ever served about the King, Uther, before he died; and on the night When Uther in Tintagil past away Moaning and wailing for an heir, the two Left the still King, and passing forth to breathe, Then from the castle gateway by the chasm ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... high-minded, or a very good man, although we are willing to count him amiable, ready to make very considerable allowance for his period and his circumstances, not disposed to think him so much a renegado and deliberate knave as a fickle, needy, and childish changeling, in the matter of his "perversion" to Popery; although we yield to none in admiration of the varied, highly-cultured, masculine, and magnificent forces of ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... marry Agnes, Mrs. Font thinks, if Agnes has a large fortune. To secure the fortune and the lord for her daughter, Mrs. Font determines to get Guy Font out of the way. Her purpose coincides with her peasant belief that he is a "changeling," and is really of the sea people. So she goes with him to a sea cave he is fond of visiting, and only she comes from the cave. She is suspected, but before the officers come for her, she learns that her crime has ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... human world shut out,— As some detected changeling elf, Doomed, with strange agony and doubt, To ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... sort of fools which fortune makes, And, after she has made 'em fools, forsakes. With Nature's oafs 'tis quite a diff'rent case, For Fortune favours all her idiot race. In her own nest the cuckoo eggs we find, O'er which she broods to hatch the changeling kind: No portion for her own she has to spare, So much she dotes on ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... is fair: The kindly green and rounded trunks, that meet Under the soil with twinings of their feet And in the sky with twinings of their arms: The yellow stools: the still ungathered charms Of berry, woodland herb, and bryony, And mid-wood's changeling ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... was a Flora he disowned; she was hard; she was of a set colour; a settled, mature, undecorative manner; plain of speech, plain of habit - he had come near saying, plain of face. And this changeling called herself by the same name as the many-coloured, clinging maid of yore; she of the frequent laughter, and the many sighs, and the kind, stolen glances. And to make all worse, she took the upper hand with him, which ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... notion of the international law on such points—but at any rate it will make the assurance of her safety absolute. No power on earth can take her from me. Great Heaven! The thought of her gone forever out of my life brings the cold sweat to my forehead. Without her, child, enchantress, changeling that she is, how could I ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... "It's like a changeling," thought Eleanor, looking with fascinated eyes at the weird little being. Lady Philippa smiled, and laid her hand softly on the furry black head. "This is an unusual sight in your cottage," she said. ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... own in Shakespeare Hall, to be used, if the party did not yield, in knocking at the door of the Cincinnati convention. William Dorsheimer acted as its temporary chairman. Dorsheimer had become a political changeling. Within a decade he had been a Republican, a Liberal, and a Democrat, and it was whispered that he was already tired of being a Kellyite. His appeal for Horatio Seymour indicated his restlessness. The feuds of Tilden and Church and Kernan and Kelly and ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... then hear: The changeling King who oft has kneel'd before me, And own'd no other pow'r, now treats me With ill dissembl'd love mix'd with disdain. A newer beauty rules his faithless heart, Which only in variety is blest; Oft have I heard him, ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... them—different. Growing up. Placing their young with well-to-do families somehow, and then dropping unobtrusively out of the picture. And the young growing up, and always the natural children dying off in one way or another. The changeling inherits, and the process is repeated, step by step. Can you say it's impossible? ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Wesley Barefoot
