C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Fairies

Moonshine revellers.

Shakespeare.

Fairies use flowers for their charactery.

Shakespeare.

On the tawny sands and shelves trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.

Milton.

Be secret and discreet; the fairy favors are lost when not concealed.

Dryden.

Wherever is love and loyalty, great purposes and lofty souls, even though in a hovel or a mine, there is fairyland.

Kingsley.

In this state she gallops, night by night, o’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream.

Shakespeare.

Their little minim forms arrayed in all the tricksy pomp of fairy pride.

Drake.

This is the fairy land; O spite of spites,
We talk with goblins, owls, and elvish sprites.

Shakespeare.

Then take me on your knee, mother;
And listen, mother of mine.
A hundred fairies danced last night,
And the harpers they were nine.

Mary Howitt.

In silence sad,
Trip we after the night’s shade;
We the globe can compass soon,
Swifter than the wand’ring moon.

Shakespeare.

But light as any wind that blows
So fleetly did she stir,
The flower, she touch’d on, dipt and rose,
And turned to look at her.

Tennyson.

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the forefinger of an alderman.

Shakespeare.

Sometimes she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five fathoms deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts, and wakes,
And, being thus frighted, swears, a prayer or two,
And sleeps again.

Shakespeare.

Bright Eyes, Light Eyes! Daughter of a Fay!
I had not been a married wife a twelvemonth and a day,
I had not nursed my little one a mouth, upon my knee,
When down among the blue bell banks rose elfins three times three:
They griped me by the raven hair, I could not cry for fear,
They put a hempen rope around my waist and dragged me here;
They made me sit and give thee suck as mortal mothers can,
Bright Eyes, Light Eyes! strange and weak and wan!

Robert Buchanan.

The maskers come late, and I think will stay, like fairies, till the cock crow them away.

Donne.

The dances ended, all the fairy train
For pinks and daisies search’d the plain.

Pope.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly.

Shakespeare.

Their harps are of the amber shade,
That hides the blush of waking day,
And every gleamy string is made
Of silvery moonshine’s lengthened ray.

Drake.

Her mantle was the purple roll’d
At twilight in the west afar;
’Twas tied with threads of dawning gold
And button’d with a sparkling star.

Drake.

Oft fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels by a forest side,
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while o’erhead the moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth
Wheels her pale course, they on their mirth and dance
Intent, with jocund music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.

Milton.

The palace of the sylphid queen—
Its spiral columns, gleaming bright,
Were streamers of the northern light;
Its curtain’s light and lovely flush
Was of the morning’s rosy blush;
And the ceiling fair, that rose aboon,
The white and feathery fleece of noon.

Drake.

Did you ever hear
Of the frolic fairies dear?
They’re a blessed little race,
Peeping up in fancy’s face,
In the valley, on the hill,
By the fountain and the rill;
Laughing out between the leaves
That the loving summer weaves.

Mrs. Osgood.

He put his acorn-helmet on;
It was plum’d of the silk of the thistledown;
The corselet plate, that guarded his breast,
Was once the wild bees’ golden vest;
His cloak, of a thousand mingled dyes,
Was form’d of the wings of butterflies;
His shield was the shell of a lady-bug queen,
Studs of gold on a ground of green;
And the quivering lance which he brandish’d bright,
Was the sting of a wasp he had slain in flight.

Drake.

About this spring of ancient fame say true,
The dapper elves their moonlight sports renew;
Their pigmy king and little fairy queen
In circling dances gamboll’d on the green,
With tuneful sprites a merry concert made,
And airy music warbled through the shade.

Pope.

To pass their lives on fountains and on flowers, and never know the weight of human hours.

Byron.

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