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Elves   Listen
noun
Elves  n.  Plural of Elf.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Elves" Quotes from Famous Books



... spiders, and the fearful monsters. Sometimes one of these evil creatures escaped and rushed upward to the bright, pure air, and spread its poisonous breath over the living things of the upper-world. But such happenings were rare, for the Elves of Darkness were faithful and strong, and did not willingly allow the wicked beasts and reptiles to harm human ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... do not like her at least I do not know. There are a few typical errors; and a "said he," or a "said she," would sometimes make the dialogue more immediately clear; but "I do not write for such dull elves" as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves. The second volume is shorter than I could wish, but the difference is not so much in reality as in look, there being a larger proportion of narrative in that part. I have lop't and crop't so successfully, ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh

... very cold While her lord the tale told; And then she made oath, by our Lady,— Such wandering elves Might provide for themselves— For she would get no ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper

... woods wherever they have been sheltered from the north. They will grow bolder as the days go by, and spread and come all down the slopes of sunny hills. Then the anemones will come, like a shy pale people, one of the tribes of the elves, who dare not leave the innermost deeps of the wood: in those days all the trees will be in leaf, the bluebells will follow, and certain fortunate woods will shelter such myriads of them that the bright fresh green of the beech trees will flash between ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany

... abyss of hell, Chained till the dreadful doom; in place of whom Sits Beelzebub, vicegerent of the damned, Who, listening downward, hears his roaring lord, And executes his purpose.—But no more[16]. The morning creeps behind yon eastern hill, And now the guard is mine, to drive the elves, And foolish fairies, from their moonlight play, And lash the laggers from the sight of ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... earth, you might, I ween, Have guessed some congregation of the elves, To sport by summer moons, had ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... man, loke adoun: Awake and think on Cristes passioun I crowche the from Elves and from Wightes.' There with the night-spel seyde he anon rightes On the foure halves of the hous aboute And on the threissh-fold ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various

... spheres, Lead in swift round the months and years. The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove, Now to the moon in wavering morrice move; And on the tawny sands and shelves Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves. By dimpled brook and fountain-brim, The wood-nymphs, decked with daisies trim, Their merry wakes and pastimes keep: What hath night to do with sleep? Night hath better sweets to prove; Venus now wakes, and wakens Love. Come, let us our rights begin; 'T is only daylight that makes sin, Which these ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton

... I had unconsciously laid myself down upon haunted ground; and I am willing to imagine that what I then experienced was rather connected with the world of spirits and dreams than with what I actually saw and heard around me. Surely the elves and genii of the place were conversing, by some inscrutable means, with the principle of intelligence lurking within the poor uncultivated clod! Perhaps to that ethereal principle the wonders of the past, as connected with that stream, the glories of the present, and even the history of the future, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... "unlucky event" for Christians. A Friday moon is considered unlucky for weather. It is the Mohammedan Sabbath and was the day on which Adam was created. The Sabeans consecrated it to Venus or Astarte. According to mediaeval romance, on this day fairies and all the tribes of elves of every description were converted into hideous animals and remained so until Monday. In Scotland it is a great day for weddings. In England it is not. Sir William Churchill says, "Friday is my lucky day. I was born, christened, married, and knighted on that day, and all my best accidents ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... horrid afrits, and shapes of fear. To-day, under an exquisite sky, pearly clouds floating across the blue, a soft southern air wafting the fragrance of wild pink, thyme and lavender, it was a region surely peopled by good genii, sportive elves and beneficent fairies only. We were in a spirit, a phantasmal world; but a world of witchery and gracious poetic ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... enchasing here those warts Which we to others from ourselves Sell, and brought hither by the elves. The tempting mole, stolen from the neck Of some shy virgin, seems to deck The holy entrance; where within The room is hung with the blue skin Of shifted snake, enfriezed throughout With eyes of peacocks' trains, and trout— ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... phrases to all their questions; all fear of noble persons and their equipage had passed away from her; for when she measured these halls and forms by the wonders and the high beauty she had seen with the Elves in their hidden abode, this earthly splendor seemed but dim to her, the presence of men was almost mean. The young lords were charmed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... necessity following. Her nerves were screwed up to the highest pitch of uneasiness by the grotesque habits of these men and maids, who were quite unlike the country servants she had known, and resembled nothing so much as pixies, elves, or gnomes, peeping up upon human beings from their shady haunts underground, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill—sometimes doing heavy work, sometimes none; teasing and worrying with impish laughter half suppressed, and vanishing directly mortal eyes were bent on them. Separate and distinct ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... shadow of guilt darkening innocent posterity. All of its sins and morbid horrors, its specters, its phantasmas, and even its hellish hopelessness play around his pages, and vanishing between the lines are the less guilty Elves of the Concord Elms, which Thoreau and Old Man Alcott may have felt, but knew not as intimately as Hawthorne. There is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but penetrating." There is at times the mysticism ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... made to hark back to the ages of faith; to recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and popular superstitions; to believe, at all hazards, not only in God and the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these beliefs, in ghosts, elves, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... Merlin old that ministered to fate, The tales of visiting ghosts, or fairy elves, Or witchcraft, are no fables. But his task Is ended with the night;—the thin white moon Evades the eye, the sun breaks through the trees, And the charmed wizard comes forth a mere man From out his circle. ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... gentle while they are little, that when they grow to be young ladies and gentlemen they will not forget to be kind and loving and brave. I hope I shall be courageous always. A little girl in a story was not courageous. She thought she saw little elves with tall pointed [hats] peeping from between the bushes and dancing down the long alleys, and the poor little girl was terrified. Did you have a pleasant Christmas? I had many lovely presents given to me. The other day ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... consolation, In his sorrowful situation. Said he, "My friends, pray let me die In the right way, nor shed such tears." Not at all, the consolers, With many a tear, and many a sigh, Had come resolved by him to lie; And when they left they helped themselves Upon his lands, the greedy elves! And drank from out his brook, And every one of them such suppers took, That when the stag revived, He found his meals reduced; So that while his friends had thrived, He had to fast or die ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park

