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More "Elfin" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wonderful. It had seemed perfect. And yet—and yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some straying angel—some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had ever realised. She cared for him—how could he doubt it? But ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... obscure the truth, just as it often does the derivation of Rommany words. But nothing can detract from the inexpressibly quaint spirit of Gipsy originality in which these odd credos are expressed, or surpass the strangeness of the reasons given for them. If the spirit of the goblin and elfin lingers anywhere on earth, it is ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... 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
... moor, riding homeward, he saw before him Jarvis Barrow. Dismounting, he met the old man beside a cairn, placed there so long ago that there was only an elfin story for the deeds ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... and on. The blue, sunlit arch overhead, the waving trees that sent dancing shadows like troops of elfin sprites over the water, the fret in one place where a rock broke the murmurous lapping, the swish somewhere else, where grasses and weeds and water blooms rooted in the sedge rocked back and forth with the slow tide—how peaceful ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... went to the ugly brown spiders, and in gentle words told them, how in Fairy Land their kindred spun all the elfin cloth, and in return the Fairies gave them food, and then how happily they lived among the green leaves, spinning garments for their neighbors. "And you too," said she, "shall spin for me, and I will give you better food than helpless insects. You shall live in peace, and spin ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... cliff. And just below the white snake he saw the bright body of a girl, who lay asleep in the soft grass. She lay without any other covering than a light, web-like veil, just as if she had thrown herself down there after having taken part the whole night in some elfin dance; but the long blades of grass and the trembling flower-clusters stood high over the sleeper, so that Reor could scarcely catch a glimpse of the soft lines of her body. Nor did he go nearer in order to see better. ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... neighbour Rip, where have you been all day? We feared some of the [Elfin](9) goblins of ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... The spirit of it—weird, elfin—was abroad, the air was full of it as, alone out in the gusty darkness of the autumn night, at eleven o'clock, Judith walked swiftly toward the Lusk place. Wrapped in a little packet she carried bread and salt, and a length of candle. She went across fields, ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... patch a farmhouse struck a muffled note of grey. On the left the ribbon of road glistened white between the sentinel poplars silhouetted against the sky. The hot smell of the earth filled the air like spice. A thousand elfin sounds, the vibration of leaves, the tiny crackling of cornstalks, the fairy whirr of ground insects, melted ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... vast possessions were known as the Honour of Peverel. In 1155 the younger Peverel was disinherited for poisoning the earl of Chester, and his estates forfeited to the crown. Few Englishmen retained estates of any importance after the Conquest, but one, Elfin, an under-tenant of Henry de Ferrers, not only held a considerable property but was the ancestor of the Derbyshire family of Brailsford. The families of Shirley and Gresley can also boast an ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... the blue hose and the pretty bronze slippers, then, with elfin grace, she caught the edge of her skirt, and with rosy, bare feet, tripped across the floor in a graceful, ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks
... hall. A shabby, disreputable, out-at-elbows office coat was worn over his ultra-smart street clothes, and he was puffing at a freakish little pipe in the shape of a miniature automobile. He eyed me a moment from the doorway, a fantastic, elfin little figure. I thought that I had never seen so strange and so ugly a face as that of this little brown Welshman with his lank, black hair and his deep-set, uncanny black eyes. Suddenly he trotted over to me with a quick little step. In the doorway he had looked ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... the transition to a type of tale wherein one special characteristic of elfin gifts is presented. For in this case, when the mannikin asked the midwife what her charge was, she modestly replied: "Oh, nothing; the little trouble I have had does not call for any payment." "Now then, lift up thy apron!" answered he; and it was quickly filled with the rubbish that lay ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... it is by lonely meres To sit, with heart and soul awake, Where water-lilies lie afloat, Each anchored like a fairy boat Amid some fabled elfin lake: To see the birds flit to and fro Along the dark-green reedy ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... there was a circle of grotesque-looking stones, strangely linked together by creeping plants and ferns of curious growth. And as the Snarling Princess looked at them, it seemed to her that the stones took dwarf-like shapes, and glared about them with weird elfin faces. The princess seemed rooted to the spot. An invisible power appeared to draw her towards the group, and to attract her by a beautiful flower, whose calyx opened at her approach. Unable to resist the impulse, she ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the feast was over, True Thomas, the host, called for the magic harp which he had received from the hands of the Elfin Queen. When it was brought to him a great silence fell on all the company, and everyone sat listening breathlessly while he sang to them song after song ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... the artistic prominence was given to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still broad daylight, a man looked only at ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... The surface of the table was covered with powdered chalk that the baronet had dusted over it in the hope of developing criminal finger prints. Now under the drumming of his palm the particles of white dust whirled like microscopic elfin dancers. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... her head promptly with a faint echo of the elfin laughter that had so maddened him a little earlier. "No, I won't promise. But I'll show you where I was hiding ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... the grass blades that it stirred, slipped from a pool of moonlight into a lake of shadow. Somewhere a small owl, tremulously melodious, called and called: and from the salt meadows, distantly, the elfin whistle of ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... as she slept, Jocelyn heard the stream ripple in the shadows like one that laughed soft but very joyously and, as he gazed up at the solitary star with eyes enraptured, this elfin laughter found its echo in ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... Mrs. Scudder opened the pantry-door and put an end to this mysterious conversation, which had already so affected Miss Prissy, that, in the eagerness of her interest, she had rubbed up her cap border and ribbon into rather an elfin and goblin style, as if they had been ruffled up by a breeze from the land of spirits; and she flew around for a few moments in a state of great nervous agitation, upsetting dishes, knocking down plates, and huddling up contrary suggestions as to what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... years old. She grew quite womanly, as it were; tried to help her mother in a thousand little ways, and especially by her own solitary branch of feminine industry—poor darling! She set on a pair of the daintiest elfin socks that ever were knitted. I found them, years after—one finished, one with the needles (all rusty) stuck through the fine worsted ball, just as the child had laid it out of ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... sense every romancer is a child—such was Ludwig Tieck, such was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. But each is something more—he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows, at least, some of Elfin Land as well ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... however, drawn back, and Wyllard, who lay facing the opening, could see a triangular patch of dim blue sky with a sharp sickle moon hanging low above a black fir branch. The night was clear and still, but now and then there was a faint elfin sighing among the stunted trees that died away again. He was then, while still determined, moodily discouraged, for they had seen no sign of human life during the journey, and his reason told him that he might search for years before he found the bones of the last ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... me, little maid, Come to the rocky shade I love to sing; Live with us, maiden rare— Come, for we "want" thee there, Thou elfin thing, To work thy spell, In some cool cell ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... Servants with torches were crossing the courtyard in every direction, and above lights were ascending and descending from landing to landing. I obtained a confused glimpse of vast masses of architecture—columns, arcades, flights of steps, stairways—a royal voluptuousness and elfin magnificence of construction worthy of fairyland. A negro page—the same who had before brought me the tablet from Clarimonde, and whom I instantly recognised—approached to aid me in dismounting, and the major-domo, attired in black velvet with a gold chain about his neck, advanced to meet me, supporting ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... behind the turrets of a castle and he had climbed up—up—up to the gabled kingdom, seeking, away from the track of the tourist, relief from the exotic gayety of his rocketing over Europe. And high above the elfin kingdom on a wooded ravine where a silver rivulet leaped and sang along the mountain, a gray and lonely monastery had offered him ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... as if all the face of the plains was being hurled toward the south in a condition of the wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the wan, elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing itself into spectral shapes of sullen aspect, rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of more than ten thousand eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination of the writer ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... bed belonged of right to the moonlight, for it was of quite elfin-like beauty. The child had dropped her cover on the floor, and the moonlight looked in at the naked little limbs. Presently she opened her eyes and looked at the ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... quite dark when she reached the Cove. In the crystal cup of the sky over her the stars were blinking. Flying flakes of foam were scurrying over the sand like elfin things. A soft little wind was crooning about the eaves of the little gray house where David Spencer was sitting, alone in the twilight, his violin on his knee. He had been trying to play, but could not. His heart yearned ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of the fairy throng, She led the dancing group along Through tangled brakes and fretted bowers, Where grew the richest, rarest flowers, That wooed the bee to banquet there, Or yielded sweets to Summer air. But she who moved with elfin pace, And taught the infant throng to play, Raised to heaven her cherub face, While that bright celestial ray, Which halos the throne of glory round, Illumed her azure, orient eye, That seemed to penetrate the sky. Bending her gaze upon ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... this?" 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 ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... her stood 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 was inappropriate to the occasion (and he ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... dragon," said Elfin. "You went out at the wrong time of day. The dragon should be ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... be allowed to carry the king's banner in an approaching battle. Being refused on account of his blindness he vanished, and the king of Brittany mentioned his suspicions that this was one of Merlin's elfin tricks. Arthur was disturbed, for he had promised to give the child anything except his honor, his kingdom, his wife, and his sword. However, while he continued to fret, there entered the hall a poor child about ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Griffin excels to a remarkable extent. What reader of the "Collegians" has not realized all the perils of the windy night and the stormy sea with trepidation and horror scarcely surpassed by the occupants of the little craft tossing amid the boiling breakers—Eily, the hapless runaway, Danny, the elfin hunchback, and Hardress, the conscience-stricken victim of conflicting thoughts and passionate impulses? How much more tragic the finding of the dead body of Eily, the "pride of Garryowen," since it occurs on the hunting field, surrounded by the half maudlin squires, and before ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... Teneriffe look on the useless and poisonous Euphorbia canariensis. It is to them—according to Mr. Piazzi Smyth—a demon who would kill them, if it could only run after them; but as it cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it, and pelt it with volleys of stones, "screeching with elfin joy, and using worse names than ever, when the poisonous milk spurts out ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Gather the punctual stars. Huge whitened hills Rise glimmering to the blue verge of the night, Ghostlike, and striped with narrow glens of firs Black-waving, solemn. O'er the Luggie-stream Gathers a veiny film of ice, and creeps With elfin feet around each stone and reed, Working fine masonry; while o'er the dam, Dashing, a noise of waters fills the clear And nitrous air. All the dark, wintry hours Sharply the winds from the white level moors Keen whistle. Timorous in his homely ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... not the goblin train Whose bells sound faintly on the passer's ear,— Who dares attempt a secret sight to gain Feels the sharp prick of many an elfin spear, And hears, too late, the low, malicious jeer, As long thorn-javelins his body gore, Until, defeated, breathless, bruised, and sore, He turns him from the haunted ground to flee, And murmurs low, as grace he doth implore, "The Queen of ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... Europe the rosemary has long had magic properties ascribed to it. The Spanish ladies used to wear it as an antidote against the evil eye, and the Portuguese called it the Elfin plant, and dedicated it to the fairies. The idea of the antidote may have been due to a confusion of the name with that of the Virgin; but as a matter of fact the 'Ros-marinus' is frequently mentioned by old Latin writers, including Horace and Ovid. The name came from the fondness of the plant ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... an elfin-storm from faery land, Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed: Arise—arise! the morning is at hand;— The bloated wassailers will never heed:— Let us away, my love, with happy speed; There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,— Drowned all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead: Awake! arise! my love, ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... like some elfin prowlers were Jane and Dozia, and they made straight through that bold moonlight for ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... 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
... 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
... 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
... excitement at the 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 as she desired of them, and as much as was usual with ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... the plonk-plonk of rising trout and the endless twitter of woodland birds mingled with the far-away barking of dogs and the lowing of the full-uddered cows in the distant meadows. Abashed and enchanted, the girl listened. It was an elfin land where the old witch voices of hill and river were not silenced. With the wind in her hair she climbed the slope again to the garden ground, where she found a solemn-eyed collie sniffing the fragrant wind ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... and relentlessly rapid marching. In the late afternoon occurred a monstrous piling up of thunder clouds, a whistling of wind, and a great downpour of rain. It beat down the wheat and pattered like elfin bullets on the forest leaves. Through this fusillade the army came down to the west fork of the Shenandoah. Pioneers laid a bridge of wagons, and, brigade by brigade, the army crossed. High on the bank in the loud wind and dashing rain, Jackson ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... tossing the snow as they run, And laughing and shouting, so brimful of fun; While the ten-year-old twins, in a somersault mood, Have measured their length from the barn to the wood. A dozen times, yes, or it may be a score, Till their cheeks are as red as the roses, and more; Then the elfin of twelve and the boy of fifteen, Are pelting each other with snowballs so keen, That we, who are older, forget to be staid, {245} And shout, each with each, as the youngsters, arrayed In feathery garments, press on or retreat, Determined to win, nor acknowledge defeat, And the snow ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... search for game. Their fellowship was, in consequence, never more complete than when they were roaming the woods. In them Easter was at home, and her ardent nature came to the surface like a poetic glow from her buoyant health and beauty. Then appeared all that was wayward and elfin-like in her character, and she would be as playful, wilful, evanescent as a wood-spirit. Sometimes, when they were separated, she would lead him into a ravine by imitating a squirrel or a wild-turkey, and, as he crept noiselessly along with bated breath and eyes peering eagerly through the tree-tops ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... Rivers May—I'm not an elfin prince,' said the boy, with a moment's hurt feeling. 'Papa sent me.' By that time the boy was fast in his grandfather's embrace, and was only enough released to give him space to answer the eager question, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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, ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... girls in my class, just the number required for this dialogue," she said. "Eight of the characters are school girls, one is a fairy, and the boy in the little play is an elfin messenger." ...