... of the father was made by the child's taking the downward road. "At a later day," says Motley, "when the unfortunate eldest son of Orange returned from Spain, after twenty-seven years' absence, a changeling and a Spaniard, the restoration of those very estates was offered to him by Philip II., provided he would continue to pay a fixed proportion of their rents to the family of his father's murderer. The education which Philip William had received, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... arts may sacrifice to fashion, she must be entirely excluded from the art of painting; the painter must never mistake this capricious changeling for the genuine offspring of nature; he must divest himself of all prejudices in favour of his age or country; he must disregard all local and temporary ornaments, and look only on those general habits that are everywhere and always the same. He addresses his works to the people of every ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... at one time, in Wales, that the Fairies exchanged their own weakly or deformed offspring for the strong children of mortals. The child supposed to have been left by the Fairies in the cradle, or elsewhere, was commonly called a changeling. This faith was not confined to Wales; it was as common in Ireland, Scotland, and England, as it was in Wales. Thus, in Spenser's Faery Queen, reference is made in the following ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... rode apart, With bitter thought and swelling heart, And would not now vouchsafe again Through Stirling streets to lead his train. 'O Lennox, who would wish to rule This changeling crowd, this common fool? Hear'st thou,' he said, 'the loud acclaim With which they shout the Douglas name? With like acclaim the vulgar throat Strained for King James their morning note; With like acclaim they hailed the day When first I ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... little fiend had got in at the window she probably would have strangled me," I returned... "Catharine Linton or Earnshaw, or however she was called—she must have been a changeling, wicked little soul! She told me she had been walking the earth these twenty years; a just punishment for her mortal transgressions, ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... of self-appointed nurse to a creature that looked more like a fairy changeling than a ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... see,' he said, 'the whole world mocks me. You say "this evening"; need it be, must it be this evening? If you only knew how far they have driven me. If you only knew what we should only detest each other for saying and for listening to. The whole thing's dulled and staled. Who wants a changeling? Who wants a painted bird? Who does not loathe the converted?—and I'm converted to Sabathier's God. Should we be sitting here talking like this if it were not so? I can't, I can't ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... is but an ordinary play; but only Nell's and Hart's mad parts are most excellent done, but especially hers: which makes it a miracle to me to think how ill she do any serious part, as, the other day, just like a fool or changeling; and in a mad part do beyond imitation almost. It pleased us mightily to see the natural affection of a poor woman, the mother of one of the children, brought on the stage; the child crying, she by force got ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... should like to be intimate with Anstey (the author of the New Bath Guide), or with the author of the Heroic Epistle, he continues:—'I have no thirst to know the rest of my contemporaries, from the absurd bombast of Dr. Johnson down to the silly Dr. Goldsmith; though the latter changeling has had bright gleams of parts, and the former had sense, till he changed it for words, and sold it for a pension. Don't think me scornful. Recollect that I have seen Pope and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... At the Keyhole The Old Stone House The Ruin The Ride-by-Nights Peak and Puke The Changeling The Mocking Fairy Bewitched The Honey ...
— Peacock Pie, A Book of Rhymes • Walter de la Mare
... comes on apace; The cricket's chirp, the woodland murmur's swell, Bid nature's changeling melodies efface The glamour of yon phantom spell. The flashing morn adown the glist'ning aisles, A dew-embowered hill and grove and lea, With ruthless light will scatter fairy wiles, Nor leave my love ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... eight of clubs! My fingers left it as though it were a snake. It was the eight of clubs! Where I had seen, in fancy, the queen of hearts, there lay like a changeling the eight of clubs, with corner bent as only token of ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... steps for departure: asking passports of the Ministry, safe-conducts of the Municipality; which Marat warns all men to beware of. They will carry gold with them, 'these old Beguines;' nay they will carry the little Dauphin, 'having nursed a changeling, for some time, to leave in his stead!' Besides, they are as some light substance flung up, to shew how the wind sits; a kind of proof-kite you fly off to ascertain whether the grand paper-kite, Evasion of the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... That changeling, lean and icy-lipped, Touched crust, and bone, and groat, and lo! Beneath her finger taper-tipped The magic all ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... herewith Mr. Shepley and Howe. After dinner to Whitehall Chappell with Mr. Child, and there did hear Captain Cooke and his boy make a trial of an Anthem against tomorrow, which was brave musique. Then by water to Whitefriars to the Play-house, and there saw "The Changeling," the first time it hath been acted these twenty years, and it takes exceedingly. Besides, I see the gallants do begin to be tyred with the