... abounded with mountain spirits, mermaids, giants, dwarfs, dragons, elves and mandrakes. These reappear in the songs of the Crusades, and are elements of the old Northern and Persian superstitions. All that the East contributed to the song of the chivalric period was a Southern magic, and a ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis

... wonderful play, depicting Elf-land with fairies, water nymphs, elves and witches, goblins, and gnomes, with exquisite scenery, beautiful costumes, and graceful dancing that held them entranced, from the time that the curtain went up until the grand march of the fairies at ...
— Dorothy Dainty at Glenmore • Amy Brooks

... on the flower-bed beneath the hollyhocks I spied the tiny tailor who makes the fairies' frocks; There he sat a-stitching all the afternoon And sang a little ditty to a quaint wee tune: "Grey for the goblins, blue for the elves, Brown for the little gnomes that live by themselves, White for the pixies that dance upon the green, But where shall I find me ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 22, 1920 • Various

... on to speak of the elves and sprites, so frequent in Scottish legend. "Our fairies, however," said he, "though they dress in green, and gambol by moonlight about the banks, and shaws, and burnsides, are not such pleasant little folks as the English fairies, but are apt to ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving

... fled. Spirit is used especially in contradistinction from matter; it may in many cases be substituted for soul, but soul has commonly a fuller and more determinate meaning; we can conceive of spirits as having no moral nature; the fairies, elves, and brownies of mythology might be termed spirits, but not souls. In the figurative sense, spirit denotes animation, excitability, perhaps impatience; as, a lad of spirit; he sang with spirit; he ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... wild beast suddenly disappears and encircled by a soft light two beautiful fairies come forward to teach the new Ala the occult science of his chosen ministry including cabalistic words and medical art. The two elves then become the familiar spirits of the sorcerer who is in this ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti

... sounding like a grunt, the other a hiss. Better call them Umpl and Sptz, which is as near as I can come to it. Of course Sptz was the girl; and they both believed most firmly in hobgoblins, evil spirits, wicked elves, that were ever on the watch for them in the dark; and when they heard the long cre-ak of a tree branch rubbing on another branch in the night as the wind arose, their ears told them that it was a branch, ...
— The Iron Star - And what It saw on Its Journey through the Ages • John Preston True

... brought up, so to speak, that he is perhaps most vivid and enthralling. The folk-lore of those lonely sub-arctic tracts is in keeping with the savagery of nature. We rarely, if ever, hear of friendly elves or companionable gnomes there. The supernatural beings that haunt those shores and seas are, for the most part, malignant and malefic. They seem to hate man. They love to mock his toils, and sport with his despair. In his very ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie

... all this time that the rolling and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about his ears; shut up in the dark, he began to remember all the tales that had been told in Yule round the fire at his grandfather's good house at Dorf, of gnomes and elves and subterranean terrors, and the Erl King riding on the black horse of night, and—and—and he began to sob and to tremble again, and this time did scream outright. But the steam was screaming itself so loudly that no one, had ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)

... sounds were all about the natural and not the supernatural. For instance, I did not see the visage of a grinning goblin just within a little chink of The Rock, as I ought to have seen. I did not see "faƫry elves" dancing in the moonlit beams, as I ought to have seen. Then boldly I took a direct course from the mountain over the plain, believing I should intercept our encampment. I continued this line for two hours, or ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... it was indeed he, shook his head. "Nay, nay, gaffer," he answered. "I am wise; I know my business. I think I have been asleep in the green wood a thousand years and waited upon by elves and fairies and all manner of pygmies, and they taught me the speech of birds, and what the trees whisper to each other from dawn to dusk, and the war-cries of the winds, with other much delectable knowledge which would have made me wiser than the wisest—but now that I ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... taken a notion to speak for themselves, And are wielding the tongue and the pen; They've mounted the rostrum; the termagant elves, And—oh horrid!—are talking to men! With faces unblanched in our presence they come To harangue us, they say, in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... one summer noonday, when the sky was blue and deep (Hey-nonny-nonny-no for Taunton in the summer!), They made him heavy-headed as he watched beside his sheep And all the little Taunton elves came stealing out to peep At Taunton in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various

... 228. In Scandinavia the dead were called elves, and lived feasting in their barrows or in hills. These became the seat of ancestral cults. The word "elf" also means any divine spirit, later a fairy. "Elf" and side may thus, like the "elf-howe" and the sid or mound, have a parallel history. See Vigfusson-Powell, Corpus ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch

... their grasses and drowned daisies glancing up at us from the blue; when we moor the boat and climb the hillsides, we are dazzled by the luxuriant beauty of it all. It hardly seems real—it is too green, too perfect, to be believed; and one thinks of some fairy drop-scene, painted by cunning-fingered elves and sprites, who might have a wee folk's way of mixing roses and rainbows, dew-drenched greens and sun-warmed yellows; showing the picture to you first all burnished, glittering and radiant, then 'veiled ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Nancy eagerly prepared herself to listen. Such a story was then poured out that it held her spell-bound. Goblins, elves, and fairies, underground glories, thrilling adventures and escapes. Was it any wonder that with such a gift for story-telling Teddy was the king of the village? It came to an end at last, and Nancy drew a long breath of relief and ...
— Teddy's Button • Amy Le Feuvre