— Dorothy Dainty's Gay Times • Amy Brooks
... one night, when Heaven seemed resting, Against the troubled fever of the earth; I dreamed that vivid throated birds were nesting, In trees that shook with elfin-hearted mirth. I dreamed that star-like purple flowers were springing A-throb with perfume all about the place, And that there was a far-off sound of singing— And ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... funniest little place, this room of Star's, the queerest, quaintest little elfin bower! It was built out from the south side of the tower, almost like a swallow's nest, only a swallow's nest has no window looking out on the blue sea. There was a little white bed in a corner, and a neat chest of drawers, ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... is a little airy, elfin animal in these woods, and in all the evergreen woods of the Pacific Coast, that is more influential and interesting than even the beaver. This is the Douglas squirrel (Sciurus Douglasi). Go where you will throughout ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... through in good shape, making rampant growths and carrying a heavy crop. These include: 2 Walters, 4 O.K. Heart, 1 Canoka, 1 Slioka, 1 Rover, 2 Calendar, 1 Westoka, 1 Nursoka, 1 Aloka, 1 Symoka, 15 select unnamed bearing seedlings, yet on trial. All are promising. Also we have three of the Elfin paper shell heartnut hybrids. I have failed to find a good pollinator for these Elfins, so they are shy croppers, although producing plenty of the female blooms. All of the above trees are 6 inches in diameter ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... like it. Many a time the little girl, who looked up to and admired the big boy who could compel her to anything when he was so minded, would, for her own ends, work on his sense of responsibility, taking an elfin delight in ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... myriad gnomes seemed toiling. Soon a light breeze rippled the water, and the shaft was seen no more. But the moon's bright wake was still revealed: a silver track, tipping every wave-crest in its course, till each seemed a pearly, scroll-prowed nautilus, buoyant with some elfin crew. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing! Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... the path wound through a forest of fir, where a wood wind wove its murmurous spell and a wood brook dimpled pellucidly among the shadows—the dear, companionable, elfin shadows—that lurked under the low growing boughs. Along the edges of that winding path grew banks of velvet green moss, starred with clusters of pigeon berries. Pigeon berries are not to be eaten. They are woolly, ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Like a fairy silver bell In the distance ringing, Lightly swinging In the air; 'Tis the water in the dell Where the elfin minstrels dwell, Falling in a rainbow sprinkle, Dropping stars that brightly twinkle, Bright and fair, On the darkling pool below, Making music so; 'Tis the water elves who play On their lutes of spray. Tinkle, tinkle! Like ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... happened that day, that Neykia, she of woodland grace and beauty, was strolling in the sunshine with her Little Pine; while on every side the trees were shaking their heads and it seemed gossiping about the hunting plans of that reckless little elfin hunter, Hymen, who was hurrying overland and shooting his joyous arrows in every direction, till the very air felt charged with the whisperings of countless lovers. It made me think of the shy but radiant Athabasca, and I wondered—was ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... mysterious underworld. Strange and weird it seemed, with its fathomless shadows and its wild grottoes, over which hung, silently waving, long pendants of ivy, while dusky gray aloes uplifted their horned heads from great rock-rifts, like elfin spirits struggling upward out of the shade. Nor was wanting the usual gentle poetry of flowers; for white iris leaned its fairy pavilion over the black void like a pale-cheeked princess from the window of some dark enchanted castle, and scarlet geranium and golden broom and crimson gladiolus waved ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... Gilbert had nearly lost his temper that he could be induced to explain the cause of his mirth, and then he said: "Why, man, you have gone clean mad, and no wonder, as this fine lady of yours has been drugging you with Elfin wine to make a fool of you. If you don't mind she'll keep you here like a horse in a mill all the days of your life, running after clouds you ...
— Up! Horsie! - An Original Fairy Tale • Clara de Chatelaine
... alternation of softly checkered gray and shade, where acres of feathery grasses flowed in wind-blown furrows; where in the purple obscurity of hollows the strange and aged little forests grew restless and full of echoes; where shadowy reeds like elfin swords clattered and thrust and parried across the darkling pools of haunted waters unstirred save for the swirl of a startled fish or the smoothly spreading wake of some furry ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... was no sense in belaboring the point. He turned to the staff. Five of them were the same big-boned heavy-framed type that apparently did most of the manual labor. The sixth, the late arrival, was an elegant creature, a bronze-skinned, green-eyed minx with an elfin face half hidden under a wavy mass of red-brown hair. Unlike the others, she had been docked—and in contrast to their heavy eyes and sleep-puffed features she was alert and lively. She flashed him an impish grin, revealing ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... compass vanished; all streets remained alike,—the same endless vista of mystic characters, red, black, and gold, on narrow suspended tablets, under which flowed the same current of pig-tailed men in blue and dirty white. From every shop, the same yellow faces stared at him, the same elfin children caught his eye for a half-second to grin or grimace, the same shaven foreheads bent over microscopical tasks in the dark. At first, Rudolph thought the city loud and brawling; but resolving this impression to the hideous shouts of his coolies ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... skin and bones.[580] Again, the wicked fairies are apt to carry off men's wives with them to fairyland; but the lost spouses can be recovered within a year and a day when the procession of the fairies is defiling past on Hallowe'en, always provided that the mortals did not partake of elfin food ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... have another quality 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, half knavery, that shows itself a little in the way they stare unwinkingly ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... the end, and that was in the person of the last descendant, Jean. She bore the name of the Rutherfords, but she was the daughter of their trembling wives. At the first she was not wholly without charm. Neighbours recalled in her, as a child, a strain of elfin wilfulness, gentle little mutinies, sad little gaieties, even a morning gleam of beauty that was not to be fulfilled. She withered in the growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her mothers) came to ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of 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 ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... 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
... Conscious of his elfin power and submitting to his dread experience, Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day's banquet, turning an appealing look towards him as the waitress repeats the catalogue of viands and saying "What ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... for some time the subject of my reflections. I had been congratulating myself on the possession of the buffalo-robe. That would go far towards the disguise; but other articles were wanting to complete my costume. The leggings and moccasins—the plumed head-dress and neck ornaments—the long elfin locks—the bronze complexion of arms and breast—the piebald face of chalk, charcoal, and vermilion—where were all these to be obtained? There was ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... against one of the pilasters a piece of black ship oak, rudely fashioned into something like human form, and which skilful people declared would have been clothed with seeming flesh and blood, and palmed upon him by elfin adroitness for his wife, had he admitted his visitants. A synod of wise men and women sat upon the woman of timber, and she was finally ordered to be devoured by fire, and that in the open air. A fire was soon made, and into it the elfin sculpture was ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... he carried upon his shoulder a ridiculous pair of elfin skates, was much too small a boy, his brother thought, to embark upon the ice, wherefore he stood like a sentinel upon the shore and drummed and ate incessantly, until an orange catapulted from an overcrowded pocket, when he ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... looked in hesitating fashion from one of the strange visitors to the other—Jill with her elfin locks, shabby hat and thick woollen gloves; Jack with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his school cap at the back of ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... movement of her coming, one small breast showing and hiding among the ragged covert of the laces. At that ambiguous hour, and coming as she did from the great silence of the forest, the man drew back from the Princess as from something elfin. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... this ethereal country clustered about a portal, whose frame-work was of shining stones, and whose firm, but slender bars, were of purest gold.—"Favoured mortal!" (the speaker was beside me)—"favoured beyond even thine own conception, know that thou art permitted to behold the Elfin Paradise—the true, the veritable Fairy Land. Pollute it not by the tone of mortal speech; to us are thy thoughts not unknown, and partially are we permitted to gratify thy desire for information. Thinkest thou—so indeed hath man taught thee—that this sweet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... 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 looked ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... procession, Formless, countless of their kind Circle us in flying coveys Like the leaves in Autumn wind. Now in ghastly silence deathly, Now with shrilling elfin cry— Is it some mad dance of bridal, Or ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... 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 ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... Maid! though now the Lily pale Transparent grace thy beauties meek; Yet ere again along the impurpling vale, The purpling vale and elfin-haunted grove, 105 Young Zephyr his fresh flowers profusely throws, We'll tinge with livelier hues thy cheek; And, haply, from the nectar-breathing Rose Extract ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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, and in my longer stern and crowded ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... gnome, With its waxen taper still alight, And beaming in its leafy chalice, That lit the revellers down below, When the nights were long, and the moon was low You might have heard, far-off and sweet, The sound of the elfin revelries, Like a bugle strain blown over seas, And the patter and beat of dancing feet,— If you had been like me awake, What time the Great Bear seems to shake, Down through the trackless realms of air, Frost-lances from his shaggy hair; And all around—beneath—across, ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... everything, pronounced it perfect with gay little pats of quaint panniered costumes, fitting of banded sailor hats o'er white coifs, recurling of ringlets, and dainty polishing of slippers. The graceful little figures seemed elfin and fairy-like in the half sleeves and low corsages of tight bodices from which depended enormously full skirts set ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... nestled Tara, a vivid, eager slip of a girl, with wild-rose petals in her cheeks and blue hyacinths in her eyes and sunbeams tangled in her hair, that rippled to her waist in a mass almost too abundant for the small head and elfin face it framed. In temperament, she suggested a flame rather than a flower, this singularly vital child. She loved and she hated, she played and she quarrelled with an intensity, a singleness of aim, surprising and a little disquieting in a creature not yet nine. She was ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... accommodated his language to the supposed intelligence of the seaman, the elfin youth stood listening with intense eagerness and expectation as the other went into the passage, and, by sundry kicks and bumps against wooden walls, gave evidence that he found the channel intricate. Presently a terrible kick occurred. This was the seaman's toe against ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... maiden thou must bring Hither, to our elfin king, Ere three days are come and gone, When the moon hath kissed the stone By our fairy monarch's throne. Shouldst thou fail, or she refuse, Death is thine; or thou may'st choose With us to chase the moonbeams bright, Around ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... reproachfully. She and I had gone to sleep together on the rug, and had naturally wandered to the dream-forest where dogs and little girls hunt wild game and have strange adventures. We encountered hosts of elfin foes, and it required all the dog tactics at Belle's command to acquit herself like the lady and huntress that she was. Belle had her dreams too. We used to lie under the trees and flowers in the old garden, and I used to laugh with delight when the magnolia leaves fell with little thuds, and Belle ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... of Faerie There bends a wild witch-hazel tree. The fairies know its elfin powers. They wove a garland of the flowers, And on a misty autumn day They crowned their queen—and ran away! And by that gift they made you free Of all the ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... into pearl that rosy bar, Sail its own soul from fairy fringe to fringe, Lured by the twinkling prey 'twas born to reach In its own pool, by many an elfin beach Of jewels, adventuring far Through the last mirrored cloud and sunset-tinge And past the rainbow-dripping cave where lies The dark green pirate-crab at ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... you do, driver?" said cowardly I, who, always mortally afraid of horse-flesh, felt on this occasion a strange confidence: partly in the staid, heavy mass of determination beside me, who looked so calm and good-natured; and partly in the queer, elfin look of the beast, who seemed so far off as to have no necessary connection with our safety or ultimate progress. It seemed quite possible for us to get on with the other three pulling, while our demoniacal friend ornamented the occasion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and all Its importunity of love and pain; And he would wait till the last passionate fall Died on the night, and all was still again, — Then to his upland village wander home, Marvelling whence that flood of elfin song might come. ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... 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 frontier with meal and other ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... flower-bell on 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, ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... uninterrupted. She swayed like a tall lily to the wind, with a few little steps one way and then a few little steps the other; holding out her cotton skirts; her hair blown all about her like a great, red cloud. There was something elfin, something wild and woodsy, in her manner of dancing; the nymph whose name she bore might so have welcomed a storm in ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... (April) touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... 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 that she is drinking in the beauty like ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... farther side were faint gray clouds in the moonlight, and the gold of the fireflies was very pale. From over the water, out of the heart of the moonlit wood, came the song of a mockingbird, a tumultuous ecstasy, possessing the air and making elfin the night. ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... on 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
