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More "Elf" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... already quoted, "I owed much to an old maid of my mother's, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country, of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... here except an old peasant woman, who isn't at all likely to make a captive of anyone. But who are you?" she continued, as she twisted in her stall to get a sight of the newcomers. "I am Nils Holgersson from Vemminghoeg, who has been transformed into an elf," replied the first of the incomers, "and I have with me a tame goose, whom I generally ride, and a gray goose." "Such rare guests have never before been within my four walls," said the cow, "and you shall be welcome, although I would have preferred ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... friend,' said Farina. 'I think of whispering Fays, and Elf, and Erl, when their odour steals through me. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... thou, Not to thyself, Mayn’t there be list’ning now Some fairy elf, Silently sitting near Thy dark retreat, Drinking with grateful ear Thy music sweet, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... something more deep and mysterious the feelings which then pervaded me might originate. Who can lie down on Elvir Hill without experiencing something of the sorcery of the place? Flee from Elvir Hill, young swain, or the maids of Elle will have power over you, and you will go elf-wild!—so say the Danes. 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 ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Phelps' patience had come to an end. Sometimes it seemed to her as if this solemn-eyed child purposely misunderstood, and mocked at her attempts to lead unwilling feet along the path of learning, and she was at a loss to know how to deal with the sprightly elf who danced and flitted about like an elusive will-o'-wisp. The fact that she was the University President's granddaughter was the only thing that had saved her thus far from utter disfavor in the eyes of her teacher; but now even that fact was lost sight of in ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... quivered after her, smiling and darkening as she dimpled or was grave. The little whirlwinds of the gulches seized the leaves and danced with her too, the birches and aspens tossed their hands, and rising ever higher and wilder and more elf-like came the mocking cadences ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... in her own proper likeness, unconcealed by bonnet or shawl, or maternal protection. The pinafore scarcely covered her gaunt neck and long arms; that tremendous head of rough, dusky hair was evidently for the first time gathered into a comb. Thence elf locks escaped in all directions, and were forever being pushed behind her ears, or rubbed (not smoothed; there was nothing smooth about her) back from her forehead, which, Hilary noticed, was low, broad, and full. The rest of her face, except the before-mentioned eyes was absolutely ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... my dearest children, when with joy You hail'd your father's safe return to home From his long mountain toils; for, when he came, He ever brought with him some little gift— A lovely Alpine flower—a curious bird— Or elf-bolt, such as on the hills are found. But now he goes in quest of other game, Sits in this gorge, with murder in his thoughts, And for his enemy's life-blood lies in wait. But still it is of you alone he thinks, Dear children. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... friends," said she, "to while away the time till the bright moon goes down, let us each tell a tale, or relate what we have done or learned this day. I will begin with you, Sunny Lock," added she, turning to a lovely little Elf, who lay among the ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... to work, but when he had once passed the line round the farmer's body and the tree, he had no difficulty in finishing the work he had begun. Dancing like an elf with the line in his hand, he spun round and round the tree till the line was wound round to its very last extremity, and the farmer looked like some big bluebottle fly entangled in the fine meshes of a spider's web. Still he slept on, and with a delighted chuckle Teddy sped back ...
— Teddy's Button • Amy Le Feuvre
... whom old stories tell, who gave wisdom to the All-Father in exchange for an eye. He is one of the giants, and he still watches his fountain in far-off Jotunheim.[EN2] I claim kinship with the dwarfs, and am sometimes known as an elf, sometimes as a wood-sprite. Men have called me Mimer because of my wisdom and skill, and the learning which I impart to my pupils. Could I but drink from the fountain of the real Mimer, then the wisdom of the ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... true and not a sham, to the owner at least it must often be a sheer delight, for the elf or "troll" which goes by this name takes such possession of the owner that under his guidance he sees "What man may never see, the star that travels far." "The light" that the poet declares shone on sea or shore, shines for him always, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... invited him to dance a measure, but Sir Oluf declined. She then offered him a pair of gold spurs, a silk doublet, and a heap of gold, if he would dance with her: and when he refused to do so, she struck him "with an elf-stroke." On the morrow, when all the bridal party was assembled, Sir Oluf was found dead in a wood.—A Danish ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... flitting, sparkling as an elf, full to the brim of laughter and light, little Francette was playing the deepest ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... imp, Peregrine Oakshott," said Lucy passionately. "He had a cord across the Slype to trip us up. I heard him laughing like a hobgoblin, and saw him too, grinning over a tombstone like the malicious elf ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fair Elf-child other summers came; But Lilith walked, heart-hungered, filled with shame, Naught comforted. And in that shadow-land She sorrowing bore, in after-time, a band Of elfin babes, that waked dim echoes ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... slowly toward the stairs. Her clinging white skirt made a soft, swishing sound as it brushed the tiled floor, and she herself—with her slender figure, graceful neck and crown of golden curls, looked, as the gloom of evening wrapped her in, more like an intangible elf—an apparition—gliding through space, than just a scornful woman who had thought fit to reject the importunate addresses of ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... reindeer. It bounded forward and struck down an elf who stood in its road. Then his brothers stood in its path, and ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... go to the stud-horses; they had bits with them, and caught the horses that were in the "town" and rode away on them. They found the stud-horses between two brooks. Skarphedinn caught sight of them, for Sigmund was in bright clothing. Skarphedinn said, "See you now the red elf yonder, lads?" They looked that way, and said they ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... was funny and almost witty, and Bert achieved epigrams; the hedges were full of honeysuckle and dog-roses; in the woods the distant toot-toot-toot of the traffic on the dust-hazy high road might have been no more than the horns of elf-land. They laughed and gossiped and picked flowers and made love and talked, and the girls smoked cigarettes. Also they scuffled playfully. Among other things they talked aeronautics, and how thev would come for a picnic together in Bert's flying-machine before ten years were ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... he is an elf, a sprite, a creature of fantasy, who may be—and, I rejoice to say, is—in this world, but certainly is not of it. This Oliver is in the line of Puck and Mercutio and Lamb and Hood and other lovers and makers of nonsense, and it is we who ask for "more." ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... crimsoned with painful humiliation while she read. Philip was not now the trim and dainty stripling first introduced to the reader. He had outgrown his faded suit of funereal mourning; his long-neglected hair hung elf-like and matted down his cheeks; there was a gloomy look in his bright dark eyes. Poverty never betrays itself more than in the features and form of Pride. It was evident that his spirit endured, rather than accommodated itself to, his fallen state; and, notwithstanding ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite forget that child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to "twopence coloured." With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it - crimson lake! - the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear) - with crimson lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded which, for cloaks especially, Titian ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... woman, just the wife for him, and he knows it, and does as she tells him most faithfully and gratefully. They are pattern-folk from top to toe, and so is the boy. But the girl! He would have his way, and named her Phyllis—Fly he calls her. She is a little skittish elf—Rotherwood himself all over; and doesn't he worship her! and doesn't he think it a holiday to carry her off to play pranks with! and isn't he happy to get amongst a good lot of us, and be his old ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "A wildwood elf of scarlet and brown!" thought Philip and hospitably flicked away a twig or so with his handkerchief ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... before they met Eddie Elf, who was singing happily to himself as he walked along. "Willie Woodchuck is whittling on a rattle!" he said, when the ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... great thick woods, and the beings in South Germany who resemble the dwarfs, and are called Wild, Wood, Timber and Moss People.[B] "These generally live together in society, but they sometimes appear singly. They are small in stature, yet somewhat larger than the Elf, being the size of children of three years, grey and old-looking, hairy and clad in moss. Their lives are attached, like those of the Hamadryads, to the trees, and if any one causes by friction the inner bark to loosen, a Wood-woman dies." In Scandinavia there is also a similarity ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... difference made, according to the dignity of the person. By the laws of Ethelbert, any one who committed adultery with his neighbour's wife, was obliged to pay him a fine, and buy him another wife [k]. [FN [i] LL. Elf. Sec. 40. See also, LL. Ethelb. Sec. 34, &c. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... who was not evil—one who would surely befriend the Shadow Witch. It was the Elf—the good Elf, who dwells in the Borderland that stretches beyond the Plain of Ash and away toward the Kingdom of Earth. Very old and wise is the Elf. He knows the ways of the Evil Fairies who dwell in the countries that lie away from ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... "school was out," James's spirits foamed over as naturally as a tumbler of soda water, and he could jump over benches and burst out of doors with as much rapture as the veriest little elf in his company. Then you might have seen him stepping homeward with a most felicitous expression of countenance, occasionally reaching his hand through the fence for a bunch of currants, or over it after a flower, or bursting into some back yard to help ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... whom we bow Has given its pledge that, if not now, They of pure and steadfast mind, By faith exalted, truth refined, Shall hear all music loud and clear, Whose first notes they ventured here. Then fear not thou to wind the horn, Though elf and gnome thy courage scorn; Ask for the castle's King and Queen; Though rabble rout may rush between, Beat thee senseless to the ground, In the dark beset thee round; Persist to ask, and it will come; Seek not for rest in humbler home; So shalt thou see, what few have seen, The palace home ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... devil was travelling abroad in a German carriage. To describe the son of the Cup-Bearer himself would be a long story; suffice it to say that he seemed to us an ape or a parrot in a great peruke, which he liked to compare to the Golden Fleece, and we to elf-locks.19 At that time even if any one felt that the Polish costume was more comely than this aping of a foreign fashion, he kept silent, for the young men would have cried out that he was hindering culture, that he was checking progress, that he was a traitor. Such at ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... or else set up on end, as is represented in old paintings, in a manner resembling that used by fine gentlemen of our own day, escaped in sable negligence from under a furred bonnet, and hung in elf-locks, which seemed strangers to the comb, over his rugged brows, and around his very singular and unprepossessing countenance. His keen, dark eyes were deep set beneath broad and shaggy eyebrows, and as they were usually bent on the ground, seemed as if they ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... around the floor in the idle designs of sand, floating like scraps of colored paper through a smooth wind heavy with music as the hours run away like light water through the fingers. But outside the house the Italian gardens are open, little lanterns spot them like elf-lights, shining on hedge-green, pale marble; the night is pallid with near and crowded stars, the air warm as Summer water, sweet as ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... look at Treherne. He stood gazing, his head a little bent, and one of his black elf-locks had fallen forward over his forehead. And again she had the sense of a shadow over the grass; she almost felt as if the grass were a host of fairies, and that the ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... Byrhflaed, Wulfthryth, Wulfrun. It is worthy of note that none of these, and only one of the remaining seventeen nuns, namely, Godgyfu, had a scriptural or Christian name. The old names common among their heathen ancestors still survived, no less than ten being compounded of the word AElf, the modern Elf, or mountain spirit. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... sit down in the pit And see you flit like elf or fairy Across the stage, and I'll engage No moonbeam sprite were half so airy. Lo! everywhere about me there Were rivals reeking with pomatum, And if perchance they caught a glance In song or dance, how ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... His servant-maids and dogs grew dull; His kitten, late a sportive elf; The woods and lakes, so beautiful, 740 Of dim stupidity were full. All grew ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... want?" Uncertain steps not long after sounded along the creaking passage; the door was opened, and presented to the impatient glance of the new proprietor the visage of the grumbling Gael. He was an old decrepit man, with bright ferocious eyes gleaming through his elf-locks. If he had succeeded in making a "swap" of his habiliments with any scarecrow south of the Tay, he would have had by far the best of the bargain, for his whole toilet consisted in a coarse blue kilt or petticoat (for it had none of the checkers that give a showy appearance to the kilt); ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... cairns and barrows, occur elsewhere; and there is said to be a specimen of a circular mound, with successive terraces, resembling the tynewalds, or judgment-seats, of the Isle of Man, and almost unique in the Western Islands. Stone and brass hatchet-shaped weapons or celts, elf-shots or flint arrow-heads, and brass fibulae, have ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... The dazzled laverock climbs the golden steep: Marian is waiting: is Robin Hood asleep? Round the fairy grass-rings frolic elf and fay, In Sherwood, in Sherwood, ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... locks—distressingly shaggy and unkempt—he wore no hat, and he looked like a brownie, grotesque, though somewhat sad. But even more did he resemble an ape—or say the missing link—and only his eyes seemed human. These were large, dark and brilliant, sparkling like jewels under his elf-locks. He sat cross-legged on the sward and hugged a fiddle, as though he were nursing a baby. And, no doubt, he was as attached to his instrument as any mother could be to her child. It was not difficult for Miss Greeby to guess that this weird, hairy dwarf was the Servian gypsy Kara, of ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... stings misfortune flings Can give me little pain When my narcotic spell has wrought This quiet in my brain: When I can waste the past in taste So luscious and so ripe That like an elf I hug myself; And so I smoke ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... creature that you beheld three years back? I think not. Whither, then, has the sprite vanished? In some hidden fairy nook, in some mysterious cloud-land he must exist still. Again, in your slim-formed girl of eight years, you look in vain for the sturdy elf of five. Gone? No; that cannot be—'a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.' Close your eyes: you have her there! A breeze-like, sportive, buoyant thing; a thing of breathing, laughing, unmistakable life; she is mirrored on your retina as plainly as ever was dancing sunbeam on a brook. The very trick ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... Elsie Moss danced like a fairy. Her cheeks glowed, her dark eyes shone, her dimples twinkled, her feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground. Her red hat was like a poppy-cup, and the dark hair tumbling about her little face, elf-locks. ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... morning: Or flush'd Aurora in the roseate dawning! Or a white Naiad in a rippling stream; Or a rapt seraph in a moonlight beam; Or again witness what with thee I've seen, The dew by fairy feet swept from the green, After a night of some quaint jubilee Which every elf and fay had come to see: When bright processions took their airy march Beneath ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... cap, and a pair of green spectacles, which he had assumed, probably, less for the preservation of his eyes, than for the dignity that they imparted to his countenance. In either case, however, he might as well have let then alone; for Huckleberry, a mischievous little elf, crept behind Eustace as he sat on the steps of the porch, snatched the spectacles from his nose, and clapped them on her own; and as the student forgot to take them back, they fell off into the grass, and lay there till ...
