"Elfin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made, Blue Walden rolls its cannonade, But for a lofty sign Which the Zodiac threw, That the bondage-days are told. And waters free as winds shall flow. Lo! how all the tribes combine To rout the flying foe. See, every patriot oak-leaf throws His elfin length upon the snows, Not idle, since the leaf all day Draws to the spot the solar ray, Ere sunset quarrying inches down, And halfway to the mosses brown; While the grass beneath the rime Has hints of the propitious time, And upward pries and perforates Through ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... airy, elfin animal in these woods, and in all the evergreen woods of the Pacific Coast, that is more influential and interesting than even the beaver. This is the Douglas squirrel (Sciurus Douglasi). Go where you will throughout all these noble ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... Martie had first thought his face odd, then interesting; now she found it strangely attractive. His eyes, between sandy lashes and under thick sandy brows, were of a sea-blue in colour, his head was covered with a cap of thick, lustreless, sand-coloured hair. Something odd, elfin, whimsical, in his crooked smile lent an actual charm to his face, for Martie at least. She told him he ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... rhythmic vibrations that became whisperings and rustlings and mutterings of sound—but of sound so different; so elusively thin that it was shimmeringly sibilant; so mellow that it was maddening sweet, piping like an elfin horn, which last was just what Bassett decided would be like a peal from some bell of the gods ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... But even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow, finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... moon, more like steel than silver, shone frostily cold, her light seeming to deepen rather than soften the dreariness of the land—and on—on—on—they went, Britta enveloped to the chin in furs, steadily driving the strange elfin-looking steeds with their horned heads casting long distorted shadows on the white ground,—and Philip beside her, urging her on with feverish impatience, while he listened to the smooth trot of the reindeer,—the tinkle of ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... The stolid trees, where much had taken place, seemed incredibly near. The time, too, now that he reflected, he saw to have been short. He wondered at the number of emotions and events that had been crowded into such little spaces. Elfin thoughts must have exaggerated and enlarged ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... meat in jelly froze! O tender haunch of elfin stag! O rich the odour that arose! O plump with scraps ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... Carlist war. It was all wonderful. It had seemed perfect. And yet—and yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some straying angel—some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had ever realised. She cared for him—how could he doubt it? But was ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... direction, and above lights were ascending and descending from landing to landing. I obtained a confused glimpse of vast masses of architecture—columns, arcades, flights of steps, stairways—a royal voluptuousness and elfin magnificence of construction worthy of fairyland. A negro page—the same who had before brought me the tablet from Clarimonde, and whom I instantly recognised—approached to aid me in dismounting, and the major-domo, attired in black velvet ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... no obligation that would involve a feeling of gratitude; to pay the piper to the utmost penny whenever she called the tune—these were the only laws that she acknowledged. Though she longed ardently for the admiration of Stephen Culpeper, she would have died rather than relinquish the elfin mockery ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... together, This will make a shoe. Left, right, pull it tight; Summer days are warm; Underground in winter, Laughing at the storm!" Lay your ear close to the hill, Do you not catch the tiny clamor, Busy click of an elfin hammer, Voice of the Leprecaun singing shrill As he merrily plies his trade? He's a span And quarter in height. Get him in sight, hold him fast, And you're a made Man! The ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... diversion is caused by the entry of an elfin-tressed little girl, who stares at us half impudently, half shyly, with bright black eyes, hesitates at the botanist's clumsy smile and nod, and then goes and stands by her father ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... bleeding hands to her sisters in an agony of despair. There is the still slighter local strain of irony, which lightens the middle of the third act. Here Ibsen comes not to heal but to slay; he exposes the corpse of an exhausted age, and will bury it quickly, with sexton's songs and peals of elfin laughter, in some chasm of rock above a waterfall. "It is Will alone that matters," and for the weak of purpose there is nothing but ridicule and six feet of such waste earth as nature carelessly can spare from her rude store of graves. Against the mountain ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... table was covered with powdered chalk that the baronet had dusted over it in the hope of developing criminal finger prints. Now under the drumming of his palm the particles of white dust whirled like microscopic elfin dancers. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... down the river until the two walls of the canon meet in the perspective. In a small way you know how it would feel to hear the rumble of an approaching seismic shock. Only there was no terror in this. It was the laughter of the sunbeam fairies as they loosened the architecture of "the elfin builders of ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... down upon the forest pond, An elfin tarn green-shadowed in the fern; Nine yews ensomber the wet bank, beyond The autumn branches of the beeches burn With yellow flame and red amid the green, And patches of the darkening ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... "Oh, well," said Elfin, "do as you like about it—the dragon will come and hunt you tomorrow, as likely as not. I don't care if he does, ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... him, the little tokens he had given in his childish way—not of dulness but of something infinitely worse, so ghastly and unchildlike in its cunning—came back as vividly as if but yesterday had intervened. The room in which they used to be; the spot in which his cradle stood; he, old and elfin-like in face, but ever dear to her, gazing at her with a wild and vacant eye, and crooning some uncouth song as she sat by and rocked him; every circumstance of his infancy came thronging back, and the most trivial, perhaps, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car, And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek for shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarund tree? ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Elfin folk of coast and cave, Laud him in the woven dance, All the tribes of wold and wave Bow the knee to King Romance! Wand'ring voices Chaucer knew On the mountain and the main, Cry the haunted forest through, KING ROMANCE HAS ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... aloft, the tops of the trees, from which the call of the red-headed woodpecker sounded as faint as the memory of a sound and the bark of the squirrels was elfin-thin. A hot crowded land, crammed with undergrowth and overgrowth wherever a woodland stood; and around every woodland dense cornfields; or, denser still, the leagues of swaying hemp. The smell of this now lay heavy on the air, seeming to be dragged hither and thither like a slow ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... a knotted look, That held as if for grain the summing sieve. Her judge now brightened without pause, as wakes Our homely daylight after dread of spells. Lips sugared to let loose the little snakes Of slimy lustres ringing elfin bells About a story of the naked flesh, Intending but to put some garment on, Should learn, that in the subject they enmesh, A traitor lurks and will be known anon. Delusion heating pricks the torpid doubt, Stationed for index down an ancient track: And ware of it was he while she poured out ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for answer, pulling impatiently at the orchids which she had gathered up again; they seemed akin to her—half elfin flowers. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Stevenson's books is unnecessary. We have all read them too recently to need a prompter. The high spirits and elfin humor which play about and support every work ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... saw, wonder-whist, How from the atmosphere a mist, So it seemed, slow uprist; And, looking from those elfin swarms, I was 'ware How the air Was all populous with forms Of the Hours, floating down, Like Nereids through a watery town. Some, with languors of waved arms, Fluctuous oared their flexile way; Some were borne half resupine On the aerial hyaline, Their fluid limbs and rare array Flickering ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... child this lithe supple young thing was as full of mischief and engaging roguery as any tortoiseshell kitten—with elfin glee her favourite sport was to fill her grandmother's bed with "ouliaries" (Good God! berries, so called because on sudden contact with bare flesh they burst with a loud explosion causing the victim to shout "Good God!" from sheer surprise). For three months this winsome game went ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... prying rain busy at her windows; the ticking of the small French clock, very dull, very far away—or was it her heart? And, faintly ringing in the receiver pressed against her ear, millions of tiny stirrings, sounds like instruments of an elfin orchestra tuning, echoes as of steps passing through the halls of fairy-land, a faint confusion of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... That gently flouts the grasses and the trees; Where every flying thing doth seem to be Instinct with sweetly sensuous melody; Where hills and dales assume their warmest phase, With here and there a scarf of opal haze To soften their luxuriant attire; Where one can almost hear the elfin choir Across the meadow-land, down in the wood, In songs of gladness—there are all things good. Ah! ye who seek the spot where joys abide, Awake! Awake! Seek out the country-side, And through the blue-gray July haze see life All free from care, ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... who exhausted on this subject, as upon most others, a profusion of learning, found the first idea of the elfin people in the Northern opinions concerning the duergar, or dwarfs.[23] These were, however, it must be owned, spirits of a coarser sort, more laborious vocation, and more malignant temper, and in all respects less ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... elfin planet, the monster ceased to climb. It hung there in the violet ray, an inch from the surface of the ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... this did not affect him, for he supposed his elfin friends had taken the opportunity to rest themselves, but after minutes lengthened into hours he began to be uneasy. What should he do if they never came back? How would he ever find his way out of these caverns? The thought was ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... hold your tongue, Whatever ye may hear or see; For if ye speak word in Elfin land Ye'll ne'er get ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... starlight draw elfin lines across her face, and my heart suddenly cried through my tongue words that my brain ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... under the mimosa trees, and with a queer elfin gesture he stooped down and kissed the lately disturbed sods, and made the sign of the cross upon his narrow little chest as he had seen his Spanish mother do. The dignity of the action, with its unconscious touch of foreign grace, and the boy's pathetic attempt to keep back his tears ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... when he had first known her. Time, experience, even the pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on that alabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she had accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an elfin youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly elusive than when she had worn the poppy ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... portraits. There was in him the Puritan, the man of the world, and the vagabond. There was something too of the obsolete soldier of fortune, with the cocked and feathered hat, worn audaciously on one side. There was also a touch of the elfin, the uncanny—the mysterious charm that belongs to the borderland between the real and the unreal world—the element so conspicuous and so indefinable in the art of Hawthorne. Writers so different as Defoe, Cooper, Poe, and Sir Thomas Browne, are seen with varying degrees ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... board it. They could only stand in powerless rage, and look after it. Bessie and Dolly, of course, could not hear the furious comments that Holmes was making as he turned angrily to old Weeks. But they could make a guess, and Dolly turned an elfin face, full of mischievous ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart
... the least little man I had ever seen; of such admirable proportions no one could call him a dwarf, because with that word we usually associate something of deformity; but yet with an elfin look of shrewd, hard, worldly wisdom in his face that marred the impression which his delicate regular little features would otherwise have conveyed. Indeed, I do not think he was quite of equal rank with the rest of the company, for his dress ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... question he asked and the answer he received were heard only by the elfin sprites dancing in the brook beside them, so we will leave it to those fairies to tell if they choose. Suffice it to say it was such as filled his heart so full of happiness it could no longer hold a secret, and there, where the moonlight fell in little rifts upon them, ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... that day, that Neykia, she of woodland grace and beauty, was strolling in the sunshine with her Little Pine; while on every side the trees were shaking their heads and it seemed gossiping about the hunting plans of that reckless little elfin hunter, Hymen, who was hurrying overland and shooting his joyous arrows in every direction, till the very air felt charged with the whisperings of countless lovers. It made me think of the shy but radiant Athabasca, and I wondered—was her ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... crazed bull; and it seemed to Annette from her perch in the branches, as if all the face of the plains was being hurled toward the south in the wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing themselves into spectral shapes rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of myriad eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination of the ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... garland and a rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle Venelas; and indeed all the postulates of elfin annals,—that the fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not speak; and the like,—I find true in Concord, however they might ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... beside the fire. She sat on a log of driftwood, and he lay on the warm shingle with his pipe in his hand. The clear green water splashed and tinkled upon the pebbles close at his feet, and a faint, elfin sighing fell from the firs above them. It was very old music: the song of the primeval wilderness; and though he had heard it often, it had a strange, unsettling effect on him as he languidly watched his companion. There was no doubt that she ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... in the air, or little flakes of frost; It seemed 'twas golden smoke around, or sunbeams lightly tossed; It seemed an elfin music like to reeds and warblers rose: "Nay!" Lucy said, "it is the wind that through the ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... of relief, one finishes a long day's run, thinking it will suffice for many a day to come; the evening is scarce over before elfin suggestions of possible rides for the morrow are floating about in the air, and when morning comes the automobile is taken out,—very much as the toper who