Their employment is thus charmingly represented by Shakespeare, in the address of Prospero:—
“Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
And ye, that on the sands, with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets, that
By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms; that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew.”
In The Midsummer Night’s Dream, the queen, Titania, being desirous to take a nap, says to her female attendants—
“Come, now a roundel, and a fairy song;
Then, for the third part of a minute hence;
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rosebuds;
Some, war with rear-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats; and some keep back
The clamorous owl that nightly hoots, and wonders
At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep;
Then to your offices, and let me rest.”
Milton gives a most beautiful and accurate description of the little green-coats of his native soil, than which nothing can be more happily or justly expressed. He had certainly seen them, in this situation, with “the poet’s eye”:—
“... Fairie elves,
Whose midnight revels, by a forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon,
Sits arbitress, and neerer to the earth
Wheels her pale course, they, on thir mirth and dance
Intent, with jocond music charm his ear;
At once with joy and fear his heart rebounds.”
The impression they made upon his imagination in early life appears from his “Vacation Exercise,” at the age of nineteen:—
“Good luck befriend thee, son; for, at thy birth
The faiery ladies dannc’t upon the hearth;
The drowsie nurse hath sworn she did them spie
Come tripping to the room where thou didst lie,
And, sweetly singing round about thy bed,
Strew all their blessings on thy sleeping head.”
L’Abbé Bourdelon, in his Ridiculous Extravagances of M. Ouflé, describes “The fairies of which,” he says, “grandmothers and nurses tell so many tales to children. These fairies,” adds he, “I mean, who are affirmed to be blind at home, and very clear-sighted abroad; who dance in the moonshine when they have nothing else to do; who steal shepherds and children, to carry them up to their caves,” etc.—(English translation, p. 190.)