— The Gorgon's Head - (From: "A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her to be a woman because of her clothes. Otherwise she seems to be a mixture of a boy and wood-elf. The combination appears to me to be a fascinating one. She is of good family, half Irish, speaks three languages, asks no questions, and seems to have an extraordinary capacity for holding her tongue. It is on that account that I questioned her sex. Her appearance ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... with bracken-fronds, And golden elf-locks fly above; Her eyes are bright as diamonds And bluer ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... cantons, flaunting with plumes and emblazoned surcoats, the chivalry of France, splendid with silk mantles and gilded corselets, the Scotch guard in their wild costume of kilt and philibeg, the scythe-like halberds of the German lanz-knechts, the tangled elf-locks of stern-featured Bretons, stamped an ineffaceable impression on the people of the South. On this memorable occasion, as in a show upon some holiday, marched past before them specimens and vanguards of all those legioned races which were soon to be too well at home in every fair ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... was about to inquire, in a whisper, who they could be, when I observed him glance up at the top of the wall above us. I turned my eyes in the same direction, and then I saw, by the light of the fire, the elf-like locks and red-coloured countenance of a wild Indian, who was gazing down upon us. He looked as much surprised to find us there as we were to ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... stopped with his bow raised; for a moment they all stared at me, transfixed. It was a little elf in blue indienne who jumped first and ran down the street, crying the news in a shrill voice, the others following, the fiddler gazing stupidly after them. Suddenly he scrambled up, moaning, as if the scourge itself had fastened on him, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pinafore, his yellow hair flying in the breeze, his chin up, his black eyes wide open, with slate in one hand, his pencil in the other, and the sandy kitten clinging to his shoulder (for Jan never lowered his chin to help her to balance herself), he looked more like some elf ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... out," he said. "Trust you to get telepathic messages from the elf-folk! Why, this gorge teems with fairy tales and legends of magic, black and white. The Rhine Valley and the Black Forest together haven't as many or as wonderful ones. I should like you to hear the stories from some of the village people or the boatmen. They believe ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... I did in my life: there was nothing indeed in the gipsy's appearance to trouble one's calm. She shut her book and slowly looked up; her hat-brim partially shaded her face, yet I could see, as she raised it, that it was a strange one. It looked all brown and black: elf- locks bristled out from beneath a white band which passed under her chin, and came half over her cheeks, or rather jaws: her eye confronted me at once, with a ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... thing," and was predestined to marry some large, good-natured man who would imagine that she would make a nice little pet, a household fairy, but who might learn to his dismay that the fairy could be a tormenting elf. She would not marry the young gentleman with whom her name was at present associated by the gossips, and who had driven over that morning to help her entertain the expected guests. Mr. Harcourt and Miss ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... trace it in relation to ethics. But I need not remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central in orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God. Now let me trace this notion ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... wonders a glorious Banquet had he prepared; to that bade the prince of men All his noblest thanes. That with mickle haste 10 Did the warriors-with-shields perform; came to the mighty chief The people's leaders going. On the fourth day was that After that Judith, cunning in mind, The elf-sheen virgin, ...
— Elene; Judith; Athelstan, or the Fight at Brunanburh; Byrhtnoth, or the Fight at Maldon; and the Dream of the Rood • Anonymous
... to a whistled call Hearkens his ready ear, Scarcely waiting to hear; Silk locks, white feet, all Rush, like a furry elf Tumbling over himself. ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... sweet, serious, timid and a little slow, and Dorothy Rose—a sparkling brunette, quick, elf-like, high tempered, full of mischief and always getting ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... vixen?" went on the speaker, addressing her husband, the Tio Pedro, who sat with her behind the counter of a small tobacconist's shop—an ugly beldame, shrank and shrivelled, with grey elf-locks, sunk cheeks, and parchment complexion, looking ninety, yet little more than half that age. Women ripen early, are soon at their prime, and fade prematurely, under this ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... death. Sir Kasimir had not retained the pledge of his own ill-omened wedlock; but, in the midst of the dilemma, the Emperor, producing his dagger, began to detach some of the massive gold links of the chain that supported his hunting-horn. "There," said he, "the little elf of a bride can get her finger into this lesser one and you—verily this largest will fit, and the goldsmith can beat it out when needed. So on with you in St. Hubert's name, ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... teeth, And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath. He had a broad face, and a little round belly That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly. He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf, And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself. A wink of his eye and a twist of his head Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread. He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, And filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk, And ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris
... by their Bonne, in Norman cap, Affect to take their first-born to their lap— To gaze enraptured, think you, on a face, In which a husband's lineaments they trace? Smiling, to win the notice of their elf? No! but to draw the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... things I have written When I knew that my heart was my own, But since I confess I am smitten, Read these little verses alone. And sincerely I trust I'll be able To convince you, you sly little elf, To grant me your heart, little Mabel, And learn what it feels ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... Made with her right a comb of pearl to part The lists of such a board as youth gone out Had left in ashes: then he spoke and said, Not looking at her, 'Who are wise in love Love most, say least,' and Vivien answered quick, 'I saw the little elf-god eyeless once In Arthur's arras hall at Camelot: But neither eyes nor tongue—O stupid child! Yet you are wise who say it; let me think Silence is wisdom: I am silent then, And ask no kiss;' then ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... Gleaming light, Where's the elf of Eldon Low? Sit with me Upon the tree; Sing our songs ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... for giving of me somewhat to do for her memory. And doesn't she fall a weeping for her mother? And doesn't that set me off a-snivelling for my good brother that I love so dear, and to think that a poor little elf like me could yet speak in the ear of princes, and make my beautiful brother vicar of Gouda; eh, lass, it is a bonny place, and a bonny manse, and hawthorn in every bush at spring-tide, and dog-roses and eglantine in every summer hedge. I know what the poor fool affects, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... the lord of those new-coming men was a king and the son of a king, King Elf the son of the Helper, and he sailed from warfaring And drew anigh to the Isle-realm and sailed along the strand; For the shipmen needed water and fain would go a-land; And King Elf stood hard by the tiller while the world ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... to the eighteenth (both included) she entered upon a curious kind of wilderness, studded with oases of a more curious character still. In one of them Rabelais was born, and found Quintessence, and of that finding—more fortunate than the result of True Thomas finding the Elf Queen—was born Pantagruelism. In another came Lesage, and though his work was scarcely original, it was consummate. None of these happy sojourns produced a Don Quixote or a Tom Jones, but divers ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the dim light I see a chimpanzee-like face looking up to mine. It is horribly seared and wrinkled, one tooth sticks out from the wide, shrivelled lips, and the beady animal-like eyes glare through grey elf locks. I am speechless with fright, till the dreadful apparition stretches out a skinny arm and with some strange words lays a claw-like hand on my bare wrist. I shrink back, uttering a ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... flying hither And hurrying thither, Here, there, through the air,—you never care whither,— Do you see me here sitting, A-knitting, a-knitting, And wishing myself with you breezily flitting, Like any wild elf? ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... truth in a talk between the King and Carr; and the bodily ear with which he heard grew large and monstrous as by magic, so awful was the secret. And though he had to be loaded with lands and gold and made an ancestor of dukes, the elf-shaped ear is still recurrent in the family. Well, you don't believe in black magic; and if you did, you couldn't use it for copy. If a miracle happened in your office, you'd have to hush it up, now so many bishops are agnostics. But that is ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... wisely consider'd it must be a sprite; That he came through the keyhole, or in at the casement; And it needs must be one that could both read and write; Yet he did not know, If it were friend or foe, Or whether it came from above or below; Howe'er, it was civil, in angel or elf, For he ne'er could have fill'd it so well of himself. CHO. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Nelly softly to herself, "that is a fairy tent, and in it I may find a baby elf sick with whooping-cough or scarlet-fever. How splendid it would be! only I could never nurse ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... formation to a giant living on a hill who stretched out his hand to pick up shell-fish. This myth remained current until the eighteenth century, and stone axes exhumed from the heaps were called thunder-axes (rai-fu) just as similar relics in Europe were called elf-bolts ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the ban of Canaan! Unforewarned, music sounded in his ears again; but he did not shrink from it now; this was not the circus band he had heard as he left the Square, but a melody like a far-away serenade at night, as of "the horns of elf-land faintly blowing"; and he closed his eyes with the sweetness ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... a little lithe lad. Then it was that in every pickle of mischief where a little lad could be this elf-child, with his black eyes and curly auburn hair, was to be found. So maddening indeed were his naughty tricks that the townspeople spoke not so often of beating him, as they would have beaten a human child, but of wringing his neck like a young thing that had no right to live. Yet ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... of sepulchral chambers, on stones forming the sides of KISTVAENS, accompanied in many instances with radiated circles, which do not, however, help us to understand them better. In Scandinavia they are known as ELFEN STENAVS, or elf stones, and the inhabitants come and place offerings on them for the LITTLE PEOPLE. According to a touching tradition, these little people are souls awaiting the time of their being clothed once more in human flesh. In Belgium these strangely decorated stones are attributed to the ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... you says better than your tongue," said the groom. "Have with you then, my bold little elf," he added, taking the bridle of the horse on which Ben was still seated. "Or one moment more. You knew me, my lad—are there any ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... elf is a kind of animal brownie dragon 1 2 "The Glass Slipper" reminds us of Ali Baba Cinderella Goldilocks 2 3 The first President of the United States was Adams Jefferson Washington 3 4 The shepherd boy who became king was David Saul Solomon ...