has sworn off the night before takes his morning dram,—it just can't ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... stalks, a sable shade Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train, In silver samite knight and dame and maid Ride to the tourney on the barrier'd plain; And he must bow in humble mute disdain, And that worst woe of baffled souls endure, To see the evil ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... Ivy was an elfin-looking creature with sparkling black eyes that seemed to see right through one; her small head was covered with a thick mop of curls of a blackness that, in some lights, had blue and green shades like the plumage of a bird; her wasted cheeks and brown, claw-like hands told ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... there is a wide triangular spread, and this, gentle friends, is Finn Park, named for a New York boy who was killed in France. The name reminded us also of Elfin Finn, the somewhat complacent stage child who poses for chic costumes in Vogue. We were wondering which was a more hazardous bringing up for a small girl, living on Thompson Street or posing for a fashion magazine. From Finn Square there is a ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... lovely shapes; within the German castle-walls, in apt masquerade. There they were grave. Here, we have already said, that they are merry. There their office was to feel and to think. Here, if there be any trust in apparitions, they drink, and what is more critical for an Elfin lip—they eat! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... descendant, Jean. She bore the name of the Rutherfords, but she was the daughter of their trembling wives. At the first she was not wholly without charm. Neighbours recalled in her, as a child, a strain of elfin wilfulness, gentle little mutinies, sad little gaieties, even a morning gleam of beauty that was not to be fulfilled. She withered in the growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her mothers) came to her ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more familiar refuge of the elfin race, (if tradition is to be trusted,) is the glen of the river, or rather brook, named the Allen, which falls into the Tweed from the northward, about a quarter of a mile above the present bridge. As the streamlet finds its way behind Lord Sommerville's hunting-seat, called the Pavilion, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... cradle it was, after she was rolled in the blankets and fixed comfortably for sight seeing! The breezes fiddled through the twigs, making elfin music, and the tree-house swayed gently. It was too beautiful to sleep through, and Migwan lay awake hour after hour in wonder and delight, watching the moon steer her placid course across the sky. She saw Jupiter culminate and incline ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... Toinette set the casement open, and lay a long time waiting and watching; then she fell asleep. She waked with a sneeze and jump and sat up in bed. Behold, on the coverlet stood her elfin friend, with a long train of other elves beside him, all clad in the beetle-wing green, and wearing little pointed caps. More were coming in at the window; outside a few were drifting about in the moon rays, which lit their sparkling robes till they glittered ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... the hill, He marshals there his elfin power; Next Monday morn my bridegroom bold Shall bear me ...
— Ermeline - a ballad - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... 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 darkness. It gave me a strange sensation, as if I were not human at all, but an elfin spirit. I wonder why these little things move me so deeply? It is because I have a most "unbalanced intellect," I suppose.' Then, looking out on Florence, she cries, 'God! how beautiful it is, and how glad I am that I am alive to-day!' And she tells me ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Lienhard, was the sole cause of her misfortune. Her prayer on the rope that the saints would destroy the hated child, and the idea which then occupied her mind, that she was really a grown maiden, whose elfin delicacy of figure was due to her being one of the fays or elves mentioned in the fairy tales, had made a deep impression ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... little &c adj.; lie in a nutshell; become small &c (decrease) 36, (contract) 195. Adj. little; small &c (in quantity) 32; minute, diminutive, microscopic; microzoal; inconsiderable &c (unimportant) 643; exiguous, puny, tiny, wee, petty, minikin^, miniature, pygmy, pigmy^, elfin; undersized; dwarf, dwarfed, dwarfish; spare, stunted, limited; cramp, cramped; pollard, Liliputian, dapper, pocket; portative^, portable; duodecimo^; dumpy, squat; short &c 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... all, when the feast was over, True Thomas, the host, called for the magic harp which he had received from the hands of the Elfin Queen. When it was brought to him a great silence fell on all the company, and everyone sat listening breathlessly while he sang to them song after song of ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... without distinction. Thus there was George Macdonald, a Scot of genius as genuine as Carlyle's; he could write fairy-tales that made all experience a fairy-tale. He could give the real sense that every one had the end of an elfin thread that must at last lead them into Paradise. It was a sort of optimist Calvinism. But such really significant fairy-tales were accidents of genius. Of the Victorian Age as a whole it is true to say that it did discover a new thing; a thing called Nonsense. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... and the sun shone, and the laughter from below the fort was too far away and elfin to jar upon us. The world forgot us, and we were well content. There seemed not much to say: I suppose we were too happy for words. I knelt beside her, and she laid her hands in mine, and now and then we spoke. In her short and lonely life, ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... The enchanted moor, with its silence, where no sound is heard—the wind which shouted beyond the mountains, "when it sped across the moor it lost its voice, and passed as silently as the dead"—is affected by the fortune of the tale equally with its human and its elfin personages. When the knight arrives at last, "wherever his horse's hoofs struck the ground, grass and flowers sprang up, and great trees with leafy branches rose on every side.... As they rode on beneath the leafy trees from every ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... the country party," said the King. "I am much minded to secure the lad for an elfin page," he added aside to Killigrew. "There's a fund of excellent humour and drollery in those queer eyes of his! So, Sir Hobgoblin, if you are proof against cold steel, I know not what is to be done with you. Get you back, and devise some other mode of finding ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... procession, Formless, countless of their kind Circle us in flying coveys Like the leaves in Autumn wind. Now in ghastly silence deathly, Now with shrilling elfin cry— Is it some mad dance of bridal, Or a death march ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... over all, with moonlight calmness and steadiness, Mary Pitkin ruled and presided, dispensing to each his portion in due season, while Diana, restless and mischievous as a sprite, seemed to be possessed with an elfin spirit of drollery, venting itself in sundry little tricks and antics which drew ready laughs from the boys and reproving glances from the deacon. For the deacon was that night in one of his severest humors. As Biah Carter afterwards remarked of that night, "You could feel ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... linking that lonely palm to the remote horizon, a thousand elfin fires arose—blue-tongued and spirituous. Grey pencilings of smoke stole straightly upward to the sky, so that look where she would Rita could discern nothing but these countless thin, faintly ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... grass, Fifer in the dun cuirass, Fifing shrilly in the morn, Shrilly still at eve unworn; Now to rear, now in the van, Gayest of the elfin clan: Though I watch their rustling flight, I can never guess aright Where their lodging-places are; 'Mid some daisy's golden star, Or beneath a roofing leaf, Or in fringes of a sheaf, Tenanted as soon as bound! Loud thy reveille doth sound, ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... realized how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, Dexter Allison's daughter. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... water, survivals of old heathenism antagonistic to Christianity. Before that holy rite was performed, the child lay exposed to all their machinations. Baptism was the armour of the infant against the assaults of Satan and his angels, against the cunning of the wanderers from elfin-land, the fairy-sprites, with their changelings and their ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... sea of rosy jade; A rose-pink sky; black ships that fade Into the night; Across the bay, the city seems But elfin music, drowsy dreams ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... the ocean, which that night was one continuous swamp of Jack-o'-lantern phosphorescence, a wild but faint luminosity mingled with stars and flashes of brilliance, the whole trooping unanimously eastward, as if in haste with elfin momentous purpose, a boundless congregation, in the sweep of a strong oceanic current. I could hear it, in my slumbrous lassitude, struggling and gurgling at the tied rudder, and making wet sloppy noises under the sheer of the poop; and I was aware that ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... toilet, looking from his own reflection to Paul's face and back again with swift alternation. He pinched a bit of the cosmetic between thumb and finger, and dressed his eyelashes with it. Then he carefully drew an arched eyebrow, and paused to look at Paul again. The single brow gave him a comically elfin look, and Paul grinned; Herr Pauer drew another eyebrow, touched up his moustache, obliterated the gray upon his temples, and combed and twisted moustache and hair to his own satisfaction. Then he sat down on the table, and looked once ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... lamp of brass was dark, and there was no other light than a solitary bulb, whose hooded rays were concentrated upon the crystal ball, so that the latter shone with a dead-white glare, somehow baleful, like an elfin moon deeply lost in ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... the rustle of the wire-grass creeping over them in a dry tide. The boy had taken off his cap; the sea-wind moving under the mat of his damp hair gave it the look of some somber, outlandish cowl. With the night coming on, his solemnity had an elfin quality. He found what he was looking for at last, and his fingers ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... daughter wrote with an elfin mockery. Her brilliant eye of youth saw through the inconsistency of the beliefs he strove to reconcile. She learned his lore, read his books, ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... she must spend in sorting what might be called shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a mosaic wrought from crushed ruins—sorting them as food for a theory which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child. Doubtless a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born. But Mr. Casaubon's theory of the elements which made ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... of a tall, swarthy woman was a small girl, so fragile as to appear almost elfin. The woman wore the garb of a gipsy, and the presence of some squalid tents and tethered horses showed our young friends at once that it was a gipsy encampment upon which ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... that, as churches increase, dwarfs and elfin-folk diminish; so, at last, when the town of Kaboutermannekensburg was founded, and a church built, the Kaboutermanneken was fairly driven to the wall, or, rather, into the ground, where he lived in the bowels of the earth, and only appeared at intervals of a hundred years. But, upon the last ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... drawn back, and Wyllard, who lay facing the opening, could see a triangular patch of dim blue sky with a sharp sickle moon hanging low above a black fir branch. The night was clear and still, but now and then there was a faint elfin sighing among the stunted trees that died away again. He was then, while still determined, moodily discouraged, for they had seen no sign of human life during the journey, and his reason told him that he might search for years before he found the bones of the last survivor of ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... labyrinth of flowering vines and creepers. Once inside the delicious odorous screen, they found themselves in an archipelago of green islets, connected by monster roots or moss-covered trunks that seemed laid by elfin hands for the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... The elfin-faced danseuse puts it over. Her voice sounds like a run-down fifteen-cent harmonica. But that doesn't matter. Not at two a.m. in an all-night cabaret. You don't need a voice to knock us out of our seats. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... the same elfin revelry, the same masks, the same music. We seat ourselves, as before, under a gauze tent and sip odd little drinks tasting of flowers. But this evening we are alone, and the absence of the band of mousmes, whose familiar little faces formed a bond of union between ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... the children stealing They stood there hand in hand, For the elfin chimes were pealing ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... bewildered at finding no corresponding sense of solidarity in Undine; and little Paul's rootlessness, his lack of all local and linear ties, made them (for all the charm he exercised) regard him with something of the shyness of pious Christians toward an elfin child. But though mother and child gave them a sense of insuperable strangeness, it plainly never occurred to them that both would not be gradually subdued to the customs of Saint Desert. Dynasties had fallen, institutions ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... the settee, her settee, was a girl with her hands under her bobbed hair, a blue dress caught up under one knee, her bare arms agleam, her elfin face all white and a smile round her too ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... mortal eyes see not the goblin train Whose bells sound faintly on the passer's ear,— Who dares attempt a secret sight to gain Feels the sharp prick of many an elfin spear, And hears, too late, the low, malicious jeer, As long thorn-javelins his body gore, Until, defeated, breathless, bruised, and sore, He turns him from the haunted ground to flee, And murmurs ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... discovered that one of the men at the bunk-house played a flute, and she was working hard to teach him and Fiddling Boss and Croaker to play a portion of the elfin dance to accompany the players. The work of making costumes and training the actors became more and more strenuous, and in this Gardley proved a fine assistant. He undertook to train some of the older boys for their parts, and did it so well that he was presently in ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... is the play that I have stolen. For all the many pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in it—dramatic inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like—you must bless the original author: of these things I have only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... walked round to the stables, in which stood ten fine horses. These, the count ordered to be removed at once to a place which he called the Elfin Grotto, giving instructions that the three which were considered to be the fleetest were to be saddled and bridled ready for instant use, Francesca's saddle being required for one of them. He also hunted out Giaccomo—who looked a smart honest fellow enough—and ordered him to go with ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... pass our exile from the starry ways: One timeless hour in time we caught from the long night of endless days. With solemn gaiety the stars danced far withdrawn on elfin heights: The lilac breathed amid the shade of green and blue and citron lights. But yet the close enfolding night seemed on the phantom verge of things, For our adoring hearts had turned within from all ...