... to the grave under the mimosa trees, and with a queer elfin gesture he stooped down and kissed the lately disturbed sods, and made the sign of the cross upon his narrow little chest as he had seen his Spanish mother do. The dignity of the action, with its unconscious touch of foreign grace, and the boy's pathetic ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... of 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 justifies ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... No storms, no clouds, in thy blue sky foreseeing, Play on, play on, My elfin John! Toss the light ball—bestride the stick, (I knew so many cakes would make him sick!) With fancies buoyant as the thistledown, Prompting the face grotesque, and antic brisk, With many a lamb-like frisk— (He's got the scissors, snipping at ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... it seemed, for the oat-fields stretched before them in unbroken silvery sheen; and the straight young corn dared to rustle its green ribbons boastfully. Fowls still uncaptured crowed lustily in adjacent barnyards; and now and again, sweet as echoes from elfin horns, came the tinkling music of cow-bells. Here and there, the little shock-headed boys who were driving their charges afield paused knee-deep in rosy clover to watch the ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... that winds to nowhere, The pilgrim listens, as the night air brings The murmured echo, perpetual, from the gorge Of barren rock far down the valley. Now, Though twilight here, it may be starlight there; Mist makes elfin lakes in the hollow fields; The dark wood stands in the mist like a somber island With one red star above it.... "This I should see, Should I go on, follow the falling road,— This I have often seen.... But I shall stay Here, where the ancient ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... three back to Torquay with us, squashed in anyhow, she talked about running over to Paris and buying a balloon or an aeroplane! We came by way of the Buckland Chase, as it is called—private property; and an elfin glen of beauty, for mile after mile, with the Dart singing below, and the Lover's Leap so close that it seemed painfully realistic—especially after the adventure of the car which ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... of light, What whisper or gleam or elfin-wild perfumes Thrilled through the night And drew you to ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... That rose from out the bosom of the lake, And Arthur rowed across and took it—rich With jewels, elfin Urim, on the hilt, Bewildering heart and eye—the blade so bright That men are blinded by it—on one side, Graven in the oldest tongue of all this world, "Take me," but turn the blade and ye shall see, And written in the speech ye ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... embodied at all; at any rate, only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice. Really, I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the stream, and in doing this they discovered all sorts of wonderful things in what Florence called the Fairy Dell: moss-grown rocks from which sprung tiny bell-shaped flowers; a circle of wee pink toadstools, which indeed seemed fit for the elfin folk; a wild grapevine with a most delightfully arranged swing on which the two girls "teetered" away in great joy; shining pebbles, bits of rose-colored quartz, a forest of plumy ferns, and all such like things, over which the city child ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... 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 ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... pillars of fire through the shadowy underwood and the woodbine flaunted its tall head proudly among the leaves. A gentle breeze rustled the fern, and breathed upon the quaking grass, setting its beautiful spikelets in motion until they seemed like fairy bells rung by elfin fingers. The flutter and hum of the wild things served but to intensify the ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... the morning. [Points at it in exalted enthusiasm.] Your priests can no more stop that light from shining or change its colour and its radiance than Joshua could stop the sun and moon. [Laughs savagely.] Why, a real fairy in an elfin cloak strayed too near the lamp an hour or two ago; and it turned him into a common society clown with ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... inexhaustible mine of legends, which she related to me—she surpassed Croker; the other, less versed, still knew a great deal, and told me how her own father, Jackey Mooney, had seen the fairies with his own eyes. Both of these sincerely and seriously regarded me as "gifted" or elfin- favoured, and the latter said in proof thereof, "Only listen to his voice; sure whin he spakes he'd while a burred aff a tree." For my uncanny ways made a deep impression on them, ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the centre of the polished floor, the strange child, whom Lady Rose had gone to fetch after lunch, with its high crest of black hair, its large, jealous eyes, its elfin hands, and the sudden smile with which, after half an hour of silence and apparent scorn, it had rewarded Sir Wilfrid's advances. He saw himself sitting bewitched ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the long, triangular nails curved over the fingertips like the claws of a cat. They wore skin-tight clothes of some metallic silky stuff, and long flowing gleaming silvery capes. They looked unearthly, elfin and strange, and in their own way they ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... me to her elfin grot, And there she gazed, and sighed deep, And there I shut her wild wild eyes ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... concentration of all lovely things! And far off cities, glittering with the pomp Of spire and pennon, laugh their joyance up In the deep flood of light. Sweet comes the tone Of the touch'd lute from yonder orange bow'rs, And the shrill cymbal pours its elfin spell Into the peasant's being! A sublime And fervid mind was his, whose pencil trac'd The grandeur of this scene! Oh! matchless Claude! Around the painter's mastery thou hast thrown An halo of surpassing loveliness! Gazing on thy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... whirl Of seething passions; he is scourged and stung, Must dive in storm-vext seas, if but one pearl Of art or beauty therefrom may be wrung. No pure-browed pensive nymph his Muse shall be, An amazon of thought with sovereign eyes, Whose kiss was poison, man-brained, worldly-wise, Inspired that elfin, delicate harmony. Rich gain for us! But with him is it well? The poet who must sound ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... and knightliness". They fought long and hard, and exchanged grievous blows, and both were weary and both were wounded. Then Theodoric waxed exceeding wroth with himself for not overcoming his foe, and said: "Truly, this is a shame for me to stand here all the day and not to be able to vanquish the elfin's son". "Why should the elfin's son be worse than the son of the devil himself?" answered Hagen.[177] At that Theodoric was seized with such fury that fiery breath issued from his mouth. Hagen's coat of mail was heated red-hot by this breath of fire, and he was forced ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... in effect that his confreres among the book clerks accepted with difficulty the story that he was married. When it was told that he had a son they gasped their incredulity. And when one day this extraordinary elfin sprite remarked that at the time of his honeymoon he had had a beard they felt (I remember) that the world was without power to ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... 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
... 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 ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... through her hair the sunshine In showers; it touches, see, Her high bright cheeks in turning; Ah, Elfin Company, ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... full-length silhouette upon a panel of palms and tree-ferns. I see the silhouette grow tall and straight again before my eyes, the door open, and Raffles listening with an alert lift of the head. I, too, hear something, an elfin hiss, a fairy fusillade, and then the sudden laugh with which Raffles rejoined us in the body ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... day achieve greatness, suddenly realized how long and weary the road would be for just such a one as the fascinated little figure on the steps, before he could begin to approach that level which, to a society that Caleb understood, was typified by this exquisite, elfin figure, Dexter Allison's daughter. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... paddle vigorously. She wore no hat and her blond hair was tousled as usual. It seemed impossible for Bet to keep her unruly locks in order at any time, but now as the breeze ruffled it, she looked like some half-wild elfin creature. ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... that I have stolen. For all the many pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in it—dramatic inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like—you must bless the original author: of these things I have only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in. Modest? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic conscience ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... winter palace of ice; 'T was as if every image that mirrored lay In his depths serene through the summer day, Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, Lest the happy model should be lost. Sad been mimicked in fairy masonry By the elfin builders of ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... 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 ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... 'Soone as the Elfin knight in presence came And false Duessa, seeming ladye fayre, A gentle husher, Vanitie by name, Made roome, and passage did for ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... giant, a colossal dwarf, six hundred feet high, and should have been thrice as tall, had it had any proper development,—for out of his head grew two misdirected skeleton legs, "hanging down and dangling." The countenance was long, elfin, sneering, solemn, as of a truculent demon, saddish for his trade, an ashamed, but unrepentant rascal. He had two immense erect ears, and in his boisterous position had suffered a loss of hair, wearing nothing save an impudent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... stories. 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 tree the birds ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... with heart of wassail, That toss the Bacchic branch, And slip your shaken music, An elfin avalanche; ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... the rustics belonging to the part of it in which I was staying, particularly regarded a kind of fossil-stone, which much resembled a sea-egg petrified, and was found frequently in the flinty gravel of that county. They esteemed such stones sacred to the elfin train, and termed them fairy loaves, forbearing to touch them, lest misfortunes should come upon them for the sacrilege. An old woman told me, that as she was trudging home one night from her field-work, she took up one of these fossils, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... see it who will simply read "Grimm's Fairy Tales" or the fine collections of Mr. Andrew Lang. For the pleasure of pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy. Touchstone talked of much virtue in an "if"; according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an "if." The note of the fairy utterance always is, "You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word 'cow'"; or "You may live happily with the King's daughter, if you do not show her an onion." The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Ready to learn of all and utter naught? What breath may move ye, or what breeze invite To odorous hot lendings of the heart? What wind-but all the winds are yet afar, And e'en the little tricksy zephyr sprites, That fleet before them, like their elfin locks, Have lagged in sleep, nor stir nor waken yet To pluck ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... Richmond. A few minutes' walk and we tread the pavements of the capital. There are no noisy and no beseeching runners; there is no sound of life, but the stillness of a catacomb, only as our footsteps fall dull on the deserted sidewalk, and a funeral troop of echoes bump their elfin heads against the dead walls and closed shutters in reply, and this is Richmond. Says a melancholy voice: "And ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... softly, softly; and the bare trees shook their branches in the keen air. The pleasant glow of the blazing logs lighted up the circle of happy faces, and peopled the distant corners with elfin shadows. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... welcome you, at least," he murmured as though to himself. He stood aside and waved a hand courteously, inviting us to pass. We crossed. At the base of the span one of the elfin shells ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... bank both above and below Johnsonville, one of the Union army's bases of supplies and a railway terminus, thus blockading the water approach and isolating there eight transports, with barges, and three light-draughts, the Key West, Elfin, and Tawah. Nevertheless, the three boats went down and engaged the lower battery, and though they found it too strong for them they retook one of the transports. Meantime Shirk had telegraphed the Admiral and Fitch, and the latter came to his assistance with three of the Cumberland River light-draughts. ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... grown together, heedless of seasons and climates, peopled with monkeys and owls, covered with old stumps as misshapen as the roots of the mandrake; then a magical forest, cut in the center near a glade through which a stream can be seen far away, behind a camel and the Samaritan group; then an elfin town appearing on the horizon of an exotic sky dotted with birds and covered with masses ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... her as plainly as I see you now: a girl in a red cloak, with such an elfin face I shall never forget it; such small piercing black eyes; such black eyebrows, depressed towards the nose, and raised high towards the temples, giving such an eldritch, mischievous, even dangerous ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... 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 ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... 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 ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... so. She heard the hoarse fret of the river, and the faint elfin sighing high up in the top of ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... But Art, high o'er the trailing smoke below Of sea-bound steamer, on yon summit's head Sat musing; and where scarce a wandering crow Sailed o'er the chasm, in thought a highway led; Conquering, as by an arrow from a bow, The scene's lone Genius by her elfin-thread. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... guess it seems awful foolish to you." He moved his cracked patent-leather pump in a sort of pattern on the floor. Again he looked up, this time with a freakish, an almost elfin flicker of his extravagant eyelashes. "There's something I could be real well," he said. "Only, I guess Poppa's got there ahead of me. I could be ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... plashing, as the massed foliage on a bough dwindles at its edges into more delicate traceries of distinct sprays and leaves. Round some stones the water whispered mysteriously, coiling in and out of gurgling recesses, and against others it broke with a clear chiming tinkle as if elfin anvils rang; here it droned on with a bee's hum soft and steady, and here it chuckled and chirped, bubbling up in sudden little rapids and cascades. At Judy's feet was a thin flat stone, which rested loosely on the top of another, and flap-flapped, bobbing up and down as the ripple rose and ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... path wound through a forest of fir, where a wood wind wove its murmurous spell and a wood brook dimpled pellucidly among the shadows—the dear, companionable, elfin shadows—that lurked under the low growing boughs. Along the edges of that winding path grew banks of velvet green moss, starred with clusters of pigeon berries. Pigeon berries are not to be eaten. They ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... utterly, with clinging arms And quick, caressing fingers, warm red lips, Where vows, half uttered, drowned in kisses, died; Mine, with the starlight in her passionate eyes; The wild wind of the woodland breathing low To wake the elfin music of the leaves, And free the prisoned odours of the flowers, In honour of young Love come to his throne! While we under the stars, with twining arms And mutual lips insatiate, gave our souls - Madly forgetting earth and ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... radiating glow this quintessential brain looked very much like an opaque, featureless bladder with dim, undulating ghosts of convolutions writhing visibly within. Then beneath its enormity and just above the edge of the throne one saw with a start minute elfin eyes peering out of the glow. No face, but eyes, as if they peered through holes. At first I could see no more than these two staring little eyes, and then below I distinguished the little dwarfed body and its insect-jointed limbs shrivelled and white. The eyes stared ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... being! No storms, no clouds, in thy blue sky foreseeing, Play on, play on, My elfin John! Toss the light ball, bestride the stick,— (I knew so many cakes would make him sick!) With fancies, buoyant as the thistle-down, Prompting the face grotesque, and antic brisk, With many a lamb-like frisk! (He's got the scissors, snipping ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... the blows of a tall, swarthy woman was a small girl, so fragile as to appear almost elfin. The woman wore the garb of a gipsy, and the presence of some squalid tents and tethered horses showed our young friends at once that it was a gipsy encampment upon which ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... fairies are apt to carry off men's wives with them to fairyland; but the lost spouses can be recovered within a year and a day when the procession of the fairies is defiling past on Hallowe'en, always provided that the mortals did not partake of elfin food while they were ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... the Strand he stalks, a sable shade Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train, In silver samite knight and dame and maid Ride to the tourney on the barrier'd plain; And he must bow in humble mute disdain, And that worst woe of baffled souls endure, To see the evil that they ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... I thought of naught save tales of magic and wonder, and every fair lady who had ostrich feathers on her head I regarded as an elfin queen. If I observed that the train of her dress was wet I believed at once that she must be a water-fairy. Now I know better, having learned from natural history that those symbolical feathers are found on the most stupid of birds, and that the train of a lady's dress may become ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 tree the birds sang out, for the spell of silence over the ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... her rose-winged fancies, From shadowy shoals of dream To clothe her in the wistful hour When girlhood steals from bud to flower; Bring her the tunes of elfin dances, Bring her the ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... rather shyly 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