— Stanford Achievement Test, Ed. 1922 - Advanced Examination, Form A, for Grades 4-8 • Truman L. Kelley
... knew, as he wrought, that a loving heart Was somehow baffling his evil art; For more than spell of Elf or Troll Is a maiden's prayer for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... bachelor elf who successfully resists all efforts of scheming fairy mammas to marry him to young and beautiful fairies, persisting in single blessedness even in exile from his kind, being driven off as a punishment for his heterodoxy on matrimonial subjects. This ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... in his face. And that dear little elf of a boy-what a voice! So bright and so arch too. Then the Miranda- she took all by surprise. I believe half the spectators took her ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Italians call him, got into disgrace in Rome. However this may be, certain it is that Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas, the kind Patron-saint of the Juveniles, makes his annual appearance on Christmas Eve, for the purpose of dispensing gifts to all good children. This festive elf is supposed to be a queer little creature that descends the chimney, viewlessly, in the deep hours of night, laden with gifts and presents, which he bestows with no sparing hand, reserving to himself a supernatural discrimination that he seems to exercise with every ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... long time with the dwindling firelight playing about him, his manhood and his desires locked in a grim struggle, wondering at the hold this forest elf had gained upon him, wondering how it was that she had stolen into his heart and head and taken such utter possession of him. It would be no easy task to shut her out of his mind and put her away from him. ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... out enough about us to show her that we were at least presentable, she inaugurated an acquaintance with us by sending a little box to myself, which proved to contain, on being opened, something in the nature of a valentine. It contained a spray of mimosa packed in cotton wool, and lying like an elf among the petals was a little sleeping bat. Lady Wilton a week before had appeared as the Evening Star at a fancy ball at Nice. In return for her valentine I bought a microscopic puppy, which, packed in cotton wool and inclosed in a box as the bat was, was transmitted ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... her? The visit came to an end, but was repeated again and again by Danby, and each time with new astonishment, new delight. She had the coquetry of a dozen women, yet her eyes looked so true. She was a perfect elf for pranks and jokes, yet demure as a nun. When he tried to awe her with his learning, she was saucy; if he was serious, she was gay; if he wished to teach, she rebelled. She was self-willed as a changeling, refractory yet gentle, seditious but just,—only ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... cold. For, oft as famine stung him, would he shoot The shaft that missed no fowl his aim had doomed. Their flesh he ate, their feathers vestured him. And there lay herbs and healing leaves, the which, Spread on his deadly wound, assuaged its pangs. Wild tangled elf-locks hung about his head. He seemed a wild beast, that hath set its foot, Prowling by night, upon a hidden trap, And so hath been constrained in agony To bite with fierce teeth through the prisoned limb Ere it could win back to its cave, and there In hunger and torturing pains ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... merely looking at these books, their bindings and names, one at last becomes, as it were, quite worm-eaten in spirit, and longs to be out in the free air—and we are there; by Upsala's ancient hills. Thither do thou lead us, remembrance's elf, out of the city, out on the far extended plain, where Denmark's church stands—the church that was erected from the booty which the Swedes gained in the war against the Danes. We follow the broad high road: it leads us close ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... "Prepare me my Pegasus! 'Saddle white Surrey!'" It is clear that he feels what his numbers prolong, That he warms with his subject, and soars in his song. But whether his lot be unhonour'd and low, Or the wreath of the Laureat encircles his brow, With the world to admire him, mysterious elf! Is a secret of state that he keeps to himself. But come! Zoological wonders require The strains of his genius, his force and his fire; He burns with impatience the scene to display: Hark away, to the Gardens ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... was gone, the main-yard sprung, the rigging hanging in elf-locks, the hull shot through and through in twenty places, the deck strewn with the bodies of nine good men, besides sixteen wounded down below; while the pitiless sun, right above their heads, poured down a flood of fire upon ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... take notice. akt|a (-ade, -at), to consider worthy, respect, notice; — sig, beware. akt|giva (-gav, -givit), to notice, pay attention. aktning (-en), respect. al (-en, -ar) alder. aldrig, never. alf (-en, -er), elf. all, (allt, alla), all. allena, (allen), alone. allenast, only. Allfader (-n), Father of All, Oden. alltfr, altogether too. alltid, always, forever. alltren, already. alltjmt, all the time, always. allts, thus. alltnog, enough. alltsedan, ever since. allvar (-et), seriousness. ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... if the whole man were a moral and physical humbug; his wonderful beauty of face, for aught I knew, might be removable like a mask; and, tall and comely as his figure looked, he was perhaps but a wizened little elf, gray and decrepit, with nothing genuine about him save the wicked expression of his grin. The fantasy of his spectral character so wrought upon me, together with the contagion of his strange mirth ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Elf—Miss Bell. She was afraid of suggesting the obligation to come home to you. She said with your artistic conscience you couldn't come, and it would only be inflicting unnecessary pain upon you. But her bronchitis was no light matter last ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... patiently enough for what seemed a long time, trying to catch the undersong that thrilled through the forest, "the horns of elf-land faintly blowing," the hum such as bees at home make when late May sees the chestnut trees in flower. Here the song was a veritable psalm of life, in which every tree, bird, bush, and insect had its own part to play. It might have ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... welcome singing Of the Meadow Lark and Robin, And above the eastern mountains Flushed the rose-light of the morning; Then again the sky was tinted By the Elf who plays with colors, And the sleeping poppies wakened When the ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... bright windows Of men I serve no more, The groaning of the old great wheels Thickened to a throttled roar; All buried things broke upwards; And peered from its retreat, Ugly and silent, like an elf, ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... fairies who fly about on gossamer wings, and dance in the moonlight, and so on. He never dances; and as to wings, what use would they be to him in a coal cellar? He is a sober, stay-at-home household elf—nothing much to look at, even if you did see him, which you are not likely to do—only a little old man, about a foot high, all dressed in brown, with a brown face and hands, and a brown peaked cap, just the color of a brown mouse. And like a mouse he hides ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... pure white lilies, bunches of star-like daisies and their soft round white little buds, gaudy marigolds, brown, yellow, and orange, crimson cock's-combs, branches of honeysuckle vines filled with honey, rich fairy trumpets, saucy elf-faced pansies, spicy pinks, hollyhocks in satiny dresses of many colors, bright-eyed verbenas and sweet-williams, brilliant geranium blossoms, and even great honest faithful sunflowers—those flowers that love the sun so dearly that they turn to gaze upon him when he is bidding the earth "good-night"—were ...
— Harper's Young People, November 11, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... (since some men of fashion nobly dare To scrawl in verse) from Bond-street or the Square? [l] If things of Ton their harmless lays indite, Most wisely doomed to shun the public sight, What harm? in spite of every critic elf, Sir T. may read his stanzas to himself; MILES ANDREWS [107] still his strength in couplets try, And live in prologues, though his dramas die. Lords too are Bards: such things at times befall, And 'tis some praise in Peers to ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... golden gallery, for Cornelia was so essentially a creature of to-day that he felt more in sympathy with her in the air and the sunshine, with the echo of the great city rising to their ears. They stood side by side, while the breeze blew elf-like tendrils of hair round the girl's face. The gentle expression of half an hour ago had departed, and she looked a creature of steel and flame; a vital, indomitable being, tingling with energy and joy. At sight of the forest of chimney pots stretching away into the ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... plainness of her features was transformed into momentary beauty. Maryllia was silent. She knew that the aspirations of genius pent up in this elf-like girl were almost too strong for her, and that the very excitability and sensitiveness of her nature were such as to need the greatest care and tenderness in training and controlling. Tactfully she changed ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... lovely consort, young and fair, And watch'd her with a dotard's bootless care. Sure, Love these dotards dooms to jealous pain, And the world's laugh, when all their toil proves vain. This lord, howe'er, did all that mortal elf Could do, to keep his treasure to himself: Stay'd much at home, and when in luckless hour His state affairs would drag him from his tower, Left with his spouse a niece himself had bred, To be the partner of her board and bed; And ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... Miss Phipps promptly. Her cheeks had grown quite red with surprise, and she pulled in her upper lip, and bit at it hard as she looked down at her new pupil, and noted the flat nose, the wide mouth, and the elf-like thinness of the shabby figure. "Pixie! that's a very charming little name, but a fancy one, surely. ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of the Old Wives' Fables They glittered out of the grey, And with all the Armies of Elf-land I strove like a beast ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... had dreaded this child—the little black-haired elf that had seen him hiding. It had made him shiver to think of her—the small woodland demon, the devil's spy whose lisping treble might be distinct and loud enough to utter his death sentence. A thousand times ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... arms of Professor Hodgson, upon whom had fallen, like a dark shroud, a gloom heavy and profound, and the man who had that morning said good-by forever to China and the wireless game and to ships and the sea, found himself floating in and out upon a sea of gold, with a sprite from elf-land dazzling him with her ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... he shut, The friar of Rubygill; Where the ghostly elf absolved himself, To follow his own good will: And he had no lack of canary sack, To keep his conscience still. And a damsel well knew, when at lonely midnight It gleamed on the waters, his signal-lamp-light: "Over! over!" she ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... up, wild and flushed, with a desperate s elf-command in her face, with an angry resolution in ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... sings the self-same tune Underneath an older moon. Life to him is, plain enough, Still a game of blind man's buff. If we listen we may hear Puckish laughter always near, And the elf's apostrophe, "Lord, what ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... athletic, and, obviously, a most powerful ruffian. On his face he carried more than one large glazed cicatrix, that assisted the savage expression of malignity impressed by nature upon his features. And his matted black hair, with its elf locks, completed the picturesque effect of a face that proclaimed, in every lineament, a reckless abandonment to cruelty and ferocious passions. Maximilian himself, familiar as he was with the faces of military butchers in the dreadful hours ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Urgan starts, that hideous dwarf, Before Lord Richard stands, And, as he crossed and blessed himself, 'I fear not sign,' quoth the grisly elf, 'That ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... to set as good 145 A face upon it as he cou'd, And thus he spoke: Lady, your bright And radiant eyes are in the right: The beard's th' identic beard you knew, The same numerically true: 150 Nor is it worn by fiend or elf, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... give glimmering light, By the dead and drowsy fire; Every elf and fairy sprite Hop as light as bird from brier; And his ditty, after me, Sing and dance ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... most was the figure that sat facing them, as they entered the van. It was that of an old, old crone, sitting on a stool, bent forward with her sharp chin resting on her clenched fists, and her elbows on her knees, while iron-gray elf-locks hung about her wrinkled, nut-brown face, half ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... good deeds, and hateth talk; But sitteth in a corner turning crabs, Or coughing o'er a warmed pot of ale. Backwinter th'other, that's his nown[123] sweet boy, Who like his father taketh in all points. An elf it is, compact of envious pride, A miscreant born for a plague to men; A monster that devoureth all he meets. Were but his father dead, so he would reign, Yea, he would go good-near to deal by him As Nebuchadnezzar's ungracious son, Foul Merodach[124], ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... Wilson) who resided in the family, remarkable for her credulity and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs, concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poesie; but had so strong an effect upon my imagination that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a look-out on suspicious ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the door shut on their retainer, and perched herself on the end of the big old-fashioned sofa drawn up at one side of the fire. She wore a loose stockinette brown dress and looked rather like a wood elf of sorts with ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... light, Where's the elf of Eldon Low? Sit with me Upon the tree; Sing our songs on ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... eleven nouns in f, change the f into v and assume es for the plural: sheaf, sheaves; leaf, leaves; loaf, loaves; leaf, beeves; thief, thieves; calf, calves; half, halves; elf, elves; shelf, shelves; self, selves; wolf, wolves. Three others in fe are similar: life, lives; knife, knives; wife, wives. These are specific exceptions to the general rule for plurals, and not a series of examples coming ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... his friend of the night lounged on a heap of rock at the edge of the ledge. The strange Indian was well past middle age, tall and dignified. He was darker than Kut-le. His face was thin and aquiline. His long hair hung in elf locks over his shoulders. His toilet was elaborate compared with that of Kut-le, for he wore a pair of overalls and a dilapidated flannel shirt, unbelted and fluttering its ends in the morning breeze. As if conscious of her gaze, Kut-le turned and looked ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... baby you are, Panoria!" Eliza replied, with the superior air of one who knows all about things. "That is no oven; nor is it a black elf's house. It ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... accustomed to seeing these wild, bare-legged mountaineers breaking loose from school in a state of subdued frenzy, leaping up and down the side ditches, screaming, yelling, panting, with their elf-locks blinding their eyes, and their bare feet flashing amid the green of grasses or the brown of the ditch-mould. They might condescend to drop me a courtesy, and then—anarchy, as before. Today they moved slowly, with eyes bent modestly on the ground, ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... a woman because of her clothes. Otherwise she seems to be a mixture of a boy and wood-elf. The combination appears to me to be a fascinating one. She is of good family, half Irish, speaks three languages, asks no questions, and seems to have an extraordinary capacity for holding her tongue. It is on that account that I questioned her sex. Her appearance ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... Danish legends of kindred type we find the tales of: The boy who ran off with the horn out of which an elf-maiden offered him a drink, and would not return it until she had promised to bestow upon him the strength of twelve men, with which, unluckily, went also the appetite of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... "If an elf or a goblin come, smear his forehead with this salve, put it on his eyes, cense him with incense, and sign him frequently with the ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... 