— The Nuts of Knowledge - Lyrical Poems New and Old • George William Russell
... through an open hollow The old man led with a smile: "Come, star-hearts, my children, follow To the elfin ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... seek the beach of sand, Where the water bounds the elfin land; Thou shalt watch the oozy brine Till the sturgeon leaps in the ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... she exclaimed. "Have I dreamed a bad dream? That certainly is my pretty little elfin child lying yonder." And she kissed it and strained it affectionately to her heart; but it struggled, and tried to bite like the kitten of ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... comes at first the exuberance of joy; then doubt. I had long debated the possibility of invisibles. As far back as I can remember, elfin tales produced an awful wonderment upon my imagination. On long May nights have I not often stolen from the house to watch for elves? A moon after a rain was to my thinking the best for such mysterious ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... callers all the day; my last, the wife of the Japanese Consul, who brought with her two children. They were like little butterflies, dressed in their gay kimonas and bright red obis, their straight black hair framing their tiny elfin faces. I was delighted and could scarcely let them go. Their mother says she will send to me their photographs, and I will send them to thee, as they seem children from another world. They are much prettier, in my eyes, than the foreign children, with their white hair and ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... winter-palace of ice; 'Twas as if every image that mirrored lay In his depths serene through the summer day, Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, Lest the happy model should be lost, Had been mimicked in fairy masonry By the elfin builders of ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... &c. (decrease) 36, (contract) 195. Adj. little; small &c. (in quantity) 32; minute, diminutive, microscopic; microzoal; inconsiderable &c. (unimportant) 643; exiguous, puny, tiny, wee, petty, minikin[obs3], miniature, pygmy, pigmy[obs3], elfin; undersized; dwarf, dwarfed, dwarfish; spare, stunted, limited; cramp, cramped; pollard, Liliputian, dapper, pocket; portative[obs3], portable; duodecimo[obs3]; dumpy, squat; short &c. 201. impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... sympathetic lips, much of the incongruity, otherwise no doubt apparent in the narrative, seemed at those times to disappear altogether. The incongruity, we mean, observable between the queer little ticket-porter and the elfin phantoms of the belfry; between Trotty Veck, in his "breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed, tooth-chattering" stand-point by the old church-door, and the Goblin Sight beheld by him when he had clambered ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... in some thin, dirty, white stuff down even to the fingers and feet: I have never seen men so wrapped up before, and women so only in the East. They wore turbans too, and thereunder peered out their elfin faces at me,—faces with protruding lower-jaws and bright eyes. They had lank black hair, almost like horsehair, and seemed as they sat to exceed in stature any race of men I have seen. The white-haired man, who I knew was a good ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... nowhere, The pilgrim listens, as the night air brings The murmured echo, perpetual, from the gorge Of barren rock far down the valley. Now, Though twilight here, it may be starlight there; Mist makes elfin lakes in the hollow fields; The dark wood stands in the mist like a somber island With one red star above it.... "This I should see, Should I go on, follow the falling road,— This I have often seen.... But I shall stay Here, where ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... a bright little maid, and, though we had not met before, we made friends at once. She had a mass of black curls, eyes dancing with elfin lights, a face permanently flushed, and limbs never in repose. She was, even in sleep—as I have seen her since—wonderfully alive, with that hectic energy that is born of spending oneself to the last ounce unceasingly; in her case, the magnetic, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... our manhood's might, When once our feet should venture on these wilds, The night would prove a sweet, still solitude,— Not dark for eyes that, earnest as a child's, Strove in the chaos but for truth and good? And oh, sweet liberty, though wizard gleams And elfin shapes should frighten or allure, To find the pathway of our hopes and dreams,— By toil to sweeten what we should endure,— To journey on, though but a little way, Towards the morning and the fir-clad heights,— To follow the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... the hush of the quiet eves, When the gloaming stole through the silent wood, And the low-toned zephyrs that stirred the leaves Were like elfin harps ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... Odin. I taught them how to fashion the tales of old into rich melodious songs, and with music and sweet-mouthed eloquence to move the minds of their fellow-men. But they say that Bragi taught them this; and they remember me only as Regin, the elfin schoolmaster, or at best as Mimer, the master of smiths. At length my heart grew bitter because