... has a beautifully formed three-split or trefoil leaf of the most vivid green colour, and a white flower like that of a geranium. It is called "fairy-bell" by the Welsh, and was believed to ring chimes for the elfin folk. It was also greatly esteemed for its acid flavour and for various reputed medicinal and magical properties by the Druids and among the early inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland. Pliny says it never shelters a snake, and is an antidote to the poison ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... from the crowded court below rose the shrill babel of many children's voices, elfin shrieks and cries accompanied by the jingle of a barrel-organ, very wiry and very much out of tune; but Ravenslee, deep-plunged in thought, heard nought of it nor heeded the fact that the pipe, tight-clenched between his strong, white teeth, was out. For Geoffrey Ravenslee had set ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... which passed across them to the main rigging, and saw what he saw, a brown hand and arm, muscular and wet, being joined from overside by a second brown hand and arm. A head followed, thatched with long elfin locks, and then a face, with roguish black eyes, lined with the marks of ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... The elfin crew leaped up the ropes and came crouching down. The bell pealed; the master's hat swung round his head. His wide eyes were wet, and he cried again, "Ring! ring! for God, light, libbutty, education!" He sprang toward the leaping, sinking mass; but the right feeling kept his own hands off. And ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... glimpses of all sorts of humanlike creatures, such as fishermen and sailors meet and marvel at on the sea, and landsmen see outside the elfin mounds. ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... passion for big flights and sweeping outlooks, had up to now neglected. They found a miniature cascade that purled over a mossy log; a cave, so small and clean and regular that it seemed not the work of the big Nature about them, but of delicate, elfin hands; and then, on the edge of forest and grass, a flower, a trembling white chalice upon the virginal bosom of which one small touch of color burned like a flame. And thus, little step after little step, they went from little wonder to little wonder. Dolly liked small things; it ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... rose, and smote from far Her elfin harps o'er land and sea; And woodland belt, and ocean bar To one ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... hold your tongue, Whatever ye may hear or see; For if ye speak word in Elfin land Ye'll ne'er get back ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... nice appreciation of my honourable discomfort, she laughed; and as her cheeks cooled she laughed the more, tossing back her pretty head while her mirth, now uncontrolled, rippled forth till the wild birds, excited, joined in with restless chirping, and a squirrel sprung his elfin ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Where elfin vapors swirled and swayed While the wild pipes of witchcraft played Such clutching music 'twould impel A prophet's self to dance to hell— So ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... through an open hollow The old man led with a smile: "Come, star-hearts, my children, follow To the elfin land awhile." ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... 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 ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... supposed giant or Paynim knight, by whom it was garrisoned. He remembered how he used to train his cousin, though several years younger than himself, to bear a part in those revels of his boyish fancy, and to play the character of an elfin page, or a fairy, or an enchanted princess. He remembered, too, many particulars of their later acquaintance, from which he had been almost necessarily led to the conclusion, that from an early period ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... far down in the valley—a cuckoo called. Out of the depths floated the elfin halloo, the gaily malicious challenge of spring herself, shouted up melodiously from the plains of Alsace—Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!—You poor, sullen, frozen foreigner up there on the snowy rocks!—Cuckoo! ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... 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
... 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 as she desired of them, and as much ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... 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
... creating a most horrible confusion by having to turn out again; madly bent upon opening locked doors, and on forcing a passage into all kinds of out-of-the-way places where there is no thoroughfare; sending wild stewards, with elfin hair, to and fro upon the breezy decks on unintelligible errands, impossible of execution: and in short, creating the most extraordinary and bewildering tumult. In the midst of all this, the lazy gentleman, who seems ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... 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 ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... saddle Bevis! I cannot rest. The air must cool my brow. I fain would ride to view the elfin scene of chivalry of which we heard to-night. Rouse none from their slumbers, for I would not have those prating knaves know that I could credit so wild a tale ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... though now the Lily pale Transparent grace thy beauties meek; Yet ere again along the impurpling vale, The purpling vale and elfin-haunted grove, 105 Young Zephyr his fresh flowers profusely throws, We'll tinge with livelier hues thy cheek; And, haply, from the nectar-breathing Rose Extract a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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 ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... The using of a man's weakness is not always coquetry; but it is something very like it. Many a time the little girl, who looked up to and admired the big boy who could compel her to anything when he was so minded, would, for her own ends, work on his sense of responsibility, taking an elfin delight ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... 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 ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... tramping and tossing the snow as they run, And laughing and shouting, so brimful of fun; While the ten-year-old twins, in a somersault mood, Have measured their length from the barn to the wood. A dozen times, yes, or it may be a score, Till their cheeks are as red as the roses, and more; Then the elfin of twelve and the boy of fifteen, Are pelting each other with snowballs so keen, That we, who are older, forget to be staid, {245} And shout, each with each, as the youngsters, arrayed In feathery garments, press on or retreat, Determined ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... shut mine eyes, See that weird sight again; The lights from anchored vessels hung; The phantom moon, that sprung Suddenly up in dim and angry wise, From the rim o' the moaning main, And touched with elfin light The two long oars whereby we made our flight, Along the reaches of the night; Then furrowed up a lowering cloud, Went in, and left us darker than before, To feel our way as the midnight watches wore, And lie in HER lee, with mournful faces bowed, That should receive and bear with her away ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... ivy-net, Now by some tinkling rivulet, In mosses mixt [2] with violet Her cream-white mule his pastern set: And fleeter now [3] she skimm'd the plains Than she whose elfin prancer springs By night to eery warblings, When all the glimmering moorland rings With ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... 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
... Huge whitened hills Rise glimmering to the blue verge of the night, Ghostlike, and striped with narrow glens of firs Black-waving, solemn. O'er the Luggie-stream Gathers a veiny film of ice, and creeps With elfin feet around each stone and reed, Working fine masonry; while o'er the dam, Dashing, a noise of waters fills the clear And nitrous air. All the dark, wintry hours Sharply the winds from the white level moors Keen whistle. Timorous in his homely bed The school-boy listens, fearful ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... complete than when they were roaming the woods. In them Easter was at home, and her ardent nature came to the surface like a poetic glow from her buoyant health and beauty. Then appeared all that was wayward and elfin-like in her character, and she would be as playful, wilful, evanescent as a wood-spirit. Sometimes, when they were separated, she would lead him into a ravine by imitating a squirrel or a wild-turkey, and, as he crept noiselessly along with bated breath and eyes peering eagerly through the tree-tops ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... pronounced it perfect with gay little pats of quaint panniered costumes, fitting of banded sailor hats o'er white coifs, recurling of ringlets, and dainty polishing of slippers. The graceful little figures seemed elfin and fairy-like in the half sleeves and low corsages of tight bodices from which depended enormously full skirts set off ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... 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 ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... entered upon to his great enjoyment. From this nothing was so easy as to float into original poetry, inspired by the same impulse and inspiration as his ballads. One of the ladies of the house of Buccleuch told him the story of the elfin page, and begged him to make a ballad of it; and from this suggestion the Lay of the Last Minstrel arose. The time was ripe for giving forth all that had been unconsciously stirring in his teeming fertile imagination. ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... added Max. "I may underrate the power of this girl. As you have said, she is a little witch. But beneath her laughter there is a rare show of tenderness and strength, which at times seems pathetic and almost elfin. You are right, Karl. I will devote myself to Twonette hereafter. She is like a feather-bed in that she cannot be injured by a blow, neither can she give one; but Yolanda—ah, Karl, she is like a priceless jewel that ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... flowers intently she perceived that they were not swayed to and fro by the wind, but by innumerable little beings that were climbing on the stems and leaves. They were pixies. Each held in its arms an elfin baby tinier than itself. She saw the babies laid in the bells of the plant, which were thus used as cradles, and the music was formed of many lullabies. When the babies were asleep the pixies or fairies left them, and gamboled on the neighbouring sward on which the old lady discovered the day after, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... include: 2 Walters, 4 O.K. Heart, 1 Canoka, 1 Slioka, 1 Rover, 2 Calendar, 1 Westoka, 1 Nursoka, 1 Aloka, 1 Symoka, 15 select unnamed bearing seedlings, yet on trial. All are promising. Also we have three of the Elfin paper shell heartnut hybrids. I have failed to find a good pollinator for these Elfins, so they are shy croppers, although producing plenty of the female blooms. All of the above trees are 6 inches in diameter and up to ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... hither, from thy home, Airy sprite, I bid thee come! Born of roses, fed on dew, Charms and potions canst thou brew? Bring me here, with elfin speed, The fragrant philter which I need. Make it sweet and swift and strong, Spirit, answer now ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... long and with a gauzy camisa and panuelo—a most comical little caricature of womanhood. She was speechless with fright, but came on so recklessly that I began to suspect the cause of her determination. It was, in truth, behind her as my groom of the front yard soon let me know. Again the elfin face and the wiry pompadour leaned round the door-jamb—"One more ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... 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 ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... I know the joys that ring Through the green deeps of leafy spring; I know the elfin cups and domes That are their small ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... spiritual tokens as the cattle are for the first bite of its fields. How it touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the campfire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... land-avalanche down the front. It was a comical fellow, a little giant, a colossal dwarf, six hundred feet high, and should have been thrice as tall, had it had any proper development,—for out of his head grew two misdirected skeleton legs, "hanging down and dangling." The countenance was long, elfin, sneering, solemn, as of a truculent demon, saddish for his trade, an ashamed, but unrepentant rascal. He had two immense erect ears, and in his boisterous position had suffered a loss of hair, wearing nothing save an impudent scalp-lock. A very grotesque personage. Was he the guardian imp, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... an evening of 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, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... time the subject of my reflections. I had been congratulating myself on the possession of the buffalo-robe. That would go far towards the disguise; but other articles were wanting to complete my costume. The leggings and moccasins—the plumed head-dress and neck ornaments—the long elfin locks—the bronze complexion of arms and breast—the piebald face of chalk, charcoal, and vermilion—where were all these to be obtained? There was no ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... man with a red face, who kept licking his lips with a small red triangle of tongue, and taught English—commercial college English—in a bombastic voice of finicky correctness, and always smelled of cigar smoke. An active young Jewish New-Yorker of wonderful black hair, elfin face, tilted hat, and smart clothes, who did something on the side in real estate. Finally, a thin widow, who was so busy and matter-of-fact that she was no more individualized than a street-car. Any one of them was considered competent to teach any "line," and among them they ground ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... 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 ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... her as she slept, Jocelyn heard the stream ripple in the shadows like one that laughed soft but very joyously and, as he gazed up at the solitary star with eyes enraptured, this elfin laughter found ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... softly; and the bare trees shook their branches in the keen air. The pleasant glow of the blazing logs lighted up the circle of happy faces, and peopled the distant corners with elfin shadows. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... on the children stealing They stood there hand in hand, For the elfin chimes were pealing Aloud ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... mortal builder's most rare device Could match this winter palace of ice; 'T was as if every image that mirrored lay In his depths serene through the summer day, Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, Lest the happy model should be lost. Sad been mimicked in fairy masonry By the elfin builders of the frost. ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... indeed. The girl was fair enough in her peaked elfin way; but the fact was that he did not love her—nor anybody. He had nothing to say therefore. She waited a little, and then, with her voice sunk to a low ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... now, they bear me up, they teach me how to fly! Deprived now of their human props, how the angry fragments leap and tumble and chase one another through the echoing abyss below! These reverberations seem freighted with elfin voices that jeer the insensate rocks for ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... and afterwards, to the tale, as it was told by his own sympathetic lips, much of the incongruity, otherwise no doubt apparent in the narrative, seemed at those times to disappear altogether. The incongruity, we mean, observable between the queer little ticket-porter and the elfin phantoms of the belfry; between Trotty Veck, in his "breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed, tooth-chattering" stand-point by the old church-door, and the Goblin Sight beheld by him when he had clambered up, up, up among the roof-beams ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... noisy; and 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 ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 'If my love were an earthly knight, As he's an elfin grey, I wadna gie my ain true-love For ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... act we find Oberon, the Elfin-king in deep melancholy, which no gaiety of his subjects, however charming, avails to remove. He has quarrelled with his wife Titania, and both have vowed never to be reconciled, until they find a pair of lovers, faithful to each other in all kinds of adversity. Both long for the reunion, ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... basket—hovering over it, his hinds clasped helplessly. After a pause, he raises his hand, until it points to a bedroom above. An echo of the circus music is very faintly heard; not with the blaring of brasses, but with the sounds of elfin horns, conveying the impression of a phantom circus band. The door of WILLIAM'S room opens, and he comes out as though to listen to the music. He wears a sleeping suit and is bare-footed. He has come down stairs ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... illumined by the awakened soul within, as some rosy lamp might shine through a flawless vase of alabaster. There were hours when Anne's eyes seemed to ache with the splendor of her. As for Owen Ford, the "Margaret" of his book, although she had the soft brown hair and elfin face of the real girl who had vanished so long ago, "pillowed where lost Atlantis sleeps," had the personality of Leslie Moore, as it was revealed to him in those halcyon days ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... minuteness and refinement of the mould containing the energetic spirit that glanced in her eyes, quivered on her lips, and pervaded every movement of the elastic feet and hands, childlike in size, statue-like in symmetry, elfin in quickness and dexterity. 