So do not thou with crabbed frowns appal them.”
Yet timorous and ill-informed folk, mistrusting the kindly disposition of Elves and Fairies, took precautions for excluding Elfin visitors from their dwellings by hanging over their doors boughs of St. John’s Wort, gathered at midnight on St. John’s Eve. A more kindly feeling, however, seems to have prevailed at Christmas time, when boughs of evergreen were everywhere hung in houses in order that the poor frost-bitten Elves of the trees might hide themselves therein, and thus pass the bleak winter in hospitable shelter.
Fairy Plants.
In Devonshire the flowers of Stitchwort are known as Pixies.
Of plants which are specially affected by the Fairies, first mention should be made of the Elf Grass (Vesleria cærulea), known in Germany as Elfenkraut or Elfgras. This is the Grass forming the Fairy Rings, round which, with aerial footsteps, have danced
“Ye demi-puppets, that
By moonlight do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites.”—Shakspeare’s Tempest.
The Cowslip, or Fairy Cup, Shakspeare tells us forms the couch of Ariel—the “dainty Ariel” who has so sweetly sung of his Fairy life—
“Where the bee sucks, there lurk I;