'parson'; 'cleft' and 'clift', now written 'cliff'; 'travel' and 'travail'; 'truth' and 'troth'; 'pennon' and 'pinion'; 'quail' and 'quell'; 'quell' and 'kill'; 'metal' and 'mettle'; 'chagrin' and 'shagreen'; 'can' and 'ken'; 'Francis' and 'Frances'{111}; 'chivalry' and 'cavalry'; 'oaf' and 'elf'; 'lose' and 'loose'; 'taint' and 'tint'. Sometimes the difference is mainly or entirely in the initial consonants, as between 'phial' and 'vial'; 'pother' and 'bother'; 'bursar' and 'purser'; 'thrice' and 'trice'{110}; 'shatter' and 'scatter'; 'chattel' and 'cattle'; ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... three great earls King Guthrum Went the rounds from fire to fire, With Harold, nephew of the King, And Ogier of the Stone and Sling, And Elf, whose gold lute had a string ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... she continued, dreamily, 'an aged woman: you have grey hair and bent shoulders. This bed is the fairy cave under Peniston Crag, and you are gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers; pretending while I am near that they are only locks of wool. That's what you'll come to fifty years hence: I know you are not so now. I'm not wandering; you're mistaken, or else I should believe you really were that withered hag, and ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... a thin, peaked, sallow face, with a discontented expression; her features were small and pinched, her hair, which was of inky blackness, fell on her shoulders in long, straight locks, without a ripple or a wave in them. She looked like an elf, but still this elfish little creature was redeemed from the hideousness which else might have been her doom by eyes of the most wonderful brilliancy. Large, luminous, potent eyes—intensely black, and deep as the depths of ocean, they seemed to fill her whole ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Irving came not into the world like the other sinful creatures of the earth, but was one of the kane-bairns of the fairies, whilk they had to pay to the enemy of man's salvation every seventh year. The poor lady-fairy—a mother's aye a mother, be she elves' flesh or Eve's flesh—hid her elf son beside the christened flesh in Marion Irving's cradle, and the auld enemy lost his prey for a time. Now, hasten on with your story, which is not a bodle the waur for me. The maiden saw the shape of ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... quite ready to play the elf in the rose-garden of love," replied Heinz gaily. "Moreover, I shall soon need a T and an S embroidered on my own doublet, for——Why don't they bring the light? Another cup of wine, the note, and then with renewed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... man had looked down upon the young one, so now the young man stood looking down upon the boy, regarding him with tolerant severity. "You most mischief-full elf!" he said. "It would be treating you deservedly were I to leave you ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... shadow was which fell across the edge of the chest. He looked and looked—and did not want to believe his eyes. But the thing, which at first seemed shadowy, became more and more clear to him; and soon he saw that it was something real. It was no less a thing than an elf who sat there—astride ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... facing the door, looked at her. He saw a small, elf-like girl in a very shimmery green frock. The green ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... yet pull them away," they all laughed, "and chuck them in her face! She has got you up in such a way as to make a regular old elf of you!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... not to heed— You, as though you would inquire "Can I trust them?" . . . then a jerk, And you'd skipped three branches higher, Jaws again at work; Like a little clock-work elf, With all the forest ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... own, my winsome elf, Some day a pet just like thyself, Her sanguine thoughts to borrow; Content to use her brighter eyes, Accept her childish ecstacies, And, ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... were in the "town" and rode away on them. They found the stud-horses between two brooks. Skarphedinn caught sight of them, for Sigmund was in bright clothing. Skarphedinn said, "See you now the red elf yonder, lads?" They looked that way, ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... all deserve the name of "bugges" for no elf or hobgoblin was ever more bizarre. Their legs and heads and bodies are small and aphid-like, but aloft there spring minarets and handles and towers and thorns and groups of hairy balls, out of all ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... household elf, believed in Scotland to render obliging services to good housewives, and his presence an evidence that the internal economies were approved of, as he favoured good husbandry, and was partial to houses where it ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... limber elf, Singing, dancing to itself, A fairy thing with red round cheeks, That always finds, and never seeks, Makes such a vision to the sight 660 As fills a father's eyes with light; And pleasures flow in ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... To that fair Elf-child other summers came; But Lilith walked, heart-hungered, filled with shame, Naught comforted. And in that shadow-land She sorrowing bore, in after-time, a band Of elfin babes, that waked dim echoes long Forgotten there, and ghastly bursts of song. Then Lilith saddened more, ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... chambers, on stones forming the sides of KISTVAENS, accompanied in many instances with radiated circles, which do not, however, help us to understand them better. In Scandinavia they are known as ELFEN STENAVS, or elf stones, and the inhabitants come and place offerings on them for the LITTLE PEOPLE. According to a touching tradition, these little people are souls awaiting the time of their being clothed once more in human flesh. In Belgium these strangely decorated stones are attributed to the NUTONS, ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... without a trace of conceit, gifted with a keen sense of humour and evidently as full of the joy of living as a school-boy. He thought her laugh delightfully musical, and it was frequently and readily evoked by Burke's droll remarks or the quaint oracular sayings from the self-possessed elf on Wargrave's knee. Her admiration of and genuine affection for Mrs. Dermot was very evident when Noreen joined ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... over, and tumble off the limb, so that I might run and catch him in my apron. Do you think I would give him to our matron to make a pie? No, you might take off my fingers first!" And the little elf snapped them emphatically ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... all Kit Rhodes was only twenty-three and all of life ahead of him for dreams! He was wondering what he could fetch back from the East that would be acceptable to a witchy elf of a butterfly girl who already had, to his simple estimate, all the ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... when with joy You hailed your father's safe return to home From his long mountain toils; for when he came He ever brought some little present with him. A lovely Alpine flower—a curious bird— Or elf-boat found by wanderers on the hills. But now he goes in quest of other game: In the wild pass he sits, and broods on murder; And watches for the life-blood of his foe, But still his thoughts are fixed on you alone, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... had come to an end. Sometimes it seemed to her as if this solemn-eyed child purposely misunderstood, and mocked at her attempts to lead unwilling feet along the path of learning, and she was at a loss to know how to deal with the sprightly elf who danced and flitted about like an elusive will-o'-wisp. The fact that she was the University President's granddaughter was the only thing that had saved her thus far from utter disfavor in the eyes of her teacher; but now even that fact was lost sight of in face of the child's repeated ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Cador's son. I give thee here my kingdom, and defend thou my Britons ever in thy life, and maintain them all the laws that have stood in my days, and all the good laws that in Uther's days stood. And I will fare to Avalun, to the fairest of all maidens, to Argante the queen, an elf most fair, and she shall make my wounds all sound; make me all whole with healing draughts. And afterwards I will come again to my kingdom, and dwell with the Britons ...
— Brut • Layamon
... to his favorite winter nook, a thicket of black alders freighted with a wealth of berries. How crimson they were amid the white quiet of the garden! And the brightly colored fruit of the barberry flamed forth from a snowy bush like the cheerful elf-lamps of a wood-gnome. ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... where a purple haze hung over the deep ravine, we faintly heard the answering hounds. In their voices we caught the dog's response to his master and friend. It said, "We have him. Come! Come!" We blew the horns again. The elf-land notes returned again and again, and with them came the call of the faithful hound, "We are here. ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... discovered, to his great delight and astonishment, that, in consequence of its having touched the lips of a goddess, it played of itself in the most charming manner. Marsyas, who was a great lover of music, and much beloved on this account by all the elf-like denizens of the woods and glens, was so intoxicated with joy at this discovery, that he foolishly challenged Apollo to compete with him in a musical contest. The challenge being accepted, the Muses were ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... Of men I serve no more, The groaning of the old great wheels Thickened to a throttled roar; All buried things broke upwards; And peered from its retreat, Ugly and silent, like an elf, The secret of ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... he seen so lovely an elf. A sunbeam had made its home in each lock of her tumbled hair. Her little brown face had the soft bloom of a ripe nectarine; her eyes, the timid ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... himself to wait. Several times, passionately insistent, he shook his head, and it was as if the refusal were being made to an invisible presence. Suddenly he lifted his face as the sound of a weird, wild wail was borne to him, mingling with the elf-like moaning of the wind. He leaned forward slightly, listening intently. From somewhere above him pleading notes from a violin were making the night even more mournful. A change ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... the old cailleach. 'Bring him to me, ye hounds, before I put a curse on ye,' and she tore her coorie from her head, and the wind tore through the strands of her white hair, and they rose like elf-locks. High above her head she threw her arm, her fingers stiff and pointing, there on the quay-head, an awesome sight in the mirk ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... pervaded me might originate. Who can lie down on Elvir Hill without experiencing something of the sorcery of the place? Flee from Elvir Hill, young swain, or the maids of Elle will have power over you, and you will go elf-wild!—so say the Danes. I had unconsciously laid myself down on 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 ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... to dislocate his worthless neck: For lo! of old, he boasts an honour'd wound; Behold that broken wing that trails the ground! Thus fools and bravoes kindred pranks pursue; As savage quite, and oft as fatal too. Happy the man that foils an envious elf, Using the darts of spleen to serve himself. As when by turns the strolling Swine engage The utmost efforts of the bully's rage, Whose nibbling warfare on the grunter's side Is welcome pleasure to his oristly hide; Gently he stoops, or strecht at ease along, Enjoys ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... adoption of pagan beliefs, not the uprooting of them. If the Roman Jupiter was a Christian daemon, his existence at all events was recognised. But even this negative way of adopting the old beliefs gave way as the Church spread further. The tribe of daemons soon included the popular fairy, elf, and goblin. And then came the positive adoption of pagan customs. Gibbon describes how the early Christians refused to decorate their doors with garlands and lamps, and to take part in the ceremonial of lifting the bride over the threshold of the house.[464] Both these customs ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... sobriquet could better express her personality: She was little—a dainty, elf-like littleness, with tiny feet and wee hands; she was gray—a soft, silver gray—too gray for her forty years (and this fragment begins when she was forty); and she was a lady in every beat of her warm heart; ...