'Lucile la Fee,' she might well have been called, as she sat manipulating the gorgeous silk and feathers with an essential strength and firmness of hands such as could hardly have ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... abyss, Hades, etc. Plant Annwn, therefore, means children of the lower regions. It is a name derived from the supposed place of abode—the bowels of the earth—of the Fairies. Gwragedd Annwn, dames of Elfin land, is a term ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... crossed his grim, hard-featured face. He sat down in a low chair near his guest and drew to his side a small table that bore a tray of refreshments. He poured out a glass of wine and held it towards the queer, elfin figure ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... a dim 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 ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... 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 ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... one can see it who will simply read "Grimm's Fairy Tales" or the fine collections of Mr. Andrew Lang. For the pleasure of pedantry I will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy. Touchstone talked of much virtue in an "if"; according to elfin ethics all virtue is in an "if." The note of the fairy utterance always is, "You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word 'cow'"; or "You may live happily with the King's daughter, if you do not show her an onion." The vision always hangs ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... sweet it is by lonely meres To sit, with heart and soul awake, Where water-lilies lie afloat, Each anchored like a fairy boat Amid some fabled elfin lake: To see the birds flit to and fro Along the dark-green reedy edge. ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... to the supposed intelligence of the seaman, the elfin youth stood listening with intense eagerness and expectation as the other went into the passage, and, by sundry kicks and bumps against wooden walls, gave evidence that he found the channel intricate. Presently a terrible kick occurred. This was the seaman's toe ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... clicked in the tiny rhythm of an elfin bass-drum. "O.S. O.S." Click. Click. Click-click-click. Mechanically responsive to his office he answered, and for a moment was concerned with some message about a local freight. When he raised his face again, Miss Van Arsdale read there a ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... occasioned it. They seemed to me then to be brown men; but their limbs were oddly swathed 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 six feet in height, sat a head below ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... cynic might liken the wedding-ring to an ancient circus, in which wild animals clawed one another for the sport of lookers-on. Perish the hyperbole! We would rather compare it to an elfin ring, in which dancing fairies made the sweetest music for ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... plunged her knife at Beowulf's breast, and his life had ended there but for the good service of his ringed mail-serk. Protected by this armour, and helped by Him who giveth victory, he passed the perilous moment, and was on his feet again. And now he espied among the armour in that place an old elfin sword, such as no other man might carry; this he seized, and with the force of despair he so smote that the fell hag lay dead:—the sword was gory, and the boy was fain of his work. With rage unsated, he ranged through the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... pleasure, had preferred to live a shy secluded life, busily engaged either in the collection of curiosities or the invention of toy-like futile machines. There was a girl too whom Sir Charles remembered, a weird elfin creature with extraordinary black eyes and hair and a clear white face. Her one regret in those days had been that she was not born a horse, and she had lived in the stables, in as horse like a fashion as was ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... good reason to execrate the wearer of the wreath; for she alone, not 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... then he stood still for a minute on the terrace, arrested by the exquisite shock of the wonderful early air: the wonderful light, keen air, a fabric woven of elfin filaments, the breathings of green lives: an aether distilled of secret essences, in the night, by the earth and the sea,—for there was the sea's tang, as well as the earth's balm, there was the bitter-sweet of the sea ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... belaboring the point. He turned to the staff. Five of them were the same big-boned heavy-framed type that apparently did most of the manual labor. The sixth, the late arrival, was an elegant creature, a bronze-skinned, green-eyed minx with an elfin face half hidden under a wavy mass of red-brown hair. Unlike the others, she had been docked—and in contrast to their heavy eyes and sleep-puffed features she was alert and lively. She flashed him an impish grin, ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... has many companions; such as elfin-women, elfin-men, dwarfs, imps, nightmares, hobgoblins with red-hot fire-tongs, Var-wolves, giants, spectres, which appear to people when they are about ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... sleekly black porpoises that, for him, had whisked through violet waves. Most of all, he brought back the yesterday's long excitement and delight of seeing the Irish coast hills—his first foreign land—whose faint sky fresco had seemed magical with the elfin lore of Ireland, a country that had ever been to him the haunt not of potatoes and politicians, but of fays. He had wanted fays. They were not common on the asphalt of West Sixteenth Street. But now he had seen them beckoning ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... with him 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, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... eye, with careless glance, Has gallop'd o'er some old romance, Of speaking birds, and steeds with wings, Giants and dwarfs, and fiends, and kings: Beyond the rest, with more attentive care, I've loved to read of elfin-favor'd fair— How if she longed for aught beneath the sky, And suffered to escape one votive sigh, Wafted along on viewless pinions airy, It kid itself obsequious at her feet: Such things I thought we might not hope to meet, Save in the dear delicious land of fairy! But now (by proof I know ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... boughs!" ... Now by the granite milestone, On the ancient human road that winds to nowhere, The pilgrim listens, as the night air brings The murmured echo, perpetual, from the gorge Of barren rock far down the valley. Now, Though twilight here, it may be starlight there; Mist makes elfin lakes in the hollow fields; The dark wood stands in the mist like a somber island With one red star above it.... "This I should see, Should I go on, follow the falling road,— This I have often seen.... But I shall stay Here, where the ancient milestone, like a watchman, Lifts up its figure ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... elfin face looked out from a low, rear window of the Candlemakers' Guildhall at the top ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... table with his big hand. The surface of the table was covered with powdered chalk that the baronet had dusted over it in the hope of developing criminal finger prints. Now under the drumming of his palm the particles of white dust whirled like microscopic elfin dancers. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... fact 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 ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... ship lying in a hollow, and I being in her with the hatches closed; but this very faintness of uproar formed of itself a quality of mystery very pat to the ghastliness of my surroundings. It was like the notes of an elfin storm of necromantic imagination; it was hollow, weak, and terrifying; and it and the thunder of the seas commingling, together with the rumbling blasts and shocks of splitting ice, disjointed as by an earthquake, loaded ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... Formless, countless of their kind Circle us in flying coveys Like the leaves in Autumn wind. Now in ghastly silence deathly, Now with shrilling elfin cry— Is it some mad dance of bridal, Or ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... legs were bare. Around his sombrero, or shadowy hat, was tied a large quantity of the herb called in English rosemary, in Spanish romero, and in the rustic language of Portugal ellecrin, which last is a word of Scandinavian origin, and properly signifies the elfin plant. [It was probably] carried into the south by the Vandals or the Alani. The [man seemed] frantic with terror, and said that the witches had been pursuing him, and hovering over his head, for the last two leagues. He came from the Spanish frontier with meal and other articles; he informed ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... the convent garden or the chances of the Carlist war. It was all wonderful. It had seemed perfect. And yet—and yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some straying angel—some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had ever realised. She cared for him—how could he doubt it? ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... 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 colourless, ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... a tiny and perfect figure of a man. He was arrayed in a beautifully fitting dress-suit such as a doll might have worn, and he was posed as if in the act of playing a violin, although no violin was present. At the elfin black hair and Mephistophelian face of this horrible, wonderful ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the beginning that a Sonata was a musical composition consisting of various movements. What are the movements? In this case there is first, "a sad and infinitely lovely movement", then, "a wild, elfin passage in triple time", and lastly, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... ladies Masham and Bearcroft, that mischief, serious mischief, must have ensued, had not Lady Cecilia, at utmost need, summoned to her aid the happy genius of Nonsense—the genius of Nonsense, in whose elfin power even Love delights; on whom Reason herself condescends often to smile, even when Logic frowns, and chops him on his block: but cut in twain, the ethereal spirit soon unites again, and lives, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... would, she could not get them back into their box. If she chased them in the meadow they fled into the wood, and if she pursued them into the wood they dodged round trees and behind sprigs of moss, and with peals of elfin laughter scampered back again into ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... vigorously. She wore no hat and her blond hair was tousled as usual. It seemed impossible for Bet to keep her unruly locks in order at any time, but now as the breeze ruffled it, she looked like some half-wild elfin creature. ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... moody Elfin King, Who woned within the hill,— Like wind in the porch of a ruined church, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... in the Court of Ages bring the somber symbolism of this court back to the gay spirit of festival. The sprites are the work of Leo Lentelli; they have a quaint elfin quality that is very engaging. The amusing and lovely group seated about the base of the column have a certain chic habit of pointing elbows, wrists and ankles that lends an unworldly attraction. Their sister sprite ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... was, however, drawn back, and Wyllard, who lay facing the opening, could see a triangular patch of dim blue sky with a sharp sickle moon hanging low above a black fir branch. The night was clear and still, but now and then there was a faint elfin sighing among the stunted trees that died away again. He was then, while still determined, moodily discouraged, for they had seen no sign of human life during the journey, and his reason told him that he might ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... dusk and looked out into the veiled and shadowy spaces and the dim singers lifted up their voices. The moon would rise late; there was no light save the tiny pin points of the cigarettes; it gave the music an elfin, eerie quality. ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... promiscuously, and form A concentration of all lovely things! And far off cities, glittering with the pomp Of spire and pennon, laugh their joyance up In the deep flood of light. Sweet comes the tone Of the touch'd lute from yonder orange bow'rs, And the shrill cymbal pours its elfin spell Into the peasant's being! A sublime And fervid mind was his, whose pencil trac'd The grandeur of this scene! Oh! matchless Claude! Around the painter's mastery thou hast thrown An halo of surpassing loveliness! Gazing on thy proud works, we mourn the curse Which 'reft ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... 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 Count did not, however, mention this ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... by assuming invisibility, and for this object sought the assistance of certain plants, such as the fern-seed[17]. In Sweden, hazel-nuts were supposed to have the power of making invisible, and it may be remembered how in one of Andersen's stories the elfin princess has the faculty of vanishing at will, by putting a wand in her mouth.[18] But these were not the only plants supposed to confer invisibility, for German folk-lore tells us how the far-famed luck-flower was endowed with the same wonderful property; and by the ancients the ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... Ef diodes gormes ef dodes fin Ergyr gwayw rieu ryvel chwerthin Hut effyt y wrhyt elwry elfin Eithinyn ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... looking up thoughtfully to the sky and stars—then his hands dropped on the keys, and he began playing a sad and infinitely lovely movement, which crept gently over the instrument like the calm flow of moonlight over the dark earth. This was followed by a wild, elfin passage in triple time—a sort of grotesque interlude, like the dance of sprites upon the sward. Then came a swift agitato finale—a breathless, hurrying, trembling movement, descriptive of flight, and uncertainty, and ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... the window and saw a corner of the rock lit up with the last ray of the setting sun. She knew it was time to prepare for her journey. She loosened her long black and gray elfin locks, and let them fall dishevelled over her shoulders. Her thin, cruel lips were drawn to a rigid line, and her eyes were filled with red fire as she drew the casket of ebony out of her bosom and opened it with a reverential touch, as a devotee would touch a shrine of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... parents are worse than dead to him—he is received into the Home, and the work of transformation—both of body and soul—commences. First he is taken to the lavatory and scrubbed outwardly clean. His elfin locks are cropped close and cleansed. His rags are burned, and a new suit, made by the old women workers, is put upon him, after which, perhaps, he is fed. Then he is sent to a doctor to see that he is internally sound in wind and limb. If passed by the doctor, he receives a brief but important ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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 frightful, and to relieve his ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... solitudes; And faints the breeze beneath the heavy sky, Nor bends the bulrush, as it loiters by Thro' long green walls of forest trees, that throw Unwavering shadows in the flood below; And droops from topmost boughs (like garlands dight By elfin hands) the gaudy parasite: Crowning the wave with flow'rs; and high above, The tall acacia moves, or seems to move Its feathery foliage in the enamor'd air, That seems, tho' all unheard, to linger there: Might'st fancy all, the earth, the air, the stream, Still unawaken'd from Creation's dream. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... high-backed armchair, took her seat deliberately, put her feet on the crimson hassock, and leaned forward, resting her hands on the crutch-top of her stick, and her chin on her hands. In this attitude she looked more elfin than human, and the light that danced in her black eyes was not ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... What whisper or gleam or elfin-wild perfumes Thrilled through the night And drew you to this hive of ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... opened the pantry-door and put an end to this mysterious conversation, which had already so affected Miss Prissy, that, in the eagerness of her interest, she had rubbed up her cap border and ribbon into rather an elfin and goblin style, as if they had been ruffled up by a breeze from the land of spirits; and she flew around for a few moments in a state of great nervous agitation, upsetting dishes, knocking down plates, and huddling ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... that ydle dreame was to him brought, Unto that Elfin knight he bad him fly, Where he slept soundly void of evill thought, And with false shewes abuse his fantasy, In sort as he him schooled privily: 410 And that new creature, borne without her dew,[*] Full of the makers guile, with usage ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... dreamed your face, one night, when Heaven seemed resting, Against the troubled fever of the earth; I dreamed that vivid throated birds were nesting, In trees that shook with elfin-hearted mirth. I dreamed that star-like purple flowers were springing A-throb with perfume all about the place, And that there was a far-off sound of singing— And ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... plonk-plonk of rising trout and the endless twitter of woodland birds mingled with the far-away barking of dogs and the lowing of the full-uddered cows in the distant meadows. Abashed and enchanted, the girl listened. It was an elfin land where the old witch voices of hill and river were not silenced. With the wind in her hair she climbed the slope again to the garden ground, where she found a solemn-eyed collie sniffing the fragrant wind in his ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... son," answered the princess, and there stepped forward a dainty elfin boy whose face was ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... story marks the transition to a type of tale wherein one special characteristic of elfin gifts is presented. For in this case, when the mannikin asked the midwife what her charge was, she modestly replied: "Oh, nothing; the little trouble I have had does not call for any payment." "Now then, lift up thy apron!" answered he; and it was quickly filled ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... fingers of the prying rain busy at her windows; the ticking of the small French clock, very dull, very far away—or was it her heart? And, faintly ringing in the receiver pressed against her ear, millions of tiny stirrings, sounds like instruments of an elfin orchestra tuning, echoes as of steps passing through the halls of fairy-land, a faint confusion ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... the quiet eves, When the gloaming stole through the silent wood, And the low-toned zephyrs that stirred the leaves Were like elfin harps in ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... country clustered about a portal, whose frame-work was of shining stones, and whose firm, but slender bars, were of purest gold.—"Favoured mortal!" (the speaker was beside me)—"favoured beyond even thine own conception, know that thou art permitted to behold the Elfin Paradise—the true, the veritable Fairy Land. Pollute it not by the tone of mortal speech; to us are thy thoughts not unknown, and partially are we permitted to gratify thy desire for information. Thinkest thou—so indeed hath man taught thee—that this sweet world is but ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... the snowy places. Afar in the southwest was the great shimmering, pearl-like sparkle of an evening star in a sky that was pale golden and ethereal rose over gleaming white spaces and dark glens of spruce. The tinkles of sleigh bells among the snowy hills came like elfin chimes through the frosty air, but their music was not sweeter than the song in Anne's heart ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... 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 ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... the midst of an elfin rally Sudden I stood alone; Far away over the distant valley ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... with a faint echo of the elfin laughter that had so maddened him a little earlier. "No, I won't promise. But I'll show you where I was hiding if you ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... her. But even then I remember how I noted the infinite delicacy of her childish skin and the fine eyebrow, finer than the finest feather that ever one felt on the breast of a bird. She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow. And from the very outset, after ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... "Oh, well," said Elfin, "do as you like about it—the dragon will come and hunt you tomorrow, as likely as not. I don't care if he ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... Remon's face and, laughing with such bright and elfin mirth as never any other woman showed, thought Wycherley, she broke into another song. She would have spared Mr. Wycherley that had she but known him to be within earshot. . . . Oh, it was only Lady Drogheda who sang, he knew,—the seasoned ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... through a roof of glass. The moment they got underneath the trees the light rays of the sun continued to come through—white, savage, and blazing—but they were gelded of heat. Then it was not hard to imagine that they were wandering through cool, bright elfin glades. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... bewitching in its alternation of softly checkered gray and shade, where acres of feathery grasses flowed in wind-blown furrows; where in the purple obscurity of hollows the strange and aged little forests grew restless and full of echoes; where shadowy reeds like elfin swords clattered and thrust and parried across the darkling pools of haunted waters unstirred save for the swirl of a startled fish or the smoothly spreading wake of some furry creature ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... she paddles in the very noon Of solemn midnight like an elfin thing, Charm'd into being by the argent moon— Whose silver light for love of her fair wing Goes with her in the shade, still worshipping Her dainty plumage:—all around her grew A radiant circlet, like a fairy ring; And all behind, a tiny little clue Of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... chiefs of British song Scorned not such legends to prolong: They gleam through Spenser's elfin dream, And mix in Milton's heavenly theme; And Dryden, in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald king and court Bade him toil on, to make them sport; Demanded for their niggard pay, Fit for their ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... Arriving there, he plunged fiercely into solving algebraical equations and working out geometry exercises, determined to put out of his head forthwith all vain imaginings of an enchanted orchard, white in the moonshine, with lilts of elfin music echoing down ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a blind boy led by a greyhound, playing on his harp, and demanding as recompense to be allowed to carry the king's banner in an approaching battle. Being refused on account of his blindness he vanished, and the king of Brittany mentioned his suspicions that this was one of Merlin's elfin tricks. Arthur was disturbed, for he had promised to give the child anything except his honor, his kingdom, his wife, and his sword. However, while he continued to fret, there entered the hall a poor child about ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... swung in Elfin towers, Wild morning-glories light the tangled ways, And, like the rosy rockets of the Fays, Burns the ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still broad daylight, a man looked ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Thomas of Erceldoun is not dead, but that he is sleeping beneath the Eildon Hills, in Scotland. One day, he met with a lady of elfin race beneath the Eildon tree, and she led him to an under-ground region, where he remained for seven years. He then revisited the earth, but bound himself to return when summoned. One day, when he was making merry with his ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... standing against one of the pilasters a piece of black ship oak, rudely fashioned into something like human form, and which skilful people declared would have been clothed with seeming flesh and blood, and palmed upon him by elfin adroitness for his wife, had he admitted his visitants. A synod of wise men and women sat upon the woman of timber, and she was finally ordered to be devoured by fire, and that in the open air. A fire ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... 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 ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... light regard, I read aright that gifted bard, —Him whose school above the rest His loveliest elfin queen has blest;— One, only one, unrival'd[20] fair, 5 Might hope the magic girdle wear, At solemn turney hung on high, The wish of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... taught them how to fashion the tales of old into rich melodious songs, and with music and sweet-mouthed eloquence to move the minds of their fellow-men. But they say that Bragi taught them this; and they remember me only as Regin, the elfin schoolmaster, or at best as Mimer, the master of smiths. At length my heart grew bitter because of the neglect and ingratitude of men; and the old longing for Andvari's hoard came back to me, and I forgot much of my cunning and lore. But I lived on and ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... they ran, and then the swordsman slashed again, and Bert could hear across the waters a little sound like the moo of an elfin cow as the fat little man fell forward. Slash went the swordsman and slash at something on the ground that tried to save itself with ineffectual hands. "Oh, I carn't!" cried Bert, near blubbering, and staring ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... the question he asked and the answer he received were heard only by the elfin sprites dancing in the brook beside them, so we will leave it to those fairies to tell if they choose. Suffice it to say it was such as filled his heart so full of happiness it could no longer hold a secret, and there, where ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... of unbelief. And she tarried for amazed intervals in the studio upstairs where Margot Gilberte plied Cellini's art, embedding pennyweights of metal in hot pitch that, cooling, held it like a dark and shapeless hand while Margot sculptured elfin leaves and scrolls upon it. Curious things came to the jeweler's desk where Margot worked; jewels cut and uncut, soft-colored sea-pebbles, natural lumps of greenish copper, silver and gold and brass (to Margot's eye there were no baser metals) malachite and coral and New ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... on. The blue, sunlit arch overhead, the waving trees that sent dancing shadows like troops of elfin sprites over the water, the fret in one place where a rock broke the murmurous lapping, the swish somewhere else, where grasses and weeds and water blooms rooted in the sedge rocked back and forth with the slow tide—how ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... as she keeps her rosy cheeks and is full of life, a little dreaming can't hurt her. You should have seen her doing the elfin dance this morning. She entered into the spirit of it like a little whirlwind. And, besides, there are no children anywhere near that I can allow her to play with. I have only a few acquaintances in the town, ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... on so vast a mass! Yet did it quiver under the finger-tip caress in rhythmic vibrations that became whisperings and rustlings and mutterings of sound—but of sound so different; so elusively thin that it was shimmeringly sibilant; so mellow that it was maddening sweet, piping like an elfin horn, which last was just what Bassett decided would be like a peal from some bell of the gods reaching earthward ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... came. And other pictures like it. And since the living that had made them was past for a little they were both fainter and in a measure brighter with more elfin colors than even that living had been which had made them glow at first. White memory had taken them into her long house of silence where everything is cool with the silver of Spring rain on leaves, she had washed from them the human pettiness, the human separateness, the human insufficiency ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... 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
... universe in which minute exquisite winged creatures flashed like flakes of fire, through dusky places. She heard their small faint voices in the whisper of the leaves, and every broad toadstool was to her a resting place for weary elfin messengers hurrying on some mission for their queen. Her own imaginings, like her favorite books, were all of magic wands, golden garments and crystal palaces. Sceptered kings, and jeweled princesses trailing robes of satin were the chief ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... away and 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 ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... 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 landscape, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... 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
... room she heard the fingers of the prying rain busy at her windows; the ticking of the small French clock, very dull, very far away—or was it her heart? And, faintly ringing in the receiver pressed against her ear, millions of tiny stirrings, sounds like instruments of an elfin orchestra tuning, echoes as of steps passing through the halls of fairy-land, a faint confusion of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Don't tell me how you did it—" hastily—"I couldn't understand. It's enough that you waved your hand and beauty sprang up! Look at my little faun dancing—we must dance too!" He lilted a swaying air, and whirled her round the room with gipsy glee. His face looked like the faun's, elfin, mischievous, happy as ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... away; a solid-built, crisply outlined man of forty, carrying himself with a practical erectness, upon whose face there was a rather disturbing half-smile. The stranger's hand was clasped in that of a little girl, wide-eyed, elfin, and lovely. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the healing hand is not yet extinct In Iceland. Dr. Maurer relates a story of a man in Reykjavlk to whom it would seem to have been communicated by an elfin, in ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... your face, one night, when Heaven seemed resting, Against the troubled fever of the earth; I dreamed that vivid throated birds were nesting, In trees that shook with elfin-hearted mirth. I dreamed that star-like purple flowers were springing A-throb with perfume all about the place, And that there was a far-off sound of singing— And then—I dreamed ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... 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
... 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 that she is drinking in the beauty like wine, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... every flower-bell on 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 ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... went home in a petulant mood. Arriving there, he plunged fiercely into solving algebraical equations and working out geometry exercises, determined to put out of his head forthwith all vain imaginings of an enchanted orchard, white in the moonshine, with lilts of elfin music echoing down its ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and can't forget the memory of them." In a sense every romancer is a child—such was Ludwig Tieck, such was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. But each is something more—he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows, at least, some of Elfin Land as well ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... 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