vanity and pride of the theatre actors who are indeed grown ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... arms! Let the battle-cry rise, Like the raven's hoarse croak, through their ranks let it sound; Set their knell on the wing of each arrow that flies, Till the shouts of the free shake the mountains around; Let the cold-blooded, faint-hearted changeling now tremble, For the war-shock shall reach to his dark-centered cave, While the laurels that twine round the brows of the victors Shall with rev'rence be strew'd o'er the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... a changeling who is suddenly transferred to the position of a rich English heiress. She develops into a good and accomplished woman, and has gained too much love and devotion to be a sufferer by the surrender of ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... meaning now, and I won't get angry with you. I think I must be a changeling, in spirit probably; there could be no mistake, I presume, in my physical identity, but my heart always claims kindred most ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... constructively, it had become a fierce though governed passion with both—to learn something of the spiritual life coursing back of the material universe. Equally slowly and inevitably had the two come to believe that the little changeling at the lodge held some wordless clue, some unconscious knowledge as to that outer sphere, that surrounding, peopled ether, in which, under their apparent rationality, the two had come to believe. Yet the banker ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... an abatement of and deduction from so much of my future pains in purgatory. He did it not out of any evil intent. He thought, belike, to have hit some of the pages. He is an honest fool, and an innocent changeling. It is a sin to harbour in the heart any bad conceit of him. As for myself, I heartily pardon him. He flirted me on the nose. In that there is no harm; for it importeth nothing else but that betwixt my wife and me there will occur some toyish wanton tricks which usually ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... superstitious age When all beyond the narrow grasp of mind Seem'd fraught with meanings of supernal kind, When e'en the learned philosophic sage, Wont with the stars thro' boundless space to range. Listen'd with rev'rence to the changeling's tale; E'en so, thou strangest of all beings strange! E'en so thy visionary scenes I hail; That like the ramblings of an idiot's speech, No image giving of a thing on earth. Nor thought significant in Reason's reach, Yet in their random shadowings give birth To thoughts and things from other worlds ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... the procession of attendants seen emerging from the background through the transparent gloom is quite awful; but in this miraculous picture, the lovely Virgin Mother is metamorphosed into a coarse Dutch vrow, and the divine Child looks like a changeling imp. ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... my cake Holds out so cold a hand to shake, It makes me shrink and sigh:— On this I will not dwell and hang,— The changeling would not feel a pang Though these ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... passage was that in which Borrow says, when describing the interior of the Mosque at Tangier: "I looked around for the abominable thing, and found it not; no scarlet strumpet with a crown of false gold sat nursing an ugly changeling in a niche." In later editions the words "no scarlet strumpet," etc., were changed to "the besetting sin of the pseudo-Christian Church did not stare me in the face in ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... rose from it ailing, suffering, dwarfed and altogether changed. Of all the dark shadows upon life I think that change through illness and organic decay in the thoughts and spirits of those who are dear and close to us is the most evil and distressing and inexplicable. Suddenly he was a changeling, a being querulous and pitiful, needing ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... "'What changeling is this?' I demanded in a loud voice, for the being that twisted in my grip was two or ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Huntsman's weal. Wald,(Ger.) - Wood. Wallowin - Walloon. Wälschen,(Ger.) - Of the Latin race. Wappenshield(Waffenschild) - Coat of arms. Ward all zu Steine,(Ger.) - Became all stone. Ward zu Wind,(Ger.) - Became a wind. Wechselbalg,(Ger.) - (formerly a popular superstitious belief), a changeling, brat, urchin. Weihnachtsbaum,(Ger.) - Christmas tree. Weihnachtslied,(Ger.) - Christmas song. Weingarts, weingärten,(Ger.) - Vineyards. Weingeist,(Ger.) - Vinous, ardent spirit. Wein-handle,(Ger. Weinhandel or Weinhandlung) - Wine-trade, ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... Ha! the elder Brutus Made his soul iron, though his sons repented. They boasted not their baseness. [Draws his sword. Infamous changeling! Recant this instant, and swear loyalty, 225 And strict obedience to thy sovereign's will; Or, by the spirit of departed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