of the neglect and ingratitude of men; and the old longing for Andvari's hoard came back to me, and I forgot much of my cunning ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... along like some elfin prowlers were Jane and Dozia, and they made straight through that ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... brimful of fun; While the ten-year-old twins, in a somersault mood, Have measured their length from the barn to the wood. A dozen times, yes, or it may be a score, Till their cheeks are as red as the roses, and more; Then the elfin of twelve and the boy of fifteen, Are pelting each other with snowballs so keen, That we, who are older, forget to be staid, {245} And shout, each with each, as the youngsters, arrayed In feathery garments, press ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... divested herself of her sables and laid them on a side table. Edna Marvel was the elder of the two by three years, but she was so small that she seemed a mere child. Her sallow little face resembled that of a tired monkey, yet it had an elfin charm, and her hands were beautiful as carved toys of ivory made in the East for a king's son to play with. They might hold a man's heart perhaps, but Mamie did not notice them, her own allurements being ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... elfin pipings, with sharp pitches and excited shrillnesses, to which Dick and Paula lent delighted ears, till, suddenly, with the abruptness of the trump of doom, all the microphonic chorus of the tiny golden lovers was swept away, obliterated, in a Gargantuan blast of sound—no ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... the glare from the candles. The sense of isolation was complete and delicious: the roses smelt very sweet, the soft strains of the waltz sounded like elfin music. ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... storms, no clouds, in thy blue sky foreseeing, Play on, play on, My elfin John! Toss the light ball, bestride the stick,— (I knew so many cakes would make him sick!) With fancies buoyant as the thistle-down, Prompting the face grotesque, and antic brisk, With many a lamb-like frisk! (He's got the scissors snipping at your gown!) ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... inspection as human hands—except for the long, triangular nails curved over the fingertips like the claws of a cat. They wore skin-tight clothes of some metallic silky stuff, and long flowing gleaming silvery capes. They looked unearthly, elfin and strange, and in their ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... Heaven, a pedestal from which the soul leaps out into the surrounding garden of limitless possibilities which are its birthright, and immediately accessible. And that, indeed, is the essential meaning of the thrill—that Heaven is here and now. The gates of ivory are very tiny; Beauty sounds the elfin horns that opens them; smaller than the eye of a needle is that opening—upon the diamond point of the thrill you flash within, and the Garden of Eternity ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... light on the grass, like a glowworm, and then Arndt saw the elfin mound open again; but this time the palace looked like a dim, gloomy staircase. On the top stair stood the little Hill-man, holding the glowworm lamp, and making many low bows to his new master. Arndt glanced rather fearfully down ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... as well—something elfin, wayward, mischievous. They peep and whisper. It is said they can cast spells. To sleep upon a daisied lawn is to run a certain risk. There is this hint of impudence in their attitude, half audacity, ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... door banged shut and she was alone in the kitchen. A little later she heard as in a dream the sound of horses' hoofs retreating far up the lane. Then all the powers of darkness closed in about her, and malicious elfin voices chattered her shame in her ears. Frederick had repudiated her and his child and had gone! Tess staggered forward, and a few minutes afterward, when Andy slipped down the ladder, he found her curled up on the cot insensible, her face shrouded ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... an elfin cheel some ways. Wonnerful eyes he've got. They burn me if I look at'em close," said Chris. She regarded Timothy without sentiment and her ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... youth with the slowness of his labors and the little progress he had made since she last inspected his work. No wonder that she laughed at the taste of the boy or his employer. Graver heads than hers might question the motive which had set the painter such a model. Imagination suggested that some elfin godmother must have prescribed the task as a condition of her future favor. At all events, the malicious sprite now acting as overseer felt a sense of triumph in this captive boy, perched against the wall, and condemned, like herself, to reproduce the past and bring ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... and long, and it was not till Gilbert had nearly lost his temper that he could be induced to explain the cause of his mirth, and then he said: "Why, man, you have gone clean mad, and no wonder, as this fine lady of yours has been drugging you with Elfin wine to make a fool of you. If you don't mind she'll keep you here like a horse in a mill all the days of your life, running after ...