— The Little Gray Lady - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 'tis there—the same; The shadow in her eyes' deep mirror sleeping, The roguish elf about her lips ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... conquest in his face. And that dear little elf of a boy-what a voice! So bright and so arch too. Then the Miranda- she took all by surprise. I believe half the spectators took ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him,—the pot calling the kettle black. Etta Robbin-Steele did flirt. She had dancing black eyes that flung a challenge to men. But Nelly herself was no shrinking violet, for all her baby face. She was like an elf. Her violet eyes were capable of infinite shades of expression. She, herself, had a way of appropriating men who pleased her, to the resentful dismay of other young women. It pleased her to do that with Jack ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... use the contemptible it,) a short-lived tyranny: Xenophon says "Fire burns only when we are near it; but a beautiful face burns and inflames, though at a distance: Plato calls beauty a privilege of nature: Theophrastus (arch fellow,) a silent cheat: Theocritus, (cunning elf,) a delightful prejudice; Carneades, a solitary kingdom, (which he doubtless would keep to himself): Domitian says that nothing is more grateful, (not even killing flies); Aristotle affirms that beauty is better than all the letters of recommendation in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... invisible, but they are invariably "little people," from three to four feet high. It may be that the Gael's conception of humanised spirits may not have been uninfluenced by the traditions of that earlier diminutive race whose arrow-heads of flint were so long regarded as "elf-bolts." The fairies dwelt only in grassy knolls, on the summits of high hills, and inside cliffs. Although capable of living for several centuries, they were not immortal. They required food, and borrowed meal and cooking ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... Although he was a priest, Thought it no sacramental sin—to feast. I can't say much for his morality: But for his immortality, Good luck! Why he's bound in calf, and squeezed in boards, And scarcely a good library's shelf But boasts acquaintance with the elf. But now I'll tell you what I should have told before, A grievous illness brought him nigh Death's door. Who, bony wight, Enjoyed the sight— And grinn'd as he thought of the fun there'd be When the jester ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... attention, giv —, look out, take notice. akt|a (-ade, -at), to consider worthy, respect, notice; — sig, beware. akt|giva (-gav, -givit), to notice, pay attention. aktning (-en), respect. al (-en, -ar) alder. aldrig, never. alf (-en, -er), elf. all, (allt, alla), all. allena, (allen), alone. allenast, only. Allfader (-n), Father of All, Oden. alltfr, altogether too. alltid, always, forever. alltren, already. alltjmt, all the time, always. allts, thus. alltnog, enough. alltsedan, ever since. allvar (-et), seriousness. ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... copper clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour. At the sixth the lady sprang up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and yet most attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet tantalising, the face of an elf. ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... transliteration of the French Auberon in the romance of Huon of Bordeaux, and Auberon is probably merely the French counterpart of Alberich or Albrich, a dwarf occurring in the German Nibelungenlied and other works. Etymologically Alberich is composed of alb elf and rich king. The name Oberon appears first in English literature in Lord Berners' translation of Huon of Bordeaux (c. 1534), and afterwards in Spenser[27] and in Robert Greene's play James IV, which was acted in 1589.[28] But ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... Tim had him fast in his fist, and fast he held him, till the elf showed him where ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... out of the wood on to the shore of the unruffled pond. Here a man might well pause and take no further step lest he fall into the blue depths of space. The moon hangs like a great shield in a sky of soft sapphire, piled with luminous figures. Within the wood are fairy and elf, goblin and gnome, half seen in the filmy light. Here giant genie stand revealed, passing in the dim perspective of mighty distances or leaning portentously from the radiant sky. In the mirror-like pond I see all these things repeated in an underworld that is as distinct and clear, yet ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... tangled elf-locks, still peer out of the drifting sand—the twisted bodies in their sea armour, lie half surrounded by the green waters; but the log hut, and Atven have vanished into the misty shadows of the past. They, and the good old priest, ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... events truer than any Egyptian.) There was a chair by the table, on which was an empty bowl and some broken bread; but the wise woman sat in the chimney corner, bending over the hearth, though the fire had burnt out, and not an ember glowed. And a strange little elf she looked, being very wizen and small, with one shoulder higher than the other, and a face ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... brother. Thou in thy sorry dreams, I in my childish grief, Thy heart in tears, mine eyes amazed with tears, Thy sorrow rich with the repining years, My sorrow frail as childhood, and as brief." Who art thou, haunting boy, nocturnal elf? "I am the Dead; the Dead that was thyself." Then falls a darkness on that starless shore. Afar I hear the ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... hall mark of its author as surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a Velasquez, and a Mathew Maris, should be the unmistakable creations of those masters. This is not to speak of tricks and manners which lend themselves to that facile elf, the caricaturist, but of a certain individual way of seeing and feeling. A young poet once said of another and more popular poet: "Oh! yes, but be cuts no ice." And, when one came to think of it, he did not; a certain ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the Noble Heart, a Bohemian Legend; The Monk of Swinstead Abbey, a Ballad Chronicle of the Death of King John; The Three Knights of Camelott, a Fairy Tale; The Ballad of Delora, or the Passion of Andrea Como; Red Gelert, a Welsh Legend; Ben Capstan, a Ballad of the Night Watch; The Elf of the Woodlands, a Child's Story. Fcap. 8vo. elegantly printed and bound in cloth, ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... the little one he felt the world was his. He forgot Waldstricker, forgot Madelene, forgot everything, but his elf-like son within his cuddling grasp. He touched his lips ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... quiet but composed interest. It never occurred to her that she could have any individual concern in the contents of the parcels. She was a tall girl who had outgrown all her frocks, or rather did outgrow them periodically, with dark elf locks about her shoulders, which would not curl or creper, or do anything that hair ought to do. She had her thoughts always in the clouds, forming all sorts of impossible plans, as was natural to her age, and was just the kind of angular, jerky school-girl, very well intentioned, but very maladroit, ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... more into the long hall with the windows and the mirrors, yellow evening was dropping over the waters and the willowy banks; and a bittern sounded in the distance like an elf upon his dwarfish drum. The same singular sentiment of some sad and evil fairyland crossed the priest's mind again like a little grey cloud. "I wish Flambeau were ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Inge go? She sank into the moor ground, and went down to the moor woman, who is always brewing there. The moor woman is cousin to the elf maidens, who are well enough known, of whom songs are sung, and whose pictures are painted; but concerning the moor woman it is only known that when the meadows steam in summer-time it is because she is brewing. Into the moor woman's brewery did Inge sink down; and no ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... That little elf, Ophelia, eight years old, Upon her battered doll's staunch bosom weeps. ("O best of men, that wove glad fairy-tales.") With tear-burned face, ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... creature, grave and gay, silent but ready, respectful yet confident, how could he follow her? The visit came to an end, but was repeated again and again by Danby, and each time with new astonishment, new delight. She had the coquetry of a dozen women, yet her eyes looked so true. She was a perfect elf for pranks and jokes, yet demure as a nun. When he tried to awe her with his learning, she was saucy; if he was serious, she was gay; if he wished to teach, she rebelled. She was self-willed as a changeling, refractory yet gentle, seditious but just,—only ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... in the meaning of "mirage," and also as another name for H[o]rai, the Elf-land of Far Eastern fable. Various beings in Japanese myth are credited with power to delude mortals by creating a mirage of H[o]rai. In old pictures one may see a toad represented in the act of exhaling from its mouth a vapor that shapes ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... about us," she said. "Countless pink campions and buttercups, with an elf in each. They will feel your giant feet, but they will know you are a mortal and cannot help your ways, because, you poor, blind ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... which he himself knew to be puppets tricked up for the entertainment of an idle hour. We are told by Lockhart, that the old man who told the story of Gilpin Horner to Lady Dalkeith bona fide believed the existence of the elf. Lady Dalkeith repeated the tale to Walter Scott, who worked it up with consummate skill into the Lay of the Last Minstrel. This is a case of a really believed legend of diablerie becoming the source of a literary fiction. Scott ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... was playing beside a stream, when one of the little elf men came along in his canoe. The boy had his bow and arrow with him; so had the little ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... zigzag or lightning marks are added to the shafts of arrows. A chapter might be written concerning this idea, which may possibly help to explain the Celtic, Scandinavian, and Japanese beliefs concerning "elf-shafts," ...
— Zuni Fetiches • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... brutal, bestial, and if one comes to think of it, grotesque! ... Oh! My poor child, what joking elf, what perverse sprite could have prompted the concluding words of your letter to me? I have made a collection of them, but out of love for you, I will not show them ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... than in England, let apothecaries and druggists say what they will." It is a tall, stout, downy plant, from three to five feet high, of the Composite order, with broad leaves, and bright, yellow flowers. Campania is the original source of the plant (Enula campana), which is called also Elf-wort, and Elf-dock. Its botanical title is Helenium inula, to commemorate Helen of Troy, from whose tears the herb was thought to have sprung, or whose hands were full of the leaves when Paris carried her off from Menelaus. ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... than superstitious or religious? The hamper of ropes that clung round the mainmast seemed to gibber like a man in fever as the gale threaded the mazes; the hollow down-draught from the foresail cried in boding tones; it seemed like some malignant elf calling "Woe to you! Woe for ever! Darkness is coming, and I and Death await you with cold arms." Every timber complained with whining iteration, and the boom of the full, falling seas tolled as a bell tolls that beats out the last minutes ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... with several others at a school. This one saw two men dressed in white come in at the window, who cut off his hair as he slept, and then went out by the same window: on awaking, he found his hair scattered about on the floor. To what can these things be attributed, if not to an elf? ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... wisp of humanity, a starved, slender elf with a freckled face, wizened and peaked, which at times looked a thousand years old. It reminded you of the face of one of those preternaturally aged monkeys that sit motionless in a dark corner of the cage, oppressed with the sins and ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... quickly Teddy set to work, but when he had once passed the line round the farmer's body and the tree, he had no difficulty in finishing the work he had begun. Dancing like an elf with the line in his hand, he spun round and round the tree till the line was wound round to its very last extremity, and the farmer looked like some big bluebottle fly entangled in the fine meshes of a spider's ...
— Teddy's Button • Amy Le Feuvre
... pretty blonde, sweet, serious, timid and a little slow, and Dorothy Rose—a sparkling brunette, quick, elf-like, high tempered, full of mischief and always getting ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... tall collar. The Reverend Gabriel's wrist brushed against them; he felt of them inquiringly; then he deliberately took off his hat to show the top of his head shorn of the glory of his curl, and the long ends of hair hanging in elf-locks about his face. ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... and the big robber-flies or devil's dykes—no name is bad enough for them—of the family Asilidaa. During these peaceful gnatless days, if a person thrusts himself into the bushes or herbage in some dark sheltered place, he will soon begin to hear the thin familiar sounds, as of "horns of elf-land faintly blowing"; and presently, from the ground and the under surface of every leaf, the ghost-like withered little starvelings will appear in scores and in hundreds to settle on him, fear not having blunted ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... ambrosial oils, till she revived, And underwent a quick immortal change, Made Goddess of the river. Still she retains Her maiden gentleness, and oft at eve Visits the herds along the twilight meadows, Helping all urchin blasts, and ill-luck signs That the shrewd meddling elf delights to make, Which she with precious vialed liquors heals: For which the shepherds, at their festivals, Carol her goodness loud in rustic lays, And throw sweet garland wreaths into her stream Of pansies, ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... uselessness of further words. How expect understanding of a common human hurt from this being, who alternately appeared in the guise of a god and a gamin? She remembered the old tale of the maiden wedded to the beautiful and strange elf-king. Was the legend symbolic of that mysterious thread—call it genius or what you will—that runs its erratic course through humanity's woof, marring yet illuminating the staid design, never straightened with its fellow-threads, never tied, and never to be followed to its source? ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... whole, the existence of these Olympians seemed to be entirely void of interests, even as their movements were confined and slow, and their habits stereotyped and senseless. To anything but appearances they were blind. For them the orchard (a place elf-haunted, wonderful!) simply produced so many apples and cherries: or it didn't, when the failures of Nature were not infrequently ascribed to us. They never set foot within fir-wood or hazel-copse, nor ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... on, cursed spirit! replied Maimoune, go on, and fear nothing. Dost thou think I am as perfidious an elf as thyself, and that I am capable of breaking the serious oath I have made? No, you may depend on my promise: but be sure you tell nothing but what is true, or I shall clip your wings, and ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... tholde dayes of the Kyng Arthour, Of which that Britons speken greet honour, All was this land fulfild of fairye. The elf queene with hir joly compaignye Daunced ful ofte in many a greene mede. This was the olde opinion as I rede,— I speke of manye hundred yeres ago,— But now kan no man se none elves mo, For now the grete charitee and prayeres Of lymtours, and othere hooly freres, That serchen ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... "Yes, Sal's Kid—a wild-eyed, elf-locked, olive-skinned little imp, nameless, but nicknamed Sal's Kid, who lived in a gutter called Rat Alley, down by the water-side in New York. I used to be fond of the child when I was cook's galley-boy, and our ship was ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... as, from a little elf, I've had a high opinion of myself, Though sickly, slender, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... pencil and book they sat by and took Each action, if false, or if true. White marks for the deeds done for others— Black marks for the deeds done for self. And nobody hid what he said or he did, For no one, of course, sees an elf. ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and he knows it, and does as she tells him most faithfully and gratefully. They are pattern-folk from top to toe, and so is the boy. But the girl! He would have his way, and named her Phyllis—Fly he calls her. She is a little skittish elf—Rotherwood himself all over; and doesn't he worship her! and doesn't he think it a holiday to carry her off to play pranks with! and isn't he happy to get amongst a good lot of us, and ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the kindred of Cain the Lord living ever Awreaked the murder of the slaying of Abel. In that feud he rejoic'd not, but afar him He banish'd, The Maker, from mankind for the crime he had wrought. 110 But offspring uncouth thence were they awoken Eotens and elf-wights, and ogres of ocean, And therewith the Giants, who won war against God A long while; but He ...