... diabolic possession; insanity &c 503. [in jest, in science] Maxwell's demon. [person possessed by a demon] demoniac. Adj. demonic, demonical, impish, demoniacal; fiendish, fiend-like; supernatural, weird, uncanny, unearthly, spectral; ghostly, ghost-like; elfin, elvin^, elfish, elflike^; haunted; pokerish [U.S.]. possessed, possessed by a devil, possessed by a demon. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... locally to be the haunts of fairies, Monacelli, as the Sorrentine inhabitants name them. Like the "good folk" of certain country districts in England, the pixies of Devonshire, and the "Tylwyth Teg" of rural Wales, these elfin people of the ravines are not malicious or unkindly in their nature, but they are particular and somewhat exacting in certain matters. They appreciate the attentions of mortal men, and offerings of fresh milk or choice fruit are not beneath ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... and race and strength, "My dear and only love" it sang, as it had sung before; but then it had been a girl's hope, and now it was a woman's certainty. At the first note, the past came back to me like yesterday. I saw the moorland gables in the rain, I heard the swirl of the tempest, I saw the elfin face in the hood which had cheered the traveller on his way. In that dim light I could not see the singer, but I needed no vision. The strangeness of the thing clutched at my heart, for here was the voice which had never been out of my ears singing again in a land far from ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... and fog on high. Only in me the waters cry Who mourn the hours now slipped for ever, Hours of boding, joy, and fever, When we loved, by chance beguiled, I a boy and you a child— Child! but with an angel's air, Astonished, eager, unaware, Or elfin's, wandering with a grace Foreign to any fireside race, And with a gaiety unknown In the light feet and hair backblown, And with a sadness yet more strange, In meagre cheeks which knew to change Or ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... and saddle Bevis! I cannot rest. The air must cool my brow. I fain would ride to view the elfin scene of chivalry of which we heard to-night. Rouse none from their slumbers, for I would not have those prating knaves know that I could credit so wild a tale ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... hold. I found dear old Belle, the setter, shaking herself and looking at me reproachfully. She and I had gone to sleep together on the rug, and had naturally wandered to the dream-forest where dogs and little girls hunt wild game and have strange adventures. We encountered hosts of elfin foes, and it required all the dog tactics at Belle's command to acquit herself like the lady and huntress that she was. Belle had her dreams too. We used to lie under the trees and flowers in the old garden, and I used to laugh with delight when the magnolia ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... 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 should meet no more, for my fancy is weakening as the years slip by, and I ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... some mysterious underworld. Strange and weird it seemed, with its fathomless shadows and its wild grottoes, over which hung, silently waving, long pendants of ivy, while dusky gray aloes uplifted their horned heads from great rock-rifts, like elfin spirits struggling upward out of the shade. Nor was wanting the usual gentle poetry of flowers; for white iris leaned its fairy pavilion over the black void like a pale-cheeked princess from the window of some dark enchanted castle, and scarlet geranium and golden broom and crimson ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... 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 ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... Strand he stalks, a sable shade Of death, while, jingling like the elfin train, In silver samite knight and dame and maid Ride to the tourney on the barrier'd plain; And he must bow in humble mute disdain, And that worst woe of baffled souls endure, To see the evil that they ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... Amadis de Gaul a garland and a rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle Venelas; and indeed all the postulates of elfin annals,—that the fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not speak; and the like,—I find true in Concord, however they might be in Cornwall ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... It had seemed perfect. And yet—and yet. She was not cold, but was she unearthly? Was she, perhaps, some straying angel—some fervid, bright spirit, flame-coloured and intangible, a being of the elfin race? As they stood together looking at the distant coastline a depression which he could neither fathom nor control came over him. His bride seemed so much younger than he had ever realised. She cared for him—how could he doubt it? But was the ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... meal. The world was astir with life: sounds of the plonk-plonk of rising trout and the endless twitter of woodland birds mingled with the far-away barking of dogs and the lowing of the full-uddered cows in the distant meadows. Abashed and enchanted, the girl listened. It was an elfin land where the old witch voices of hill and river were not silenced. With the wind in her hair she climbed the slope again to the garden ground, where she found a solemn-eyed collie sniffing the fragrant wind in ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin-world, where the impossible does not strike one as incongruous, and the England of 1648 seems ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... extent. What reader of the "Collegians" has not realized all the perils of the windy night and the stormy sea with trepidation and horror scarcely surpassed by the occupants of the little craft tossing amid the boiling breakers—Eily, the hapless runaway, Danny, the elfin hunchback, and Hardress, the conscience-stricken victim of conflicting thoughts and passionate impulses? How much more tragic the finding of the dead body of Eily, the "pride of Garryowen," since it occurs on the hunting field, surrounded ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thous not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... haze and through its mazy ringlets, Titania may have led her elfin rout, Or Ariel fanned it with his gauzy winglets, Or Puck danced in the bowl to ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... snow as they run, And laughing and shouting, so brimful of fun; While the ten-year-old twins, in a somersault mood, Have measured their length from the barn to the wood. A dozen times, yes, or it may be a score, Till their cheeks are as red as the roses, and more; Then the elfin of twelve and the boy of fifteen, Are pelting each other with snowballs so keen, That we, who are older, forget to be staid, {245} And shout, each with each, as the youngsters, arrayed In feathery garments, press on or ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... were crossing the courtyard in every direction, and above lights were ascending and descending from landing to landing. I obtained a confused glimpse of vast masses of architecture—columns, arcades, flights of steps, stairways—a royal voluptuousness and elfin magnificence of construction worthy of fairyland. A negro page—the same who had before brought me the tablet from Clarimonde, and whom I instantly recognised—approached to aid me in dismounting, and the major-domo, attired in black velvet with a gold ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... of all sorts of humanlike creatures, such as fishermen and sailors meet and marvel at on the sea, and landsmen see outside the elfin mounds. ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... sleeping land, Thy fancy, like a magick wand, Forth caird the Elfin race: And now around the fountain's brim In circling dance they gaily skim; And now upon its surface swim, And ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... by lonely meres To sit, with heart and soul awake, Where water-lilies lie afloat, Each anchored like a fairy boat Amid some fabled elfin lake: To see the birds flit to and fro Along the dark-green reedy edge. ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... 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, ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... true shamrock is the delicate little wood-sorrel, Oxalis acetosella, which has a beautifully formed three-split or trefoil leaf of the most vivid green colour, and a white flower like that of a geranium. It is called "fairy-bell" by the Welsh, and was believed to ring chimes for the elfin folk. It was also greatly esteemed for its acid flavour and for various reputed medicinal and magical properties by the Druids and among the early inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland. Pliny says it never shelters a snake, and is an antidote to the poison of serpents and scorpions—a ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... said the elfin, bearded face, "to make real a dream. Is it not so? Either to dream that what you seek is yours, or else to dream that what you hate is conquered. You drink to escape reality, and the irony is that ...
— Pygmalion's Spectacles • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... beastly people in their sour smoke, and to think greedily of how by this time he might have been with Ellen listening to the grave conversation that sat as quaintly on her loveliness as tortoiseshell spectacles on an elfin nose, and looking at that ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... 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 ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... of British song Scorned not such legends to prolong: They gleam through Spenser's elfin dream, And mix in Milton's heavenly theme; And Dryden, in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald king and court Bade him toil on, to make them sport; Demanded for their niggard pay, Fit for their souls, a looser lay, Licentious satire, song, and play; ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... fell softly, softly; and the bare trees shook their branches in the keen air. The pleasant glow of the blazing logs lighted up the circle of happy faces, and peopled the distant corners with elfin shadows. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... 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 an interval, a polished ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... her fair head on his breast, and through her sobs she spoke "Oh, take me from this evil place, and from the elfin folk, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... beginning that a Sonata was a musical composition consisting of various movements. What are the movements? In this case there is first, "a sad and infinitely lovely movement", then, "a wild, elfin passage in triple time", and lastly, "a breathless, hurrying, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... scrambled from their path; a tiny snake, green as the grass blades that it stirred, slipped from a pool of moonlight into a lake of shadow. Somewhere a small owl, tremulously melodious, called and called: and from the salt meadows, distantly, the elfin whistle of plover answered. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... San Francisco, Bryce stood disconsolate on the dock and waved to Shirley until he could no longer discern her on the deck. Then he went home, crawled up into the haymow and wept, for he had something in his heart and it hurt. He thought of his elfin companion very frequently for a week, and he lost his appetite, very much to Mrs. Tully's concern. Then the steelhead trout began to run in Eel River, and the sweetest event that can occur in any boy's existence—the sudden awakening to the wonder and beauty of life so ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... the fluttering fancies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . . Would fain the shade of elder days recall, The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall; Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme; Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime, Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale, Or bid the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... M. D., turned eyes of misery upon her. His ruddy hair was awry. This young man was imaginative and could therefore suffer deeply. He had the gift of turning platitudes into puzzles, and his hazel eyes were lit with an elfin quality, which, if possible, endeared him the more to his mother. All his life he had been the greatest thing in the world to this woman. To see him in such straits tore her very heart. When he had been a little boy, she had been able to make joy appear in those ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... 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 ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... the Elfin King went to a golden chest whence he took a phial that was filled with a blood-red liquor. And with this liquor he anointed the ears and the eyelids, the nostrils, the lips, and the finger-tips of the bodies of Burd Helen's two brothers that ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... 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 ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Glendearg, which was the favourite haunt of the White Lady, and the spot where Sir Piercie Shafton's stoccatas, embroccatas, and passados first failed him, when opposed to the less polished and rustic skill of Halbert Glendinning, assisted by the machinations of the queen of the elfin tribe. On this place are found a number of small stones, of a singular shape and appearance, resembling guns, cradles with children in them, bonnets, &c., several of which I obtained in a tour to Scotland. They are called elf-stones ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 290 - Volume X. No. 290. Saturday, December 29, 1827. • Various
... discovered all sorts of wonderful things in what Florence called the Fairy Dell: moss-grown rocks from which sprung tiny bell-shaped flowers; a circle of wee pink toadstools, which indeed seemed fit for the elfin folk; a wild grapevine with a most delightfully arranged swing on which the two girls "teetered" away in great joy; shining pebbles, bits of rose-colored quartz, a forest of plumy ferns, and all such like things, over which the city child exclaimed ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... lashes paled her gray eyes slightly; her snub nose made charming havoc of what, without it, would have been a conventional regularity of profile. She was really no more slender than the normal woman, but, compared with her mates, she seemed of elfin slimness; she was shapely in a supple, long-limbed way. There was something a little exotic about her. Her green and gold plumage gave her a touch of the fantastic and the bizarre. Prevailingly, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... subdued to my ear by the ship lying in a hollow, and I being in her with the hatches closed; but this very faintness of uproar formed of itself a quality of mystery very pat to the ghastliness of my surroundings. It was like the notes of an elfin storm of necromantic imagination; it was hollow, weak, and terrifying; and it and the thunder of the seas commingling, together with the rumbling blasts and shocks of splitting ice, disjointed as by an earthquake, loaded the inward ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still broad daylight, a man looked only ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... marked him as a spirit not to be forgotten. So tenderly boyish was he in effect that his confreres among the book clerks accepted with difficulty the story that he was married. When it was told that he had a son they gasped their incredulity. And when one day this extraordinary elfin sprite remarked that at the time of his honeymoon he had had a beard they felt (I remember) that the world was without power to ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... the briers, Round his holy corse to gre; Elfin-fairy, light your fires, Here my body still shall be. My love is dead, Gone to his death-bed, All ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... personal observation, viewing the matter at close range, that nearly always fat, like old age or a thief in the dark, steals upon one unawares. I take my own case. As a youngster and on through my teens and into my early twenties—ah, those romping elfin twenties!—I was, in outline, what might be termed dwindly, not to say slimmish. Those who have known me in my latter years might be loath to believe it, but one of my boyhood nick-names—I had several, and none of them was complimentary but all of them ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... she would steal round in the black shadows, stalking her imaginary play-fellows, and then would go flying out into the moonlight, pursued by them in turn; and looking herself, with her white night-dress over her clothes, and her tousled hair, the weirdest little elfin figure in the world. Finally, to escape capture, she ran up a ladder that had been left against a haystack. Blocks of hay had been cut out, leaving a square shelf half way down the stack, on to which ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the search for game. Their fellowship was, in consequence, never more complete than when they were roaming the woods. In them Easter was at home, and her ardent nature came to the surface like a poetic glow from her buoyant health and beauty. Then appeared all that was wayward and elfin-like in her character, and she would be as playful, wilful, evanescent as a wood-spirit. Sometimes, when they were separated, she would lead him into a ravine by imitating a squirrel or a wild-turkey, and, as he crept noiselessly along with bated breath and eyes ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... 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 a ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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, ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... so modest!" Ydo's laughter rang out like a chime of bells, full of elfin malice. "But I am going to tell you a secret. He is the distinguished discoverer of a rare and wonderful specimen of almost fabulous value. A specimen which collectors have ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... 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
... forth she paddles in the very noon Of solemn midnight like an elfin thing, Charm'd into being by the argent moon— Whose silver light for love of her fair wing Goes with her in the shade, still worshipping Her dainty plumage:—all around her grew A radiant circlet, like a fairy ring; And all behind, a tiny ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... attending to everything, pronounced it perfect with gay little pats of quaint panniered costumes, fitting of banded sailor hats o'er white coifs, recurling of ringlets, and dainty polishing of slippers. The graceful little figures seemed elfin and fairy-like in the half sleeves and low corsages of tight bodices from which depended enormously full skirts set off ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... pensive looks the pleasing smile, And Care's stern brow of every frown beguile. These magic favours graced the infant-maid, Whose more enlivening smile the charming gifts repaid. Now Fortune changed, who, were she constant long, Would leave us few adventures for our song. A wicked elfin roved this land around, Whose joys proceeded from the griefs he found; Envy his name: —his fascinating eye From the light bosom drew the sudden sigh; Unsocial he, but with malignant mind, He dwelt with man, that he might curse mankind; Like the first foe, he sought th' abode ...