— Up! Horsie! - An Original Fairy Tale • Clara de Chatelaine
... the wind, And let each insect louder sing; Let elfin "joy be unconfined;" And let the laughing fairies bring A wreath enchanted, and to bind Upon the Poet's worthy brow Heartsease and laurel, and a kind Of valley lily, white as snow; And fresh May-roses, branching long— Braid all these in a garland gay, To crown the Poet for his song, Sung in ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... rest of the work is mainly enchantments and the like. More fairy-like music has never entered a musician's dreams than Philidel's "Hither this way," and the chorus which alternates with the solo part is as elfin, will-o'-th'-wispish, as anything of Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn is Purcell's only rival in such pictures. At the beginning of the celebrated Frost Scene, where Cupid calls up "thou genius of the clime" (the clime being Arctic), we get ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... which Lucrezia Borgia laughed when the world was young. It is a pity cats don't drink champagne. I would have made you to-night as drunk as Bacchus. We drink, and in the stillness the glouglou of his tongue forms a bass to the elfin notes of the Pommery ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... agreed; and the Elfin King went to a golden chest whence he took a phial that was filled with a blood-red liquor. And with this liquor he anointed the ears and the eyelids, the nostrils, the lips, and the finger-tips of the bodies of Burd Helen's two brothers that lay as ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... gods and goddesses of classical mythology or our own folk-lore, none were more fascinating than the Nature Spirits—Elves and Fairies, Neckans and Kelpies, Pixies and Ouphes, Mermaids, Undines, Water Spirits, and all the Elfin world ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... the Countess presented him with a daughter. Scarcely had Hermann received intelligence of this event before a very diminutive old crone entered the apartment and informed him that the elfin bride, whom he had seen in the miniature procession on the night of his nuptials, had given birth to a daughter. Hermann was very friendly to the visitor, wished all happiness to the mother and child, and the old woman took her departure. The ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... dancing men inscribed on her party list. Both were dead long since. To whom the house belonged now I did not know. But I recognised pictures and statuary and a conservatory with palms. And the place shimmered with brilliant ghosts and was haunted by hot perfumes and by the echo of human voices and by elfin music. And the cripple forgot that he was being carried up the stairs in the grip of the old soldier. He was mounting them with heart beating high and the presence of a beloved hand on his arm.... You see, it was all so sudden. It took my breath away and sent my mind whirling ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... rampart's thundering side The surges of the tumbling tide, When Arthur ranged his red-cross ranks On conscious Camlan's crimsoned banks: By Mordred's faithless guile decreed Beneath a Saxon spear to bleed. Yet in vain a Paynim foe Armed with fate the mightly blow; For when he fell, an elfin queen, All in secret and unseen, O'er the fainting hero threw Her mantle of ambrosial blue, And bade her spirits bear him far, In Merlin's agate-axled car, To her green isle's enameled steep Far in the navel of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... it, and all Its importunity of love and pain; And he would wait till the last passionate fall Died on the night, and all was still again, — Then to his upland village wander home, Marvelling whence that flood of elfin ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... loggia. We were great pals now, Boy and I. I had never met anyone in the least like him. At one moment he was a human boy, almost a child; at another his brain leaped beyond mine, and he became a poet or a philosopher; again he was an elfin sprite, a creature for whom Puck was the one thinkable name. There was a single thing only, about which you could always be sure. He would never ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Whence came the intense glowing imagination of the Brontes—so unlike the Miss-Austen-like calm of their predecessors? Again, I only know that their mother was a Cornish woman. Whence came this huge elfin creature, George Borrow, with his eagle head perched on his rocklike shoulders, brown-faced, white-headed, a king among men? Where did he get that remarkable face, those strange mental gifts, which place him by himself in literature? ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in consequence, never more complete than when they were roaming the woods. In them Easter was at home, and her ardent nature came to the surface like a poetic glow from her buoyant health and beauty. Then appeared all that was wayward and elfin-like in her character, and she would be as playful, wilful, evanescent as a wood-spirit. Sometimes, when they were separated, she would lead him into a ravine by imitating a squirrel or a wild-turkey, and, as he crept noiselessly along with ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... have acquiesced in it very quietly; but this outlandish belief in fairies was altogether an overtask for Yankee credulity. As might have been expected, the little strangers, unable to breathe in an atmosphere of doubt and suspicion, soon took their leave, shaking off the dust of their elfin feet as a testimony against an unbelieving generation. It was, indeed, said that certain rude fellows from the Bay State pulled away a board from the ceiling and disclosed to view the fairies in the shape of the landlady's three slatternly daughters. But the reader who has any degree ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... is on the wide And moving waters, and it draweth nigh Like a sea-cloud. The elfin billows fly Before it, in their armories enthrall'd Of radiant and moon-breasted emerald; And many is the mariner that sees The lone boat in the melancholy breeze, Waving her snowy canvass, and anon Their stately vessel with a gallant run Crowds by in all her glory; but the cheer Of men ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... The pensive shell doth borrow melody. I would not do the lordly masters wrong By filching fair words from the shining throng Whose music haunts me as the wind a tree! Lo, when a stranger in soft Syrian glooms Shot through with sunset treads the cedar dells, And hears the breezy ring of elfin bells Far down by where the white-haired cataract booms, He, faint with sweetness caught from forest smells, Bears ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... ground-ivy instead of the shepherd's purse, that lank intruder that not only is a weed but looks like one? Why not bee-orchises for wartwort, and gentians for chickweed? I have no fault to find with the foxgloves under the apple-tree or with the ivy-leaved toad-flax that hangs with its elfin flowers from every cranny in the wall. But I protest against the dandelions and the superfluity of groundsel. I undertake that, if rest-harrow and scabious and corn-cockle invade the garden, I shall never use a hoe on them. More than this, if only the right weeds ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... legs were bare. Around his sombrero, or shadowy hat, was tied a large quantity of the herb which in English is called rosemary, in Spanish romero, and in the rustic language of Portugal, alecrim; which last is a word of Scandinavian origin (ellegren), signifying the elfin plant, and was probably carried into the south by the Vandals. The man seemed frantic with terror, and said that the witches had been pursuing him and hovering over his head for the last two leagues. He came from the Spanish ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... inn, arising from Anty's arrival and Martin's return, was gradually subsiding. These two important events, both happening on the same day, sadly upset the domestic economy of Mrs Kelly's establishment. Sally had indulged in tea almost to stupefaction, and Kattie's elfin locks became more than ordinarily disordered. On the following morning, however, things seemed to fall a little more into their places: the widow was, as usual, behind her counter; and if her girls did not give her as much assistance ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... rumbling there is in the elfin hill," said one of the lizards; "I have not been able to close my eyes for two nights on account of the noise; I might just as