— The Tale of Beowulf - Sometime King of the Folk of the Weder Geats • Anonymous
... glimmering light; By the dead and drowsy fire, Every elf and fairy sprite, Hop as light as bird from brier; And this ditty after me, Sing and dance it trippingly. First rehearse this song by rote, To each word a warbling note, Hand in hand, with fairy grace, We will sing, ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... street, certain forms he did meet, But scarce might behold their faces; From matted elf-locks eyes stared like an ox, And shambling were ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... added Hannekin, "the elf lock came out of my hair this very morn, I having, as you bade me, combed it each morn with the ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... imprisonment could take from him—not even the ban of Canaan! Unforewarned, music sounded in his ears again; but he did not shrink from it now; this was not the circus band he had heard as he left the Square, but a melody like a far-away serenade at night, as of "the horns of elf-land faintly blowing"; and he closed his eyes ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... be a little lithe lad. Then it was that in every pickle of mischief where a little lad could be this elf-child, with his black eyes and curly auburn hair, was to be found. So maddening indeed were his naughty tricks that the townspeople spoke not so often of beating him, as they would have beaten a human child, but of wringing his neck like a young thing that had no right ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... speeding onward fast, with the Taf at some distance on my right, when I saw a strange-looking woman advancing towards me. She seemed between forty and fifty, was bare-footed and bare-headed, with grizzled hair hanging in elf locks, and was dressed in rags and tatters. When about ten yards from me, she pitched forward, gave three or four grotesque tumbles, heels over head, then standing bolt upright, about a yard before me, raised her right arm, and shouted in a most discordant voice—"Give ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... me, because I'm little! For though I am an elf o' mettle, An' can, like ony wabster's shuttle, Jink there or here, Yet, scarce as lang's a ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... thrilled at intervals, and the jays were chattering incessantly in the cherry-trees by the fence. The dew was still on the grass that lay in the parallelogram of shade made by the Sears' dwelling, and in the twilight of grass-land all the elf-people were whispering and tittering and scampering about in surreptitious revel. The breeze of dawn, tired and worn out, was sinking to a fitful doze in the cottonwood foliage near by. In the lattice of the kitchen ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... carpeted with powdered pearls, and kept in place by a thousand dewy strands, hanging from above like the chains of a lamp, and supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world, and all the vaporous freshness of dawn. They recalled to me the poetry of the North, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden, Frithjof and the Edda, Ossian and the Hebrides. All that world of cold and mist, of genius and of reverie, where warmth ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... "Oberon, or the Elf King's Oath," a romantic and fairy opera in three acts, words by J.R. Planche, was first produced at Covent Garden, London, April 12, 1826, in English. Its first Italian performance was given in the same city, July 3, 1860, the recitatives being supplied by Benedict, who ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... big, covered wagon, of the prairie-schooner type, were from ten to a dozen wild-looking Mexicans, their straggling elf-locks crowned by high-peaked sombreros, and their serapes streaming out wildly about them, whipped into loose folds by the pace at which they rode. As Coyote Pete had said, there was little difficulty for any one who had seen him once, in recognizing Black Ramon de Barros. His magnificent ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... little mouse had finished repeating what the elf had said she laid her staff against the king's breast, and sure enough there sprang forth from it the loveliest flowers. They yielded so strong a perfume that the king commanded that the mice who stood nearest the chimney should stick their tails in the fire, in order that ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... tell him that no maid will stay with her? That she shows no desire to improve? That she mimics and angers her teachers, refuses to study and plays impish tricks like some mischievous little elf? Am ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... to herself, "that is a fairy tent, and in it I may find a baby elf sick with whooping-cough or scarlet-fever. How splendid it would be! only I could never nurse such ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... and was predestined to marry some large, good-natured man who would imagine that she would make a nice little pet, a household fairy, but who might learn to his dismay that the fairy could be a tormenting elf. She would not marry the young gentleman with whom her name was at present associated by the gossips, and who had driven over that morning to help her entertain the expected guests. Mr. Harcourt and Miss Marchmont understood each other. He was ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... famous echo-rock near St. Goar, with which locality he became thoroughly familiar during the years 1780-89. No romanticist knew the Rhine better or loved it more than Brentano. "Lore" means[31] a small, squinting elf; and is connected with the verb "lauern." The oldest form of the word is found in the Codex Annales Fuldenses, which goes back to the year 858, and was first applied to the region around the modern Kempten near Bingen. "Lei" means a rock; "Loreley" means then "Elbfels." And what Brentano ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... thought, I'm in a moment gone, Nor can I ever be alone: All things on earth I imitate Faster than nature can create; Sometimes imperial robes I wear, Anon in beggar's rags appear; A giant now, and straight an elf, I'm every one, but ne'er myself; Ne'er sad I mourn, ne'er glad rejoice, I move my lips, but want a voice; I ne'er was born, nor e'er can die, Then, pr'ythee, tell ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... tale of elf and fairy did she tell the dying child, Till his eyes lost half their anguish, and his worn, wan features smiled; Tales herself had heard haphazard, caught amid the Babel roar, Lisped about by tiny gossips playing round their ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... thought—or should die soon!—supposing it were a sign of death! The nearer I got to the house the more agitated I grew; and on catching sight of it I trembled in every limb. The apparition had outstripped me: it stood looking through the gate. That was my first idea on observing an elf-locked, brown-eyed boy setting his ruddy countenance against the bars. Further reflection suggested this must be Hareton, my Hareton, not altered greatly since I left him, ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... 'You wicked elf,' said Miss Mary, 'to inveigle people into predicaments, and then go shouting ho! ho! ho! like ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... accounts concur in expressing (with as much admiration as is possible to naturalists) the kindly and frank disposition of this bird; which for the rest is almost a central type of all bird power with elf gifts added: it flies like a lark, trips on water-lily leaves like a fairy, swims like a duck, and roves like a sea-gull, having been seen sixty miles from land: and, finally, though living chiefly in Lapland and ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... cottages harbored Maya for the night; and then her way at dawn lay through a vast forest, where the dim tree-trunks stretched far away till they grew undefined as a gray cloud, and only here and there the sunshine strewed its elf-gold on ferns and mosses, feathery and soft as strange plumage and costly velvet. Sometimes a little brook with bubbling laughter crept across her path and slid over the black rocks, gurgling and dimpling in the shadow or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... kind of wilderness, studded with oases of a more curious character still. In one of them Rabelais was born, and found Quintessence, and of that finding—more fortunate than the result of True Thomas finding the Elf Queen—was born Pantagruelism. In another came Lesage, and though his work was scarcely original, it was consummate. None of these happy sojourns produced a Don Quixote or a Tom Jones, but divers smaller things resulted. And again and again, as had happened in the Middle ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the meadows, The weird, capricious elf! The buds unfold their perfumed cups For love of her sweet self; And silver-throated birds begin to tune their lyres, While wind-harps lend their ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... art a strange little elf, but I know how to tell if thou art mortal. Wilt thou have thy supper?" and he held out a spoonful of the bread and milk to the dancing figure. The child immediately stopped his whirling, and running to Crescimir, eagerly ate the food, ...
— A Napa Christchild; and Benicia's Letters • Charles A. Gunnison
... distinguish—1, The active presence of the Sprites in a human habitation. 2, Their masquerading. 3, Their dispatch of human victuals. 4, The liability of Elfin limbs to human casualties. 5, The personality of that saucy Puck, our tiny ambassador elf. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... spirit-elf, Rise up and bless. Help us to cleanse in holiness Show how to dress in saintliness Our weary selves, Expurge our deeds of earthiness Expunge desires of selfliness Rise up and bless ... This strong Soul dying in ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... days of King Arthur all the land was filled with fairies, and the elf queen and her merry company held many a dance in the green meadows where now you will see never one of them. But that was many hundred ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... children, were your father out, There was a merriment at his return; For still, on coming home, he brought you somewhat, Might be an Alpine flower, rare bird, or elf-bolt, Such as the wand'rer finds upon the mountains: Now he is gone in quest of other spoil On the wild way he sits with thoughts of murder: 'Tis for his enemy's life he lies in wait And yet on you, dear children, you alone He thinks as then: for your sake is he here; To ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... what her joy was, when, one day as she wandered alone, gazing on gorgeous blossoms rich in brilliant colours, down at her feet she spied, waving its delicate-tinted elf-bells in the warm, ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... five years, which only a vigorous hate had kept going. Marked with the characteristics of the cat, velvety to eye and touch, insolent and elusive in her glance, undisciplined, she could act a part for a time. To Horace Endicott she had played the role of a child of light, an elf, a goddess, for which nature had dressed her with golden hair, melting eyes of celestial ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... same hour when the tumult in Strasburg being abated for that night,—the Strasburgers had all got quietly into their beds—but not like the stranger, for the rest either of their minds or bodies; queen Mab, like an elf as she was, had taken the stranger's nose, and without reduction of its bulk, had that night been at the pains of slitting and dividing it into as many noses of different cuts and fashions, as there were heads in Strasburg ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... any earthly thing, until there came, added to her own, a young, new life. When her beautiful babe, half-elf, half-mortal, nestled in her woman's breast, it wakened there the fountain of human love, and of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... gallery, for Cornelia was so essentially a creature of to-day that he felt more in sympathy with her in the air and the sunshine, with the echo of the great city rising to their ears. They stood side by side, while the breeze blew elf-like tendrils of hair round the girl's face. The gentle expression of half an hour ago had departed, and she looked a creature of steel and flame; a vital, indomitable being, tingling with energy and joy. At ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... For fairy natures are compounded all Of whimsies and of freaks fantastical, And what the best of fairies loves the best (Except pure kindness) is an artless jest. And so wise men have argued, on the whole, That the misguided creatures have no soul; But as for me, if the bright fairy elf Has none, I'll get along without, myself! These fairies laughed and danced and sang sweet songs, And did all else that to their craft belongs,— All tricks and pranks of whole-souled jollity That make life merry 'neath the greenwood tree. The youngest of them childishly ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... Meanwhile the carles fell to speech freely with the wayfarers, and told them much concerning their little land, were it hearsay, or stark sooth: such as tales of the wights that dwelt in the wood, wodehouses, and elf-women, and dwarfs, and such like, and how fearful it were to deal with such creatures. Amongst other matters they told how a hermit, a holy man, had come to dwell in the wood, in a clearing but a little way thence toward the north-west. ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... she hardly affected one like a child, I remember. Do you know," exclaimed Mr Powell, who clearly must have been, like many seamen, an industrious reader, "do you know what she looked like to me with those big eyes and something appealing in her whole expression. She looked like a forsaken elf. Captain Anthony had moved towards her to keep her away from my end of the table, where the tray was. I had never seen them so near to each other before, and it made a great contrast. It was wonderful, for, with his beard ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... [Footnote 3] thy shore I climb'd at last, And, thy shady region pass'd, Upon another shore I stood, And look'd upon another flood; [Footnote 4] Great Ocean's self! ('Tis He, who fills That vast and awful depth of hills;) Where many an elf was playing round, Who treads unshod his classic ground; And speaks, his native rocks among, As FINGAL spoke, and OSSIAN sung. Night fell; and dark and darker grew That narrow sea, that narrow sky, As o'er the glimmering waves we flew. The sea-bird rustling, wailing by. ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... his reindeer. It bounded forward and struck down an elf who stood in its road. Then his brothers stood in its path, and stopped ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... children, in spite of a certain elf-like disobedience which possessed them like a disease. It was quite enough to tell them not to do a thing for them to be eaten up with a desire to do it forthwith. Christine had discovered this, and had learned to manage them in other ways ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... him. thing in the world to him. Only while she passed did he see her as a gleam of colour, a gypsy elf poorly clad, her bare feet flashing beneath a short green skirt, a twig of rowan berries stuck carelessly into her black hair. Her face was pale. She had an angel's ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... you out of window?" said a girl's voice; and there behind her, in a half-timid attitude, stood Betty Macdonald, a vision of white muslin, its frills and capes a little tossed by the wind, the pointed face and golden hair showing small and elf-like under the big ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the whistle again and again. "You may not believe it," he said between calls, "but the hunter who taught me this, told me never to use it unless I was in dire need. Then help of some sort would surely come. It is called the Elf's Horn." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... night—a night in March—people who had stayed up late by their firesides, talking of their sons at the front or dozing over the Temps, heard a queer music in the streets below, like the horns of elf-land blowing. It came closer and louder, with a strange sing-song note in which there was ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... and advanced towards them. The garb of the newcomer somewhat resembled that of a forester; but his arms and lower limbs were destitute of covering, and appeared singularly muscular, while his skin was swarthy as that of a gipsy. His jet-black hair hung in elf-locks over his ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the lulls between customers at the wicket, Vaniman had had a succession of run-ins with the demon of drowsiness—a particularly mischievous elf, sometimes, in business hours. Whenever he caught himself snapping back into wakefulness he found Vona's twinkle of amusement ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... not slow to recognize a geist; his knees shook, and he dared not utter a word. The elf looked down upon him half displeased, ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... babe, baby, babe in arms; nurseling, suckling, yearling, weanling; papoose, bambino; kid; vagitus. child, bairn [Scot.], little one, brat, chit, pickaninny, urchin; bantling, bratling^; elf. youth, boy, lad, stripling, youngster, youngun, younker^, callant^, whipster^, whippersnapper, whiffet [U.S.], schoolboy, hobbledehoy, hopeful, cadet, minor, master. scion; sap, seedling; tendril, olive branch, nestling, chicken, larva, chrysalis, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... bishops here, And there a chancellor in embryo, Or bard sublime, if bard may e'er be so, As Milton, Shakespeare, names that ne'er shall die! Though now he crawl along the ground so low, Nor weeting how the muse should soar on high, Wisheth, poor starveling elf! his ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... around her for a little stream where she might wash her face and hands; suddenly she remembered that face and hands were dyed, and that she would do best to leave them alone. She smoothed out as best she could the ragged elf-locks which the gypsy maid had left on her curly head, and then covering her face with her hands, said simply ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... knew the girl well enough—too well for her, not well enough yet for himself. It was precisely to win the woeful beauty of her that he had set his snares and unleashed his dogs. Did the Abbot know anything? Impossible; his reference forbad the fear. Was the girl something more than a dark woodland elf, a fairy, haggard and dishevelled, whose white shape shining through rags had made his blood stir? The mask of his face safeguarded him through this maze of surmise; nothing out of the depths of him was ever let to ruffle that dead surface. He commanded his voice to ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... is, as too many human apologies are, a mere excuse. The real reason for the midwife's abstention was not that fairy food was distasteful, but that she durst not touch it, under penalty of never again returning to the light of day. A Danish tradition tells of a woman who was taken by an elf on Christmas Eve down into the earth to attend his wife. As soon as the elfwife was delivered her husband took the child away; for if he could find two newly married persons in the bridal bed, before they had repeated their Paternoster, he could, by laying the child ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... footsteps of several persons in the neighbourhood. I was about to inquire, in a whisper, who they could be, when I observed him glance up at the top of the wall above us. I turned my eyes in the same direction, and then I saw, by the light of the fire, the elf-like locks and red-coloured countenance of a wild Indian, who was gazing down upon us. He looked as much surprised to find us there as we were ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... pretended not to heed— You, as though you would inquire "Can I trust them?" . . . then a jerk, And you'd skipped three branches higher, Jaws again at work; Like a little clock-work elf, With all the forest ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... Moss danced like a fairy. Her cheeks glowed, her dark eyes shone, her dimples twinkled, her feet scarcely seemed to touch the ground. Her red hat was like a poppy-cup, and the dark hair tumbling about her little face, elf-locks. Elsie Marley ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... year old daughter, had been helping. Little Wolfgang, now three years old, in his childish eagerness to be as busy as the others, had only hindered, and had to be reprimanded once in a while. One could never be vexed with the little elf, even if he turned somersaults in new clean clothes, or made chalk figures all over the living-room chairs. He never meant to do any harm, and was always so tenderhearted and lovable, it was ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... and see him!" said Eddie Elf. So Timothy Toad hopped along the path until he met ...