— Miscellaneous Poems • George Crabbe
... to me, and the closer I watched him the more convinced I became, that this was no optical illusion, that a faint luminosity, a sort of elfin light, played eerily ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... 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 ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... gifts from Odin. I taught them how to fashion the tales of old into rich melodious songs, and with music and sweet-mouthed eloquence to move the minds of their fellow-men. But they say that Bragi taught them this; and they remember me only as Regin, the elfin schoolmaster, or at best as Mimer, the master of smiths. At length my heart grew bitter because of the neglect and ingratitude of men; and the old longing for Andvari's hoard came back to me, and I forgot much of my cunning ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... the columbine nearly doubles its size, it never has the elfin charm in a conventional garden that it possesses wild in Nature's. Dancing in red and yellow petticoats to the rhythm of the breeze, along the ledge of overhanging rocks, it coquettes with some Punchinello as if daring him to reach her at his peril. Who is he? Let us sit a while on the rocky ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... came through in good shape, making rampant growths and carrying a heavy crop. These include: 2 Walters, 4 O.K. Heart, 1 Canoka, 1 Slioka, 1 Rover, 2 Calendar, 1 Westoka, 1 Nursoka, 1 Aloka, 1 Symoka, 15 select unnamed bearing seedlings, yet on trial. All are promising. Also we have three of the Elfin paper shell heartnut hybrids. I have failed to find a good pollinator for these Elfins, so they are shy croppers, although producing plenty of the female blooms. All of the above trees are 6 inches in diameter and up ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various
... the joys that ring Through the green deeps of leafy spring; I know the elfin cups and domes That are their small ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... clothes, and they never keep to the same fashions a month. I work for a doll with three daughters. Bless you, she's enough to ruin her husband!' The person of the house gave a weird little laugh here, and gave them another look out of the corners of her eyes. She had an elfin chin that was capable of great expression; and whenever she gave this look, she hitched this chin up. As if her eyes and her chin worked together on ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... 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
... the edge of a chair near the door. Mrs. Tree crossed the room to her own high-backed armchair, took her seat deliberately, put her feet on the crimson hassock, and leaned forward, resting her hands on the crutch-top of her stick, and her chin on her hands. In this attitude she looked more elfin than human, and the light that danced in her black eyes was not ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... the elfin knight Approached, him seemed that the merry sound Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height, And many feet fast thumping the hollow ground, That through the woods their echo did rebound; He nigher drew to wit what it mote be. There he a troop of ladies dancing found Full merrily and making ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... something like it,—but when and where? What planet boasted that star of cities for strength and lustre that must surpass new London and old Thebes? For Rodomant had the mathematical gift of all the highest harmonists, and his brain could magnify and actualize the elfin-sized images under his eye to their just and proper proportion in the real." It must have been like heaven, this city so stilly and so fair,—for, you see, there were no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... in lovely June O'erlook these happy children at their play: Lo, where they gambol through the garden gay, Or round the hoary hawthorn dance and sing, Or, 'neath yon moss-grown cliff, grotesque and grey Sit plaiting flowery wreaths in social ring, And telling wondrous tales of the green Elfin King. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... to-day, it is his own native land only which he sees and paints: even the fairy world in which, at whatever inevitable interval, he is second to Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live in an elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity. Within that greater circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and Ariel and their fellows move, aiding or injuring mankind, and reflecting human life in a kind of unconscious parody, Herrick cannot walk: and it ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... a time three sisters, quite transparent, and very beautiful. The robe of the one was red, that of the second blue, and that of the third white. They danced hand in hand beside the calm lake in the clear moonshine. They were not elfin maidens, but mortal children. A sweet fragrance was smelt, and the maidens vanished in the wood; the fragrance grew stronger—three coffins, and in them three lovely maidens, glided out of the forest and across the lake: ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... to the Moonlight!" said he, looking up thoughtfully to the sky and stars. Then his hands dropped on the keys, and he began playing a sad and infinitely lovely movement, which crept gently over the instrument, like the calm flow of moonlight over the dark earth. This was followed by a wild, elfin passage in triple time—a sort of grotesque interlude, like the dance of spirits upon the lawn. Then came a swift agitato finale—a breathless, hurrying, trembling movement, descriptive of flight, and uncertainty, and vague impulsive terror, which carried us away on its rustling wings, and ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... her elfin grot, And there she gazed, and sighed deep, And there I shut her wild wild eyes So ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... clouds in the moonlight, and the gold of the fireflies was very pale. From over the water, out of the heart of the moonlit wood, came the song of a mockingbird, a tumultuous ecstasy, possessing the air and making elfin the night. ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... side of the other was warm with the light which poured upon it. The Gothic spires, the Moorish domes, the weird and mysterious caves, which last night had given more than a touch of awe to her majestic bedchamber, now looked a good deal less like the ruins of mediaeval castles and the homes of elfin sprites and gnomes. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... gloom Saw that majestic weapon of the light Uptowering like the shaft of some huge gun Through one arched rift of sky. Dark at its base With naked arms, the crew that all day long Had sweated to make ready for this night Waited their captain's word. The switchboard shone With elfin lamps of white and red, and keys Whence, at a finger's touch, that monstrous tube Moved like a creature dowered with life and will, To peer from deep to deep. Below it pulsed The clock-machine that slowly, throb by throb, Timed to the pace ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... him, had whisked through violet waves. Most of all, he brought back the yesterday's long excitement and delight of seeing the Irish coast hills—his first foreign land—whose faint sky fresco had seemed magical with the elfin lore of Ireland, a country that had ever been to him the haunt not of potatoes and politicians, but of fays. He had wanted fays. They were not common on the asphalt of West Sixteenth Street. But now he had ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... There is something in her, Nicholas, that one doesn't find in other women, isn't there? An elfin strangeness. [He sighs] Although she is without doubt the richest girl in the country, her mother is so stingy that no one will have her. After her mother's death Sasha will have the whole fortune, but until ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... had 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 ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... builder's most rare device Could match this winter palace of ice; 'T was as if every image that mirrored lay In his depths serene through the summer day, Each fleeting shadow of earth and sky, Lest the happy model should be lost. Sad been mimicked in fairy masonry By the elfin builders ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Peveril, though there is too much of the dwarfs and the elfie. Scott cannot deny himself one of these spirits in some shape or other; I hope that we shall find that this elfin page, who has the power of shrinking or expanding, as it seems, to suit the occasion, is made really necessary to the story. I think the dwarf more allowable and better drawn than the page, true to history, and consistent; but Finella is sometimes handsome enough ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... using the paddle vigorously. She wore no hat and her blond hair was tousled as usual. It seemed impossible for Bet to keep her unruly locks in order at any time, but now as the breeze ruffled it, she looked like some half-wild elfin creature. ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... 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 ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... at it in exalted enthusiasm.] Your priests can no more stop that light from shining or change its colour and its radiance than Joshua could stop the sun and moon. [Laughs savagely.] Why, a real fairy in an elfin cloak strayed too near the lamp an hour or two ago; and it turned him into a common society clown with ...
— Magic - A Fantastic Comedy • G.K. Chesterton
... learn from us the Runic lay; But dip thee, first, in yonder crystal wave, Which binds thee to the Elfin race ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... head promptly with a faint echo of the elfin laughter that had so maddened him a little earlier. "No, I won't promise. But I'll show you where I was hiding if you like. ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... open space there was a circle of grotesque-looking stones, strangely linked together by creeping plants and ferns of curious growth. And as the Snarling Princess looked at them, it seemed to her that the stones took dwarf-like shapes, and glared about them with weird elfin faces. The princess seemed rooted to the spot. An invisible power appeared to draw her towards the group, and to attract her by a beautiful flower, whose calyx opened at her approach. Unable to resist the impulse, she stepped into the circle ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... punctual stars. Huge whitened hills Rise glimmering to the blue verge of the night, Ghostlike, and striped with narrow glens of firs Black-waving, solemn. O'er the Luggie-stream Gathers a veiny film of ice, and creeps With elfin feet around each stone and reed, Working fine masonry; while o'er the dam, Dashing, a noise of waters fills the clear And nitrous air. All the dark, wintry hours Sharply the winds from the white level moors Keen whistle. Timorous in his homely ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... in the companion bed belonged of right to the moonlight, for it was of quite elfin-like beauty. The child had dropped her cover on the floor, and the moonlight looked in at the naked little limbs. Presently she opened her eyes and looked at the ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... 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, the ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... it not if she heard; her dance continued uninterrupted. She swayed like a tall lily to the wind, with a few little steps one way and then a few little steps the other; holding out her cotton skirts; her hair blown all about her like a great, red cloud. There was something elfin, something wild and woodsy, in her manner of dancing; the nymph whose name she bore might so have welcomed a storm in her ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... human road that winds to nowhere, The pilgrim listens, as the night air brings The murmured echo, perpetual, from the gorge Of barren rock far down the valley. Now, Though twilight here, it may be starlight there; Mist makes elfin lakes in the hollow fields; The dark wood stands in the mist like a somber island With one red star above it.... "This I should see, Should I go on, follow the falling road,— This I have often seen.... But I shall stay Here, where the ancient ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... lengthened it to a perfect oval, adding a touch of strength to the brow, a touch of decision to the chin; and, lest these should overweight it, had removed from the eyes their clouded trouble and left them clear to the depths. The elfin Diane, the small woodland-haunting Indian, no longer looked forth from those windows; no search might find her captive shadow behind them. She had died young, or had faded away perhaps and escaped ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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, ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... wound through a forest of fir, where a wood wind wove its murmurous spell and a wood brook dimpled pellucidly among the shadows—the dear, companionable, elfin shadows—that lurked under the low growing boughs. Along the edges of that winding path grew banks of velvet green moss, starred with clusters of pigeon berries. Pigeon berries are not to be eaten. They are woolly, tasteless things. But they are to be looked at in ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... long, but took their vengeance in the end, and that was in the person of the last descendant, Jean. She bore the name of the Rutherfords, but she was the daughter of their trembling wives. At the first she was not wholly without charm. Neighbours recalled in her, as a child, a strain of elfin wilfulness, gentle little mutinies, sad little gaieties, even a morning gleam of beauty that was not to be fulfilled. She withered in the growing, and (whether it was the sins of her sires or the sorrows of her mothers) came to her maturity depressed, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... breeze 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
... to the staff. Five of them were the same big-boned heavy-framed type that apparently did most of the manual labor. The sixth, the late arrival, was an elegant creature, a bronze-skinned, green-eyed minx with an elfin face half hidden under a wavy mass of red-brown hair. Unlike the others, she had been docked—and in contrast to their heavy eyes and sleep-puffed features she was alert and lively. She flashed him an impish grin, ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... 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
... curiously-wrought chain, wound under and among the bandeaux; on her wrists, plump and dimpled as a baby's, more chain-work of the like precious metal, ending in tinkling fringe that swung, glittering, to and fro, with the restless motion of the elfin hands, she never ceased to clasp and chafe and fret one with the other, while she thus stood and awaited the decision of her companions. But instead of detracting from the charm of her appearance, the seemingly unconscious ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... long procession, Formless, countless of their kind Circle us in flying coveys Like the leaves in Autumn wind. Now in ghastly silence deathly, Now with shrilling elfin cry— Is it some mad dance of bridal, Or a ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... off men's wives with them to fairyland; but the lost spouses can be recovered within a year and a day when the procession of the fairies is defiling past on Hallowe'en, always provided that the mortals did not partake of elfin food while they were ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... maiden may safely lay their hand on the cockatrice's den. The ballad tells us that Lady Janet was happy at last; but she paid dearly through months of sorrow and shame for those three red roses plucked in the Elfin Bower. The precise cause of Keene's forbearance it would be very difficult to explain: more than one feeling probably ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... his heid about; (The braid mune schinis in lift richt cleir.) Twa Elfin een are glentin owt, (My luvis een like ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... not get their man handcuffed before that same elfin ten-year-old son of Owen's had tried desperately to fight the officers into letting ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... 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
... for those timid few who, frightened at the long tail, scamper away from the intruder; for, when allowed to mingle in the sport, he suddenly seizes the fairest child, and hurries away to make a dainty meal off him with his little wives in elfin-land. To the Indian men the fairies profess a real friendship; and when they meet one near their dwellings they invite him in and feast him, and press him to stay all night. He invariably declines the polite invitation with his thanks, and his regrets that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... garment of the men he had hitherto seen, the dress of this person was characterised by all the trappings of the national bravery. Upon his raven hair, the glossy curls of which made a notable contrast to the matted and elfin locks of the savages around, was placed a cloth cap, with a gold tassel that hung down to his shoulder; his mustaches were trimmed with care, and a silk kerchief of gay hues was twisted round a well-shaped but sinewy throat; a short jacket of rough cloth ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of Erceldoun is not dead, but that he is sleeping beneath the Eildon Hills, in Scotland. One day, he met with a lady of elfin race beneath the Eildon tree, and she led him to an under-ground region, where he remained for seven years. He then revisited the earth, but bound himself to return when summoned. One day, when he was making merry with his friends, he was told that a hart and hind ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... it, and all Its importunity of love and pain; And he would wait till the last passionate fall Died on the night, and all was still again, — Then to his upland village wander home, Marvelling whence that flood of elfin song might come. ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... his wife's toilworn hand. In the long grass along the creek fireflies sparkled, and their elfin lanterns, waning, glowing, drifted high in the calm ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... the Kralahome, like the idol of ebony before the demon had entered it! while around him these elfin worshippers, with flushed cheeks and flashing eyes, tossing arms and panting bosoms, whirl in their witching waltz. He is a man to be wondered at,—stony and grim, his huge hands resting on his knees in ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
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