well have had the toothache, for that ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... of the fairy throng, She led the dancing group along Through tangled brakes and fretted bowers, Where grew the richest, rarest flowers, That wooed the bee to banquet there, Or yielded sweets to Summer air. But she who moved with elfin pace, And taught the infant throng to play, Raised to heaven her cherub face, While that bright celestial ray, Which halos the throne of glory round, Illumed her azure, orient eye, That seemed to penetrate the ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... lurk; and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or not, no man ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... set in the soft earth. Across them other poles had been placed cunningly woven in and out. Still other branches, criss-crossed above, and piled high with foliage, offered a thick mat of verdure to shield one from the hot rays of the sun. Within the elfin chamber was a rustic seat; everywhere, their roots enwrapped in wet earth, ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... excitement. Edith sang, and Margaret played some of her elfin strains, and Mr. Regulus made music leap joyously from the sounding violin. There was one in the lonely library who might have made sweeter music than all, whose spirit's chords were all jangled and tuneless, and whose ear seemed closed to the concord of melodious ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... when the stunted form of Hannah Croneen was seen approaching. Hannah wore her bedgown and her short blue serge petticoat; her legs and feet were bare; the breezes had caught up her short gray locks, and were tossing them wildly about. She looked very elfin and queer as she approached ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... little loss in beauty and in that of her which was desirable, he realised, in a kind of paralysis, that he desired her no more, that he loved her no more with the idealised love he had given to the elfin princess of his dreams. Not that he would not still do her infinite service. The pathos of her broken life moved him to an anguish of pity. For her soothing he would give all that life held for him, save one thing—which was no longer ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... spoke the moody Elfin King,[7] Who woned[8] within the hill,— Like wind in the porch of a ruined church, His voice ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... is the most wonderful fairy story in the world, but Shakespeare did not create it out of hand; he found the fairy part of it in the traditions of the country people. One of his most intelligent students says: "He founded his elfin world on the prettiest of the people's traditions, and has clothed it in the ever-living flower of his ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... a powerfully-built fellow, with a handsome figure and face, though the latter was very dark, and he walked with a stoop and an awkward slouching gait. He wore his long black hair in straight elfin locks; those in front having been cut across the forehead just above the eyebrows, as being the simplest method of clearing the way for vision. He was clad in a very dirty soiled hunting-shirt and leggings of leather, with moccasins ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... pathos so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm—all this is "Trivia." Where are Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of old time? Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy elfin scamper. It is Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given scenario of that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences—the mind of a ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... of distress; Her never-failing stores Have cheer'd the famish'd wilderness, Have gladden'd distant shores. Oh! leave no little plot of sod 'Mid all her clust'ring vales untrod; But all thy varying gifts unfold In one mad embassy of gold: O'er all the land of beauty fling Bright records of thy elfin wing." ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... time he her would kiss She call'd on Mary's son; Then he became a lovely knight, His elfin shape was gone. ...
— Ellen of Villenskov - and Other Ballads • Anonymous
... as they sat and watched and listened with their pointed ears lifted alertly, watching with soft gray eyes, or the way they handled objects with their little four-fingered hands. They were so remarkably human-like in their elfin way that the colonists couldn't help but ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... now arrived for Goldsmith to apply for orders, and he presented himself accordingly before the Bishop of Elfin for ordination. We have stated his great objection to clerical life, the obligation to wear a black coat; and, whimsical as it may appear, dress seems in fact to have formed an obstacle to his entrance into the church. He had ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... marrying—but now that he heard the possibility questioned, he felt a disagreeable conviction of its inevitableness. Mrs. Dressel's view was of course absurd. In spite of Justine's feminine graces, he had formerly felt in her a kind of elfin immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched heart and senses: it was only of late that she had developed the subtle quality which calls up thoughts of love. Not marry? Why, the vagrant fire had just lighted ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... colonel, because I myself have something to say." The little elfin voice disregarded Wachique and the page. They were part of the furniture of the room, and did not ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... most wonderful just before the birth of her first child, a little changeling creature, wild-eyed as her fairy mother. How she made believe with the little fairy vestments, the elfin-shirts, the pixy-frocks—long before it was time for the tiny body to step inside them! how she talked to the unborn soul that none but she as yet could see! And all the time she 'knew' she was going to die, ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... elfin steps their music moves no more Beneath light domes to tune the festal train, Nor at the moony eves along the shore To brim with fairy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... the wayward elfin spirit, if we may so term it, throughout his career. His fairy gifts are of no avail at school, academy, or college: they unfit him for close study and practical science, and render him heedless of everything that does not address itself to his poetical imagination, and genial and festive ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the ugly brown spiders, and in gentle words told them, how in Fairy Land their kindred spun all the elfin cloth, and in return the Fairies gave them food, and then how happily they lived among the green leaves, spinning garments for their neighbors. "And you too," said she, "shall spin for me, and I will ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... air like a sceptre over the wood-lice he devours with his pickaxe bill. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard!" was an instigation to murder in the flicker, who loves young ants as much as wild-cherries or Indian corn, and is capable of taking any such satire seriously upon things to eat. Not so elfin and devilish as the small black woodpecker, he is full ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... blue glass, and across the east were two long vermilion clouds. Behind the black hill the sun had shouldered up, molten, and the shadow of Vessons, standing monkey-like on the lowest bar of the gate, lay on the stretch of wet clover behind him—a purple, elfin creature, gifted with a prehensile dignity. The cows did not appear after his first call. He lifted his head and called again in a high plaintive tone, as one reasons with a fretful child. 'Come o-on, come o-on!' Then he sank into the landscape again. After ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... the distant peaks of the Hian Min, and I to find my way by strange means back to those hazy fields that all poets know, wherein stand small mysterious cottages through whose windows, looking westwards, you may see the fields of men, and looking eastwards see glittering elfin mountains, tipped with snow, going range on range into the region of Myth, and beyond it into the kingdom of Fantasy, which pertain to the Lands of Dream. Long we regarded one another, knowing that we should meet no more, for my fancy is weakening ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett] |