— Friendly Fairies • Johnny Gruelle
... with this self-willed elf? To carry out her father's ideas, and let her nature have unrestrained freedom to develop itself, will be the ruin of her! Unless she is controlled and guided she is just the girl to grow up wild and eccentric, and end in running away with ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the pretty elf about everywhere in spite of her cruel rebuffs, for he was sadly in her way that night; and when she refused to dance with him, peremptorily ordering him away to entertain dowagers, or perform any similar heavy work, he would take the post she assigned him, and ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... his forehead and his throbbing temples, so calm and cool but a moment before. He stood trembling, his damp elf-locks dangling over his brow. Through the half-open door a little breath of wind threaded in and made the lamp-blaze jump; it rustled outside through the lilac-bushes like the passing of a ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... herself, not all the floods of the deluge could have made her think or feel thus: her real self, her divine nature had begun to wake. True, that nature was as yet no more like the divine, than the drowsy, arm-stretching, yawning child is like the merry elf about to spring from his couch, full of life, of play, of love. She had no faith in God yet, but it was much that she felt ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... distinctly see that the sometime snow-flake left her sphere and came gradually towards himself. As the vaporous shape floated nearer, it also grew larger, so that, although Fred could not have said certainly that the size was human, it relieved him from the impression of any fairy or elf or sprite. No, it was nothing of that sort. It was just the gentlest, calmest, serenest face and form in the world,—with the same look of pure sweetness he had noticed on her first entrance,—with a peculiar surprised look in her wide-open eyes, that he had seen but in one human face. As ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... on tiptoe, as noiselessly as an elf, across the old hall, and softly opened the door of a little, low-ceilinged corner room; Babette, who, overcome by joy and surprise, had not noticed the stranger standing in the shadow, followed her dear Fraeulein. The door was ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... tight-fitting hat her great grave eyes held mine expectantly. The stars in them seemed upon the edge of dancing. Her heightened colour, the poise of her shapely head, the parted lips lent to that exquisite face the air of an elf. All the sweet grace of a child was welling out of her maidenhood. Her apple-green frock fitted the form of a shepherdess. Her pretty grey legs and tiny feet were those of a fairy. Its very artlessness trebled the attraction of her pose. Making ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... wagon, of the prairie-schooner type, were from ten to a dozen wild-looking Mexicans, their straggling elf-locks crowned by high-peaked sombreros, and their serapes streaming out wildly about them, whipped into loose folds by the pace at which they rode. As Coyote Pete had said, there was little difficulty for any one who had seen him once, in recognizing Black ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... me, and I turn with a start. In the dim light I see a chimpanzee-like face looking up to mine. It is horribly seared and wrinkled, one tooth sticks out from the wide, shrivelled lips, and the beady animal-like eyes glare through grey elf locks. I am speechless with fright, till the dreadful apparition stretches out a skinny arm and with some strange words lays a claw-like hand on my bare wrist. I shrink back, uttering a little muffled cry ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... fact could possibly ensue; and the quarrel was as unreal as if, theorizing in primitive times about the raising of dough by yeast, one party should have invoked a 'brownie,' while another insisted on an 'elf' as the true cause of the phenomenon." [Footnote: 'Theorie und Praxis,' Zeitsch. des Oesterreichischen Ingenieur u. Architecten-Vereines, 1905, Nr. 4 u. 6. I find a still more radical pragmatism than Ostwald's in an address ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... out," James's spirits foamed over as naturally as a tumbler of soda water, and he could jump over benches and burst out of doors with as much rapture as the veriest little elf in his company. Then you might have seen him stepping homeward with a most felicitous expression of countenance, occasionally reaching his hand through the fence for a bunch of currants, or over it after a flower, or bursting into some back yard to help an old lady ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... follow, and I found him telling Elf such a tragic tale of how you and Le had gone off and left him tied up, without even looking behind to bid him good-by, that his heart was quite broken, and he had been trying to hang himself on his own ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... gibberish heard in the straw. The fool shrieks, 'Nuncle, come not in here,' and out rushes 'Tom o Bedlam'—the naked creature, as Gloster calls him—with his 'elf locks,' his 'blanketed loins,' his 'begrimed face,' with his shattered wits, his madness, real ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... pale dome of his head, and venerably haloed though he was for me by his greatness, there was yet about him something—boyish? girlish? childish, rather; something of a beautifully well-bred child. But he had the eyes of a god, and the smile of an elf. In figure, at first glance, he seemed almost fat; but this was merely because of the way he carried himself, with his long neck strained so tightly back that he all receded from the waist upwards. I noticed afterwards that this deportment made the back of his jacket hang quite far away ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... and when he doesn't look like an elf, he looks like a king with a high crown on his head or a naughty boy with a ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... deeds, and hateth talk; But sitteth in a corner turning crabs, Or coughing o'er a warmed pot of ale. Backwinter th'other, that's his nown[123] sweet boy, Who like his father taketh in all points. An elf it is, compact of envious pride, A miscreant born for a plague to men; A monster that devoureth all he meets. Were but his father dead, so he would reign, Yea, he would go good-near to deal by him As Nebuchadnezzar's ungracious son, Foul Merodach[124], by his father ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... of any earthly thing, until there came, added to her own, a young, new life. When her beautiful babe, half-elf, half-mortal, nestled in her woman's breast, it wakened there the fountain of human ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... was it a tryst of joy in that day's dawning For the foemen of Yngvi Frey, When the land-rulers guided the long-ships across the waste, And the sword-elf from the south-land Thrust the sea-steeds against ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... single body he has; he shuns being wounded; he avoids being taken. They do say his age is but that of a girl to be wed. [1]His deeds of manhood have not yet come,[1] nor will he hold out against tried men, this young, beardless elf-man of whom thou spokest." [2]"We say not so,"[2] replied Fergus, "for manful were the deeds of the lad at a time when he was younger than he ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... Herford, he is an elf, a sprite, a creature of fantasy, who may be—and, I rejoice to say, is—in this world, but certainly is not of it. This Oliver is in the line of Puck and Mercutio and Lamb and Hood and other lovers ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... drawing near the confines of illusive, void dreams, Elf-land lies behind us, the shores of Reality rise in front. These shores are yet distant; they look so blue, soft, gentle, we long to reach them. In sunshine we see a greenness beneath the azure, as of spring meadows; we catch glimpses of silver lines, and imagine the roll ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... touched the little one he felt the world was his. He forgot Waldstricker, forgot Madelene, forgot everything, but his elf-like son within his cuddling grasp. He touched his lips to ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... sounded along the creaking passage; the door was opened, and presented to the impatient glance of the new proprietor the visage of the grumbling Gael. He was an old decrepit man, with bright ferocious eyes gleaming through his elf-locks. If he had succeeded in making a "swap" of his habiliments with any scarecrow south of the Tay, he would have had by far the best of the bargain, for his whole toilet consisted in a coarse blue kilt or petticoat (for it had none of the checkers that give a showy appearance to the kilt); ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... which then pervaded me might originate. Who can lie down on Elvir Hill without experiencing something of the sorcery of the place? Flee from Elvir Hill, young swain, or the maids of Elle will have power over you, and you will go elf-wild!—so say the Danes. I had unconsciously laid myself down on 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 ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... self-same tune Underneath an older moon. Life to him is, plain enough, Still a game of blind man's buff. If we listen we may hear Puckish laughter always near, And the elf's apostrophe, "Lord, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... the little mouse had finished repeating what the elf had said she laid her staff against the king's breast, and sure enough there sprang forth from it the loveliest flowers. They yielded so strong a perfume that the king commanded that the mice who ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... Fell into the well, Though Mamma told him not to move its cover; For this stubborn little elf Only chose to please himself, Looking in, he ...
— Aunt Kitty's Stories • Various
... gods kept carnival, Tricked out in star and flower, And in cramp elf and saurian forms They swathed their too ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... running about to look for him, here and there, among the enchanted bracken that rustled with elf-life, while the shadows came alive, and the rosy ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... childishness whatever. It was a thin, peaked, sallow face, with a discontented expression; her features were small and pinched, her hair, which was of inky blackness, fell on her shoulders in long, straight locks, without a ripple or a wave in them. She looked like an elf, but still this elfish little creature was redeemed from the hideousness which else might have been her doom by eyes of the most wonderful brilliancy. Large, luminous, potent eyes—intensely black, and deep as the depths of ocean, they seemed to fill her whole face; and in moments ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... you know ... she's a bit struck on him. That's more like it. She thinks he's a very tall handsome man. Well, he's not my taste. Funny, if you're tall, I s'pose you want a tall man to fall in love with you. It's different, being small, I suppose. My Elf's only about inch taller than me. You can't hardly see there's any difference between us. If I've got my hair frizzed ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... rose up and meant to go to the stud-horses; they had bits with them, and caught the horses that were in the "town" and rode away on them. They found the stud-horses between two brooks. Skarphedinn caught sight of them, for Sigmund was in bright clothing. Skarphedinn said, "See you now the red elf yonder, lads?" They looked that way, and said ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... house give glimmering light; By the dead and drowsy fire, Every elf and fairy sprite, Hop as light as bird from brier; And this ditty after me, Sing and dance it trippingly. First rehearse this song by rote, To each word a warbling note, Hand in hand, with fairy grace, We will sing, and bless ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... quoting as an example of the medicines to which our forefathers submitted. It is given in a Leech Book of the tenth century or earlier, and is thus translated by Cockayne: "If a man is in the water elf disease, then are the nails of his hand livid, and the eyes tearful, and he will look downwards. Give him this for a leechdom: Everthroat, cassuck, the netherward part of fane, a yew berry, lupin, helenium, a head of marsh mallow, fen, mint, dill, lily, attorlothe, pulegium, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... sing,—any or all these might be said to resemble the dulcet melody they played; while every delicate arpeggio, every rippling chord was muffled with a soft pressure of their hands ere the sound had time to become vehement. This elf-like harping continued for a short interval, during which the priests, gathering in a ring round a huge bronze font-shaped vessel hard by, dipped their flambeaux therein ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... strife. They can turn, like the present writer, to the thumbed diaries of that great combat,[4] and can recall the great scenes of that prolonged Parliamentary agony with a sense of treading again some well-worn road. Others are new to the issue, and can only hear, like "horns of Elf-land faintly blowing," some faint echo ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... old man had looked down upon the young one, so now the young man stood looking down upon the boy, regarding him with tolerant severity. "You most mischief-full elf!" he said. "It would be treating you deservedly were I ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... silk, which, if you take by the right end you may wind off at pleasure on the bottom or card of your discourse in a tale or so—how you will; but if you light on the wrong end you will pull all into a knot or elf-lock, which nothing but the shears or a candle will undo ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... softly to herself, "that is a fairy tent, and in it I may find a baby elf sick with whooping-cough or scarlet-fever. How splendid it would be! only I could never nurse ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... 'travail'; 'truth' and 'troth'; 'pennon' and 'pinion'; 'quail' and 'quell'; 'quell' and 'kill'; 'metal' and 'mettle'; 'chagrin' and 'shagreen'; 'can' and 'ken'; 'Francis' and 'Frances'{111}; 'chivalry' and 'cavalry'; 'oaf' and 'elf'; 'lose' and 'loose'; 'taint' and 'tint'. Sometimes the difference is mainly or entirely in the initial consonants, as between 'phial' and 'vial'; 'pother' and 'bother'; 'bursar' and 'purser'; 'thrice' and 'trice'{110}; 'shatter' ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... a voice that was like the tinkle of a little bell. It was a pretty sight,—the tiny woman, all white from cap to toe, standing in the full tide of sunbeams, bunches of honeysuckle and catalpa flowers, half as big as herself, in her arms, the elf-like face smiling out of them at the eagerness of her feathered darlings, darting and glancing and gleaming and humming about her, as if she had been a larger edition of themselves, and not of a different genus. She made me stand by her while ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... her as if this solemn-eyed child purposely misunderstood, and mocked at her attempts to lead unwilling feet along the path of learning, and she was at a loss to know how to deal with the sprightly elf who danced and flitted about like an elusive will-o'-wisp. The fact that she was the University President's granddaughter was the only thing that had saved her thus far from utter disfavor in the eyes ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... ghost or beckoning elf Far from her homestead to the desert bourn, The vagrant soul returning to herself Wearily wise, must ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... our guide said. He was always up to some sort of mischief, and his greatest delight was to get other people into trouble. The country people had long wished to be rid of him but he had a long lease of his house and he meant to stay there. He was a homely little elf, with bright red hair, a slight squint in one eye and a wart on his nose. If a lesson had not been prepared, this fellow, who was called "I Forgot," was sure to be on hand in time to whisper into the ear of the culprit, "Say 'I Didn't Think' or 'I Forgot,'" and the minute ...