... borders of the forest he was almost afraid to venture among the gloomy shadows of the trees. Therein, as he believed, dwelt many strange and mysterious elves, that were wont to lead travellers astray to their destruction. But he must pass through that forest or else go round many miles across the hills; so he braced his girdle tighter about him and boldly plunged into the ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton

... floated about them, . . girls as lovely, as delicate, as dainty as cyclamens that wave in the woods in the early days of an Italian spring. Their garments were so white, so transparent, so filmy and clinging, that they looked like elves robed in mountain-vapor rather than human creatures, . . there were fifty of them in all, and as they tripped forward, they, like the doves that had heralded their approach, surrounded Lysia flutteringly, saluting her with gestures of exquisite grace and devout humility, while she, enthroned ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... sub-contractor; 'Tisn't machinery. No! In fact, What Sweating is, in a manner exact, After much thinking we cannot define. Who is to blame for it? Well, we incline To think that the Sweated (improvident elves!) Are, at the bottom, to blame themselves! They're poor of spirit, and weak of will, They marry early, have little skill; They herd together, all sexes and ages, And take too tamely starvation ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various

... the broad, handsome avenue as the merry group broke up. Happy children, their dear little bodies tastefully clothed and their dear little faces wreathed in smiles, flitted about here and there at play, like pretty elves. Now and then some one or more of them would run, with shouts of glee, to welcome ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington

... eyes of hers! Drenched irises. And they used to dance like elves of delight. And all through a foolish misunderstanding about a shark. What a tragedy misunderstandings are. That pretty romance broken and over just because Mr. Glossop would insist ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... mother's side, while she and her maids spun the wool of the last clipping. She was a fair woman out of the Western Isles, all brown and golden as it seemed to him, and her voice was softer than the hard ringing speech of the Wick folk. She told him island stories about gentle fairies and good-humoured elves who lived in a green windy country by summer seas, and her air would be wistful as if she thought of her lost home. And she sang him to sleep with crooning songs which had the sweetness of the west wind in them. But her maids were a rougher stock, and they ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... both of them!" shouted Cloudesley, as he vigorously laid about him. "Strike for Hay Hill and vengeance! Let them have it, my men! And you, little fellows! Small young gentlemen, with the souls of heroes, and the bodies of elves, who can't strike a very hard blow, aim where your blows will tell! Aim at their faces. This for Fanny! This for Edith!" shouted Cloudesley, raining his strokes right and left, but ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... phenomena that the Society had investigated came into the discussion, and Malone heard quite a lot about the Beyond, the Great Summerland, Spirit Mediums and the hypothetical existence of fairies, goblins and elves. ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett

... nest, robin red-breast! Sing, birds, in every furrow! And from each bill let music shrill Give my fair Love good-morrow! Blackbird and thrush in every bush, Stare, linnet, and cocksparrow, You pretty elves, among yourselves Sing my fair Love good-morrow! To give my Love good-morrow! ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various

... long she was busy at work tending her flowers, bathing them in the fresh morning dew, painting them anew with her delicate fairy brush, or loosening the clay when it pressed too heavily upon their fragile roots; and at night she joined the elves in their merry dance upon the greensward. She was not alone in the great forest; near her were many of her sister fairies, all old friends and playmates. There was the Fairy Primrose in a gown of pale yellow, and Cowslip, who wore a robe of the ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker

... me no surprise or even curiosity. It simply sounded homelike and familiar. I gazed abstractedly out of the window at the brilliant blossoms in the garden, that nodded their heads at me like so many little elves with coloured caps on, but I said nothing. I felt that Cellini watched me keenly ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli

... comparison of the thoroughly popular beliefs of all countries, the beliefs cherished by the non-literary classes whose ballads and fairy tales have only recently been collected, would probably reveal a general identity, concealed by diversity of name, among the 'lesser people of the skies,' the elves, fairies, Cyclopes, giants, nereids, brownies, lamiae. It could then be shown that some of these spirits survive among the lower beings of the mythology of what the Germans call a cultur-volk like the Greeks or Romans. It could also be proved that much of ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... the scene, a faint glow filtered in through the whiteness, and made it all seem a fairy-land. Indeed, was it not? And were not the little swaying mist-wreaths that wavered in at our windows some dainty elves timidly come to give us greeting? All day the fog held, and the sad tolling of the bell went on. Now and then, the calls of the river craft would ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins

... of the word. For he who will himself not to yield to irritability, can hardly avoid paying attention to the subject, and thinking thereon, check himself when vexed. And as I have said, what we summon by Will ere long remains as Habit, even as the Elves, called by a spell, remain ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland

... traceable to the same source, 'the fact being that Celt and Saxon, Scandinavian and Goth, Lapp and Finn, had their "duergar," their "elfen" without number, such as dun-elfen, berg-elfen, munt-elfen, feld-elfen, sae-elfen and waeter-elfen—elves or spirits of downs, hills and mountains, of the fields, of the woods, of the sea, and of the rivers, streams and solitary pools—fairies, in short, and a complete fairy mythology, long centuries before Peter the Hermit was born, ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor

... should really be spelled, Aelfred, [Footnote: That is, the rede or councel of the elves. A great many Old-English names are called after the elves or fairies.] was the youngest son of King Aethelwulf, and was born at Wantage in Berkshire in 849. His mother was Osburh daughter of Oslac the King's cup-bearer, ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... observance of All Hallows Eve has been considerably distorted during the course of years but the fun it affords the young folks in its present manner of keeping cannot be gainsaid and needs no changing. Halloween is the night when a magic spell enthrals the earth. Witches, bogies, brownies and elves are all abroad to use their power. Superstition proves true, witchery is recognized and the future may be read in a ...
— Armour's Monthly Cook Book, Volume 2, No. 12, October 1913 - A Monthly Magazine of Household Interest • Various