— Silver Links • Various
... Mr. Cobb solemnly, as he remounted his perch; and as the stage rumbled down the village street between the green maples, those who looked from their windows saw a little brown elf in buff calico sitting primly on the back seat holding a great bouquet tightly in one hand and a pink parasol in the other. Had they been farsighted enough they might have seen, when the stage turned into ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Then came an elf, right beauteous to behold, Whose coat was like a brooklet that the sun Hath all embroider'd with its crooked gold, It was so quaintly wrought and overrun With spangled traceries,—most meet for one That was a warden of the pearly streams;— ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... of fairyland runs through a crowded city. Twenty feet from him (for he was very short-sighted) the red and white and yellow suns of the gas-lights thronged and melted into each other like an orchard of fiery trees, the beginning of the woods of elf-land. ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the bold dashing fellow, held noisy revel during the dazzling winter days, night came every once in so often; and then a quavering call, tremulous yet unafraid, told the listening world that an elf of the moonlight was claiming his own. And if some shivered at the sound, others there were who welcomed it as a challenge to enter the realm of ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... What, so beyond all madnesse is the elf, Now he hath got out of himself! His fatal enemy the Bee, Nor his deceiv'd artillerie, His shackles, nor the roses bough Ne'r half so netled ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... of 579 Deutsche Sagen, 1816. The name of his heroine Brentano took from the famous echo-rock near St. Goar, with which locality he became thoroughly familiar during the years 1780-89. No romanticist knew the Rhine better or loved it more than Brentano. "Lore" means[31] a small, squinting elf; and is connected with the verb "lauern." The oldest form of the word is found in the Codex Annales Fuldenses, which goes back to the year 858, and was first applied to the region around the ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... presence of the sun, Following darkness like a dream, Now are frolic; not a mouse Shall disturb this hallow'd house: I am sent with broom before, To sweep the dust behind the door. Through the house give glimmering light, By the dead and drowsy fire: Every elf and fairy sprite Hop as light as bird from brier; And this ditty, after me, Sing, and dance it trippingly. First, rehearse your song by rote, To each word a warbling note: Hand in hand, with fairy grace, Will we sing, ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... 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 cow-herds, the people who, from their manner of life, are most exposed to the effects ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... the linden trees of Buelach,—those tall and stately trees, with velvet down upon their shining leaves, and rustic benches underneath their overhanging eaves? A leafy dwelling, fit to be the home of elf or fairy, where first I told my love to thee, thou cold and stately Hermione! A little peasant girl stood near, and listened all the while, with eyes of wonder and delight, and an unconscious smile, to hear the stranger still ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... of love are brutal, bestial, and if one comes to think of it, grotesque! ... Oh! My poor child, what joking elf, what perverse sprite could have prompted the concluding words of your letter to me? I have made a collection of them, but out of love for you, I will not ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... spirit,' replied Maimoune; 'go on and fear nothing. Dost thou think I am as perfidious an elf as thyself, and capable of breaking the solemn oath I have made? Be sure you tell nothing but what is true, or I shall clip thy wings, and treat thee ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... him terrorless: his name's "No More." He is the corporate Silence: dread him not! No power hath he of evil in himself; But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!) Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf, That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod No foot of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... but then a Brownie is a curious creature—a fairy, and yet not one of that sort of fairies who fly about on gossamer wings, and dance in the moonlight, and so on. He never dances; and as to wings, what use would they be to him in a coal cellar? He is a sober, stay-at-home household elf—nothing much to look at, even if you did see him, which you are not likely to do—only a little old man, about a foot high, all dressed in brown, with a brown face and hands, and a brown peaked cap, just the color of a brown mouse. And like a mouse he hides in corners—especially kitchen ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... and I stood In Helen's room, where she had thrown herself Upon a couch, and lay, a winsome elf, Pouting and smiling, cheek upon her arm, Not in the least a portrait of alarm. "Now sweet!" I coaxed, and knelt by her, "be good! Go curl your hair; and please your own Maurine, By putting on that lovely grenadine. Not wolf, nor ogre, neither Caliban, Nor ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... pool of the river suddenly boiled up in my face in a little fountain. It was in a very dreary, marshy part among dilapidated trees that you see through holes in the trunks of; and if any kind of beast or elf or devil had come out of that sudden silver ebullition, I declare I do not think I should have been surprised. It was perhaps a thing as curious—a fish, with which these head waters of the stream are alive. They are some of them as long as my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... translation, slipped into the Villa Camellia at the eleventh hour, and answered "present" as their names were read on the roll-call. Peachy's disheveled hair drew down a rebuke from Miss Bickford, but this was such a very minor evil that she took it meekly, smoothed the offending elf-locks with her fingers, and composed her dimples to an expression ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... spirit gained him from the very cradle every prerogative of eldership (and he did struggle first into life, too, so he was the first-born), had grown to be a swarthy, strong, big-boned man, of the Roman-nosed, or, more physiognomically, the Jewish cast of countenance; with melo-dramatic elf-locks, large whiskers, and ungovernable passions; loud, fierce, impetuous; cunning, too, for all his overbearing clamour; and an embodied personification of those choice essentials to criminal happiness—a ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... babies, and cats, and parrots. Here is a tall, venerable grandfather, with spectacles and a long gray beard, dressed in a black robe with a hood and a yellow scarf; grave, patriarchal, imperturbable: his little granddaughter, a pretty elf of a child, with flower-like face and shining eyes, dances hither and yon among the chaos of freight and luggage; but as the chill of evening descends she takes shelter between his knees, under the folds of his long robe, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... of the young vixen?" went on the speaker, addressing her husband, the Tio Pedro, who sat with her behind the counter of a small tobacconist's shop—an ugly beldame, shrank and shrivelled, with grey elf-locks, sunk cheeks, and parchment complexion, looking ninety, yet little more than half that age. Women ripen early, are soon at their prime, and fade prematurely, under this ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... in the fairy-stories," he said in a voice Joy did not quite know, "who catches an elf-girl in some unfair way, and finds her turn to a dear human woman in his house. Joy ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... elves came trooping along. They lived in the further meadow, else they had come sooner. They were somewhat larger than the fairies, yet they were very tiny and very delicate creatures. The elf prince had long flaxen curls, and he was arrayed in a wonderful suit of damask web, at the manufacture of which seventy-seven silkworms had labored for seventy-seven days, receiving in payment therefor as many mulberry leaves as seven blue beetles could ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... and book they sat by and took Each action, if false, or if true. White marks for the deeds done for others— Black marks for the deeds done for self. And nobody hid what he said or he did, For no one, of course, sees an elf. ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... still enjoy a certain popularity. The once-famous Catnach Press still survives in Seven Dials, and Mr. Such, of Union Street in the Borough, still maintains what is probably the largest stock of broadsides now in existence, including Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight (or May Colvin), perhaps the most widely dispersed ballad ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... sailor-idiom to be lawful in poetry, because I do not indeed. On the same principle we may have Yorkshire and Somersetshire 'sweet Doric'; and do recollect what it ended in of old, in the Blowsibella heroines. Then for the Elf story ... why should such things be written by men like Mr. Horne? I am vexed at it. Shakespeare and Fletcher did not write so about fairies:—Drayton did not. Look at the exquisite 'Nymphidia,' with its subtle sylvan consistency, and then at the lumbering coarse ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... "Aldrian" is not an historical personage; the name is merely a derivative of "aldiro", 'the elder', and signifies 'ancestor', just as Uta means 'ancestress'. In the "Thidreksaga" Aldrian is the king of the Nibelung land and the father of Gunther, Giselher, and Gernot, whereas Hagen is the son of an elf by the same mother. (7) Else appears also in "Biterolf"; in the "Thidreksaga" he is called "Elsung", the younger, as his father bore the same name. See Adventure XXV, note 4. (8) "Amelrich" is the ferryman's brother. (9) "Spear". It was the custom to offer ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... he wandered along, A cheerless and comfortless elf, He sought for relief in a song, Or ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... Leonard laughed angrily; but when Henry held up the elf-bolt, and he saw its sharp point, he was shocked, and he saw horror in ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... man to go thither and to open up a road for others to follow him, was Sido, a popular hero about whom the people tell many tales. But whereas in his lifetime Sido was an admired and beneficent being, in his ghostly character he became a mischievous elf who played pranks on such as he fell in with. His adventures after death furnish the theme of many stories. However, it is much to his credit that, finding the land of the dead a barren region without vegetation of any sort, he, by an act of generation, converted it into a ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... clock upon the wall clanged the first stroke of the hour. At the sixth the lady sprang up and turned on the Major one of the queerest and yet most attractive faces he had ever seen in his life; open, and yet tantalising, the face of an elf. ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... evening breeze. akt, attention, giv —, look out, take notice. akt|a (-ade, -at), to consider worthy, respect, notice; — sig, beware. akt|giva (-gav, -givit), to notice, pay attention. aktning (-en), respect. al (-en, -ar) alder. aldrig, never. alf (-en, -er), elf. all, (allt, alla), all. allena, (allen), alone. allenast, only. Allfader (-n), Father of All, Oden. alltfr, altogether too. alltid, always, forever. alltren, already. alltjmt, all the time, always. allts, thus. alltnog, enough. alltsedan, ever since. allvar (-et), ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... beautiful, and of course young; there were also some bold individuals who asserted that when the moon shone brightly and goldenly, the young fairy was then to be seen in the tops of the trees or upon the edge of the wall. Light as an elf, transparent as a moonbeam, she there swung to and fro, executing the singular dances and singing songs that brought tears to the eyes and compassion to the hearts of those who heard them. On hearing these tales, the Romans would make the sign of the cross, and ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... the snow. The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath. He had a broad face and a little round belly That shook, when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly. He was chubby and plump,—a right jolly old elf; And I laughed, when I saw him, in spite of myself. A wink of his eye and a twist of his head Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread. He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, And filled all the stockings; then ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... some ten warriors in each. Still they came, shoals of them, like fish, with savages almost naked, the harbor smooth as glass, the grand tyee, or great chief of the tribes, standing erect shouting a welcome, with long elf-locks streaming down his back. Women and children now appeared in the canoes. That meant peace. The women were chattering like magpies; the men gurgling and spluttering their surprise at the white ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Japanese manuscripts. By merely looking at these books, their bindings and names, one at last becomes, as it were, quite worm-eaten in spirit, and longs to be out in the free air—and we are there; by Upsala's ancient hills. Thither do thou lead us, remembrance's elf, out of the city, out on the far extended plain, where Denmark's church stands—the church that was erected from the booty which the Swedes gained in the war against the Danes. We follow the broad high road: it leads us close past Upsala's ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... through the keyhole, or in at the casement; And it needs must be one that could both read and write; Yet he did not know, If it were friend or foe, Or whether it came from above or below; Howe'er, it was civil, in angel or elf, For he ne'er could have fill'd it so well of himself. CHO. Let ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... are bound with bracken-fronds, And golden elf-locks fly above; Her eyes are bright as diamonds And bluer than the ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... latter. "'Tis the little maid of the sugar-tree!—Marmaduke Haward's brown elf grown into the queen of all the fairies!" Crossing to Audrey he took her by the hand. "My dear child," he said, with a benevolence that sat well upon him, "I always meant to keep an eye upon thee, to see that Mr. Haward did by thee all that he swore ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... deliver'd was Of so horrible a fiendlike creature, That in the castle none so hardy* was *brave That any while he durst therein endure: The mother was an elf by aventure Become, by charmes or by sorcery, And ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... all ended, she was in the gayest, the most elf-like spirits. All went well until Marcey dug a hole in the ground, put a stone in it, and, burying it, said it was Laforce's heart. Then Laforce pretended to ventriloquise, and mocked Marcey's slight stutter. That was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... come to the end of the list. He read out Abel's name and that of an old bent man with grey elf-locks, a famous bee-master. Mr. James looked at Abel as much as to say, 'You've got your prize, you see! It's ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
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