... distant, dark, chaotic land, of which Utgard was the chief seat. Midgard, or the earth, the abode of man, was represented as a disk in the midst of a vast ocean; its caverns and recesses were peopled with elves and dwarfs, and around it lay coiled the huge Midgard Serpent. Muspelheim, or Flameland, and Nifelheim or Mistland, lay without the organized universe, and were the material regions of light and darkness, the antagonism of which had produced the universe with its gods and men. Nifelheim ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... and Philip, or sturdy and straight like Tom; but he was a very happy little boy all the same, after a strange, quiet fashion of his own, and he liked best of all to be alone with Norah in the woods or by the river, when they would make up all sorts of fancies about queer little elves and fairies who, they said, lived in the trees or bushes, and in the sticklebacks' nests in ...
— The Gap in the Fence • Frederica J. Turle

... look through and over the lattice-work which separates the regions of the natural and the supernatural. She had firm faith in midnight revels in the woods, held by those elves, fairies, and satyrs who come down to us from the dim and shaded life of earlier ages, and whose existence she had eagerly accepted when I hinted its possibility. Her theory of the mutability of species exceeded Darwin's; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... very soothing to the eye. All at once I saw approaching a set of the most beautiful little people, so little that they would only have reached to my knee; they looked like men and women, but they were better proportioned. They called themselves Elves, and their garments were composed of the leaves of flowers, trimmed with the wings of gnats and flies—not at all ugly. They seemed as if they were searching for something—what I did not know; but when they came a little nearer to me their leader tapped my sausage-stick, and said, 'This ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen

... shadows, gray but luminous," he calls them. He seems never to have asked himself the question how far these visions were pure illusions, but believed and trusted them implicitly. To him all nature was a vast spiritual symbolism, wherein he saw elves, fairies, devils, angels,—all looking at him in friendship or enmity through the eyes of flowers ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... haunted by something gentle and merry. I went there many a time for company, being much alone. An Indian would have told me that it was the Un a games- suk—the spirit-fairies of the rock and stream. These beings enter far more largely, deeply, and socially into their life or faith than elves or fairies ever did into those of the Aryan races, and I might well have been their protege, for there could have been few little boys living, so fond as I was of sitting all alone by rock and ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... chorus," the use of talking-birds as messengers; that they would repeat the plots current in other countries, and display the same non-Christian idea of death and of the future world (see "The Lyke-wake Dirge"), the same ghostly superstitions and stories of metamorphosis, and the same belief in elves and fairies, as are found in the ballads of Greece, of Provence, of Brittany, Denmark and Scotland. We shall now examine these supposed common notes of all genuine popular song, supplying a few out ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... of this class which we have selected, "The Wood of Tontla,"[135] is specially interesting from its resemblance to Tieck's well-known German story of "The Elves," which must originally have been derived from the same ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby

... hall tingled a chime, sweet almost playful music for the elves of midnight and a challenge to baser intruders. Jane must have dozed when she suddenly became ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft

... varied accentuation of the verses is striking; and would any one convince himself of the variety of which this measure is capable, let him try to read this passage, and the speech of Prospero, beginning "Ye elves of hills," to the same tune. In ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... stopped short. He took off his cap and ran his hand through his thick, light hair. He was too old to believe in fairies or elves. But he heard the voice again even more distinctly. "Oh, don't go away! Do ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers

... thy breath upon my cheek; I vainly searched for words I long'd to speak, But could not utter lest the sound thereof Should scare away the elves that wait on love. And when I spoke to thee 'twas of the spot Where we were seated,—things that matter'd not,— Uncared for things,—the weather,—the new laws! And, sudden-loud, ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay

... Tai-yue suggested, whereupon Pao-yue prosecuted his raillery. "In this Lin Tzu cave," he said, "there was once upon a time a whole swarm of rat-elves. In some year or other and on the seventh day of the twelfth moon, an old rat ascended the throne to discuss matters. 'Tomorrow,' he argued, 'is the eighth of the twelfth moon, and men in the world ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... you are in danger the cat will come and tell us—only elves and pigeons, which fly round your window, ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various

... into biblical phrases. In the market they were strange enough, dead and on the marble slabs, or in green leaves, but in the lagoon they were a kaleidoscope of complexions and shapes. They were the lovely elves to complement the fantastic shellfish, yellow, striped with violet; bright turquoise, with a gold collar; gold, with broad bands of black terminating in winglike fins; scarlet, with cobalt polka-dots; ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... winter our brook had a new charm: it ran beneath a roof of ice, often mounded with snow; its voice sounding cheerful as ever in those inscrutable caverns, as if it discoursed secret wonders of fairy-land, and carried treasures of the elves and gnomes. Zero, with his utmost rigors, could not still its speech for a day or fix his grip upon those elastic limbs. Indeed, the frosty god conspired with it for our delight; building crystal bridges, with tracery ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... the ages' gain, the ages' loss, A wealth of wonders and so much away— When now hears one the woodland elves at play, Or angry dryads where tall tree-tops toss. No more they lightly tread the dewy moss As danced they through cool haunts in ecstasy; But rank and lost the paths in lone decay Where fairy footsteps once were wont ...
— The Rose-Jar • Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones

... resources of recent art could not render more genuinely marine; fountains disclosed the most bewitching of Naiads; and Druidical oaks, expanding, surrendered the imprisoned Hamadryad to the air of heaven. Fairies and Elves, Satyrs and Forsters, Centaurs and Lapithae, played their parts in these gaudy spectacles with every conventional requirement of shape, costume, and behavior point-de-vice, and were supplied by the poet, to whom the letter-press of the show had been confided, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... stood still, realizing the peril to which the children had exposed themselves. Without doubt their immunity was due to their very audacity. Apparently the boar had not connected these fearless mites with human beings whom he knew to be vulnerable, but had fancied them sportive elves, against whom his tusks would be powerless. Peggy registered a vow not to let Dorothy out of her sight again while the ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith

... Caroline's story of elves, and was quite sure that her head was filled with them, for she felt as if she wanted to shake Millicent, and at the thought that her dear "Martha" was really lost ...
— A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony • Alice Turner Curtis

... black braced helmlets For the wild elves' heads of the wild waves wrought. As flowers on the sea are her small green realmlets, Like heavens made out of a child's heart's thought; But these as thorns of her desolate places, Strong fangs that fasten and hold lives fast: ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... stood the village of Allathurion; and there was peace between the people of that village and all the folk who walked in the dark ways of the wood, whether they were human or of the tribes of the beasts or of the race of the fairies and the elves and the little sacred spirits of trees and streams. Moreover, the village people had peace among themselves and between them and their lord, Lorendiac. In front of the village was a wide and grassy space, and beyond this the great wood again, but at the back the trees ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany

... compel him to retract the ungracious thought. To be plain, he is not desirous of any higher honorary distinction than the good opinion of his readers. And now, sons and daughters of Fashion! ye cameleon race of giddy elves, who flutter on the margin of the whirlpool, or float upon the surface of the silvery stream, and, hurried forwards by the impetus of the current, leave yourselves but little time for reflection, one glance will convince you that you are addressed by an old acquaintance, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... as he descended the stairs. "Before I would call that gray carle my father, or his child my wife, may I feel all the hammers of the elves and sprites he keeps tortured within that ugly little prison-house playing a death's march on my body! Holy Saint Dunstan, the timbrel-girls came in time! They say these wizards always have fair daughters, and their ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... back to my cabin in the woods," she said, solemnly, and with her finger up, "I shall whistle all the fairy folk into a ring, all the elves and the pixies, and the little brown gnomes who burrow in the leaves and look for all the world like pine cones, and I shall tell them what you did, and to-night they will come to your cabin, and will pinch you black and blue, and stick thorns into you, and rub you with the poison leaf ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... brought back at once the little crib, or the watered blue moreen canopy of the big four-poster to which I was sometimes lifted for a change; even the scrawly pattern of the paper, which my weary eyes made into purple elves perpetually pursuing crimson ones, the foremost of whom always turned upside down; and the knobs in the Marseilles counterpane with which my fingers used to toy. I have heard my mother tell that whenever I was most languid and suffering I used to whine out, 'O do read Frank and ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge

... "on so fair a night as this, methinks, the old fables and romances might well be true that tell of elves that dance on moony nights, and of shapely nymphs and lovely dryads that are the spirits of the trees. Aye, in the magic of so fair a night as this ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... Some are groping for shells or for pebbles, which the lapidary will transform for a trifle into dazzling jewels; others are playing ducks and drakes on the waves, or entertaining themselves like Prospero's elves, ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine

... brown woods, limpid, serene, Puffing its fans the Nautilus went its way, And from a hundred salt and weedy shelves Peered little horned faces of sea-elves: The prawn darted, half-seen, Thro' watery sunlight, like a pale green ray, And all around, from soft green waving bowers, Creatures like fruit out-crept ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... so heavily, I pray; Like elephants you're treading! And 'mong the elves be Puck to-day, The stoutest at ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, and ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... When people had banished the old professional clown from the stage, they felt the necessity of running about themselves as clowns. The sober, enlightened age protested against the old folk-tales with goblins, gnomes, elves, and other kindred sprites, but, to make up for it, thousands of living caricatures played in their own rooms the part of goblins and gnomes, and lady shepherdesses appropriated the roles of the elves, nixies, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... our children laugh at him who slew Babylon's winged bulls and smote great numbers of the elves and fairies, when he is shorn of his ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany

... arnium fishing bumps. Got them us elves. Tooking longthier, more hurtful, but can. Few don't gives high dragon bump tweddy far whores, ...
— High Dragon Bump • Don Thompson

... toiling With wild white roses' bloom— No printers' vats a-boiling Nor labour of the loom— With fern and foxglove chalice On tiny feet or wings Titania's elves made sallies, And that's how Lady Alice Had on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various

... greatest of his physical fears—greater even than that of drowning which sometimes whelmed him in dreams and on ships—was the dread of empty space; a touch of vertigo seized him; the enemy gathered round the torch beneath suddenly seemed elves, puny impossible things far off, and he almost slipped into their midst. But he dragged back his senses. "We must all die," he gasped, "but we need not be precipitate about the business," and shut his eyes as he stood up, and with feet upon the moulding stretched to gain grip of the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... terrible deity, the tyrant of the elves and fairies, who must all appear before him once every five years to give ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Heights and Jane Eyre must have read and drawn upon for many things, names (including her own pseudonym of Currer Bell), descriptions of scenery, local legends, as of that fairy Jannet, Queen of the Malhamdale Elves, who haunted the sources of the Aire and suggested Rochester's Queen of Elves, his fairy, Janet Eyre. Parallel passages are given showing a certain correspondence between Montagu's traveller's tale and the opening scene of Wuthering Heights. Montagu ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... and in mourning for an uncle who had taken his life. Now you know my family! That's the stock I come from. Once I narrowly escaped fourteen years' hard labour—so I've every reason to thank the elves, though I can't be altogether ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... more puzzling than professing it. She was a queer card. She wore a green velvet dress barred with grey fur, which I should have called artistic, but that she hated all the talk about art; and she had an attractive face, which I should have called elvish, but that she hated all the talk about elves. But what was arresting and almost blood-curdling about her, in that social atmosphere, was not so much that she hated it, as that she was entirely unaffected by it. She never knew what was meant by being "under the influence" ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... Sir Bedivere and spake: "O me, my King, let pass whatever will, Elves, and the harmless glamour of the field; But in their stead thy name and glory cling To all high places like a golden cloud For ever: but as yet thou shalt not pass. Light was Gawain in life, and light in death Is Gawain, for ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... sparkling, dew-drenched grass. It was, as I have said in the introduction to this book, a large part of childhood's radiant romance! What tales our fancy wove into the fairy-rings under the elm-trees! We lifted each moist fungus half expecting to see the brownies and the elves fly from beneath it! And what fearsome care we took to include no single hypocritical toadstool among our treasures! I am really afraid that Mr. Chesterton would have been less conscientious. Mushrooms and toadstools are all alike to him. He can never have had such ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham

... singular and interesting string of fragments handed down from times long anterior to the Reformation, when they had been employed as armour of proof by the credulous vulgar against the Robin Goodfellows, urchins, elves, hags, and fairies of earlier superstition. I regret that I cannot throw more light upon it. The concluding lines are not deficient ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts

... Helena to Hermia, or Titania's description of her fairy train, or her disputes with Oberon about the Indian boy, or Puck's account of himself and his employments, or the Fairy Queen's exhortation to the elves to pay due attendance upon her favourite, Bottom; or Hippolita's description of a chace, or Theseus's answer? The two last are as heroical and spirited as the others are full of luscious tenderness. The reading of this play is like wandering in a grove by moonlight: the descriptions breathe a sweetness ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... fate of the elves is nearly the same As the terrible fate of men; To love, to rue, to be, and pursue A flickering wisp of the fen. We must play the game with a careless smile, Though there's nothing in the hand; We must toil as if it were worth our while Spinning our ropes of sand; And laugh, and cry, ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... cheered himself as he rode on by calling to mind some of the beautiful stories of the old religion of his land. He thought of the elves and fairies who were said to dwell in these very forests, and at midnight to creep up from their hiding-places and gambol and play tricks among the flowers and dewdrops with the wild bees and the summer insects, or dance ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed

... Odin, Thor and the other deities did not lose their adherents in a day, and Bede records the relapses into idolatry of Northumbria as well as the other parts of England. There can be no doubt that fairies and elves entered largely into the mythology of the Anglo-Saxons, and the firmness of the beliefs in beings of that nature can be easily understood when we realise that it required no fewer than twelve centuries of Christianity ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home

... Metaphysiques, and Miracles, and Traditions, and Abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else, but to execute what they command them. The Fairies likewise are said to take young Children out of their Cradles, and to change them into Naturall Fools, which Common people do therefore call Elves, and are ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... weigh out the innumerable and delicate bits of pleasantry which give the charm to social life! The words to relate the legends connected with the knights and castles of chivalry, saints, witches, elves, spooks, and gypsies, the foreigners among us never acquire, or at least never so as to have the ready and delicate use of them in social life, until their foreign character has become quite absorbed in the fully developed American, and the taste, if not the material for picturing the customs and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... dewy branches; crystal streams lisping through banks purple with violets, rosy with eglantine, or sweet with wild thyme; thickets where the rabbits hide; sequestered nooks on which the elms and alders throw long shadows; circles of green grass made by dancing elves; rounded hills shut in by oaks, pines, birches, and laurel, where shepherds pipe on oaten straws, or shag-haired satyrs frolic and sleep; and meadows, whose carpets of cowslip and mint are freshened daily by nymphs pouring out gentle streams from crystal urns. Every now and then, huntsmen ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... margin of his brief: "Recipe for obtaining good title for ejectment: two or three void patents, several ex parte surveys, one or two acts of usurpation acquiesced in for the time but afterwards proved such. Mix well with half a dozen scriptural allusions, some ghosts, fairies, elves, hobgoblins, and a quantum suff. of eloquence." Hamilton also originated the practice of preparing "Points," ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... afraid of meeting fairies or elves. There are glades and hollows that used to seem very wonderful. And they still seem very wonderful, only not quite in the same way. Doesn't the world seem very wonderful to you? I'm always wondering at things. ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore

... true—are nevertheless substantial creatures, whose loves and jokes and quarrels receive our thorough sympathy; and the air they breathe—the lords and the ladies, no less than the mechanics and the elves—is instinct with an exquisite good-humour, which makes us as happy as the night is long. To turn from Theseus and Titania and Bottom to the Enchanted Island, is to step out of a country lane into a conservatory. The roses and the dandelions have vanished before preposterous ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... things to seem very lifeless. But the phantoms of Tasso, he would fain make realities; he works at every detail of character, history, or geography, which may make his people real; they are not, as with Spenser, elves and wizards flitting about in a nameless fairyland, characterless and passionless; they are historical creatures, captains and soldiers in a country mapped out by the geographer; but they are phantoms ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... ceremonies, gave the order to form in line; and at ten minutes to eleven the splendid procession started for the church. The road was lined with the King's vassals shouting, "Hurrah, hurrah!" Countless little elves with gauzy wings watched from the branches of the trees; and the great cathedral bells went clang, bang, clang, as merrily ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston

... circumstances. They have no brilliant sun and moon to addle the brain and poison the eye, but the grey north has its marshes, and fenny ground, and fetid mists, which produce agues, low fevers, and moping madness, and are as fatal to cattle as to man. Such disorders are attributed to elves and fairies. This superstition still lingers in some parts of England under the name of elf-shot, whilst, throughout the north, it is called elle-skiod, and elle- vild (fairy wild). It is particularly prevalent amongst shepherds and ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... it not," answered the Wise One, shaking his head. "Only the Elf of the Borderland can bestow this upon you, for he alone, together with his elves, possesses the secret of its making. Moreover it must be woven in the presence of him who is to wear it; otherwise it has no power. Go to him and ask it. He will not refuse you. Creeping Shadow, who knows where he is to be found, will guide ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield

... self-assuming elves, Brimful of pride, of nothing, of yourselves, Survey Eugenio, view him o'er and o'er, Then sink into yourselves, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... Eurydike from the shades of death. In our Western fairy tales we still have these Ribhus, or Arbhus, transformed, through various changes of language, into Albs, and Elfen, and last into our English Elves. It is not needful to go further into the fanciful way in which the old Aryans slowly made ever-increasing deities and superhuman beings for themselves out of all the forms and aspects of Nature; or how their Hindu and Persian and Greek and Teuton descendants ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce

... fire,—through the shifting Cloud-halls of calm and storm, Pour down thy blossoms! let me hear them come, Pelting with noiseless light the twinkling thickets, Making the darkness audible with the hum Of many insect creatures, grigs and crickets: Until it seems the elves hold revelries By haunted stream and grove; Or, in the night's deep peace, The young-old presence of Earth's full increase Seems telling thee her love, Ere, lying down, she turns to rest, and smiles, Hearing thy heart beat through ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein

... doctrine; comic incidents from the old ballads are reproduced; and so the episode ends merrily of these frolics in the wood. At that point a delicious fairy pageant is introduced, presenting Queen Titania and her elves and illustrating at once the grievance of the fairies against the men whose heavy feet have crushed their toads and bats and flowers and mystic rings, and Marian's dream of love. Sir Arthur Sullivan's music is here again used, and again it is felt ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... two are identical, but there is promise that the theory may be proved at some later date when the subject is more fully worked out. It is now a commonplace of anthropology that the tales of fairies and elves preserve the tradition of a dwarf race which once inhabited Northern and Western Europe. Successive invasions drove them to the less fertile parts of each country which they inhabited, some betook ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray

... and on Raphael and Michel Angelo,—and two comedies by Gustav zu Putlitz. There is also Von Eichendorff's best novel, which in Berlin went through four editions in a year, "Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts," or "Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing,"—and, finally, Tieck's well-known story of "The Elves," and his "Tragedy of Little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... ungainly things that would rouse disdain and laughter and even pity, at anything at once so weak and so malevolent. But they are not like the demons of sin that can hamper and wound; they are just little gnomes and elves that can make a noise, and their strength is a spiteful ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... little king and queen of sprites there happened, at this time, a sad disagreement: they never met by moonlight in the shady walks of this pleasant wood, but they were quarrelling, till all their fairy elves would creep into acorn-cups ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... alongside which the road ran in a brown, winding thread, were little wooded and grassy promontories sitting like islands upon the water and suggesting the last peaceful reservation of all the fairies, wood-elves and brownies who might be crowded out from the cities and the busy lands now over-run and exploited by the ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... sky spread over with wings, And a mild Sun that mounts & sings; With trees & fields full of Fairy elves, And little ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon

... this old Hampshire park. Three great avenues of them run round a triangle half a mile across, and outside the shade of their black branches the purple heather and waving bracken form a carpet fit for elves and fairies. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... ever remember, as we wandered in the park-lands, she began to say—half unthinking—that it was truly an elves-night. And she stopped herself immediately; as though she thought I should have no understanding; but, indeed, I was upon mine own familiar ground of inward delight; and I replied in a quiet and usual voice, that the Towers of Sleep would grow that night, and I felt ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson

... play And light the breakers dance, The Oreads from the caves With silvery elves advance; And up from ocean stream, And down from heaven far, The rays that blend in dream The abysm ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... story Of Santa Claus: once, so they say, He set out to see what people were kind, Before he took presents their way. 'This year I will give but to givers, To those who make presents themselves,' With a nod of his head old Santa Claus said To his band of bright officer-elves. ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... so much better that day, that the good doctor, when he came, was astonished; and when he heard that the fairies had done him the honor to take him to their Midsummer festival, he was delighted, as well as astonished, and laughingly declared that the elves had robbed him of his patient. "Why, Charley," he continued, "if the fairy Queen can put such a rosy color in your cheeks, and such a sparkle in your eyes in one night, she beats me all to pieces at doctoring. I shall ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow

... over-refined sensibility: he need not have feared the demon, as no good man need fear Satan. His pen ceased to convey his sentiments; he sickened at heart; and after his body had been covered by the green grass turf, the gentle elves of fairy-land took care to weave a chaplet to hang upon his tomb, which was never to know decay! SYCORAX was this demon; and a cunning and clever demon ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... Christmas fairies stealing Rows of little socks to fill? Are they angels floating hither With their message of good-will? What sweet spell are these elves weaving, As like larks they chirp and sing? Are these palms of peace from heaven That these lovely ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various

... you don't mind," he said, "I prefer this path. I like the sweep of the hill to the right. These vast stretches of grass at this hour always make me feel that I am walking on the edge of a carpet, on which the elves and the fairies are ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici

... with the knaves and the maids, and listened to their harp-playing, and harp they can, these Cornish, like very elves; and then I, too, sang songs and told them stories, for I can talk their tongue somewhat, till they all blest me for a right good fellow. And then I fell to praising up old Ironhook ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... employments distinctly feminine. He forebore comment, however, and presently struck down a road which wound into a little suburb peopled by Polish quarry-workers. It was essentially an alien community in whose straggling streets and lanes one heard English but seldom. Tow-headed children, shy elves peeping from odd hiding-places, swarmed a half-dozen and upward to a house. Work was the key-note of Little Poland, as it was called. While the men toiled in the sandstone quarries the women did a man's stint ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... time, for The Seven Castles Of The Diamond Lake was as brilliant and wonderful as heart could wish. But in spite of the comical red imps, sparkling elves, and the gorgeous princes and princesses, Jo's pleasure had a drop of bitterness in it. The fairy queen's yellow curls reminded her of Amy, and between the acts she amused herself with wondering what her sister would ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... light laugh and little snatches and echoes of gay talk came back like heartless elves ...
— Betty's Bright Idea; Deacon Pitkin's Farm; and The First Christmas - of New England • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... a Fairy Tale that's new: How the merry Elves o'er the ocean flew From the Emerald isle to this far-off shore, As they were wont in the days of yore; And played their pranks one moonlit night, Where the zephyrs alone could see ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich

... to Fairies is "Ellyll," an elf, a demon, a goblin. This name conveys these beings to the land of spirits, and makes them resemble the oriental Genii, and Shakespeare's sportive elves. It agrees, likewise, with the modern popular creed respecting ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... arrange their gods when the time comes to do so, after the pattern of an Aryan patriarchal establishment, the father at the head, his sons and daughters near him, the servants in attendance, the unorganised host of spirits, nymphs and elves, outside. But to know the original character of the religion it is less important to ask how the pantheon is arranged, than what gods are worshipped, and how they are related to man. And the point which stands ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... Betty suddenly. She was walking ahead with Alice Waite. "I can see two people. They're stooping over the fire. Why, Alice, it's two dear little brown elves." ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde

... boy had heard stories about elves, but he had never dreamed that they were such tiny creatures. He was no taller than a hand's breadth—this one, who sat on the edge of the chest. He had an old, wrinkled and beardless face, and was dressed in a black frock coat, knee-breeches and a broad-brimmed black hat. He was very trim and ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof

... all that afternoon, for Psyche sat in the orchard drawing squirrels on the wall, pert robins hopping by, buttercups and mosses, elves and angels; while May lay contentedly enjoying sun and air, sisterly care, and the "pretty things" she loved so well. Psyche did not find the task a hard one; for this time her heart was in it, and if she needed any reward she surely ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott

... mountains, where the fairies and goblins live, or the forests, which belong to the brownies and elves, or the valleys, where the sunbeams play, or the caves, where the wind-voices hide, or—I do b'lieve she's asleep. Yes, sir! Both eyes are tight shut, and she has dropped the foxglove she was ...
— At the Little Brown House • Ruth Alberta Brown

... cut, Were shaven and sheared, And mingled in with holy mead, And sent upon wide ways enow; Some abide with the Elves, Some abide with the Aesir, Or with the wise Vanir, Some still hold the sons ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous

... it known, To all who bend before your throne, Fays and fairies, elves and sprites, Beauteous dames and gallant knights, That we, Oberon the grand, Emperor of fairy land, King of moonshine, prince of dreams, Lord of Aganippe's streams, Baron of the dimpled isles That lie in pretty maidans' smiles, Arch-treasurer of all the graces ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... last work on the easel—a beautiful fresh smiling shape of Titania, such as his sweet guileless fancy imagined the Midsummer Night's queen to be. Gracious, and pure, and bright, the sweet smiling image glimmers on the canvas. Fairy elves, no doubt, were to have been grouped around their mistress in laughing clusters. Honest Bottom's grotesque head and form are indicated as reposing by the side of the consummate beauty. The darkling forest would have grown around them, with the stars glittering from the midsummer ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... How could I take real live little girls into the kingdom of the elves and gnomes and pixies? ...
— Jimmy, Lucy, and All • Sophie May

... Dotted all round this skeleton of what was once a wood, but now merely a few sticks of charred tree trunks, and in and out as far as the eye could see, were scores of tiny fires. The flames danced up and down like elves, and crowded round the fires were groups of our boys, laughing and chatting as if there was no such thing as war. Now and then the flash of the big howitzers momentarily lighted up the ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins

... one respect weakened the hold which Nature has upon our feelings. To the Greeks—to our own ancestors,—every River or Mountain or Forest had not only its own special Deity, but in some sense was itself instinct with life. They were not only peopled by Nymphs and Fauns, Elves and Kelpies, were not only the favourite abodes of Water, Forest, or Mountain Spirits, but they had a conscious ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... form of a circle; at the end of fifteen years some of these circles acquire a diameter of fifteen to twenty feet or more. These are known as fairy rings. Before science dispelled the illusion they were believed to have been the work of witches, elves, or evil spirits, from which ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal

... after time Tord thought that some one went behind him. He often looked round. Sometimes he stopped to listen, but he understood that it was the leaves and the wind, and went on. As soon as he started on again, he heard some one come dancing on silken foot up the slope. Small feet came tripping. Elves and fairies played behind him. When he turned round, there was no one, always no one. He shook his fists at the ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof

... far off,' answered he; 'I just stuck my tail in the stream close by the place where the elves dwell, and the fish hung on ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang

... after- glow. There is plenty of amusement for them on this broad reach of sand and shingle. Some are groping for shells or for pebbles, which the lapidary will transform for a trifle into dazzling jewels; others are playing ducks and drakes on the waves, or entertaining themselves like Prospero's elves, ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine

... them, and see if you can so much as guess their age, their capabilities, or their intentions. I fancy that the difference between the feelings with which they and the fishes inspire us is much the same as that between our mental attitude towards hill-men or house-elves, and towards men ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... know I've seen her sleep like a dormouse through prayers, sermon, and all at Pont de Dronne. Follette is she be, she belongs to the white elves of ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge



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