Word: elfland
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...thought." The childless man endlessly tried to recapture a youthful sense of wonder; almost all his works blink out at the world as if they were seeing it for the first time. Yet when he could tear himself away from toy theaters and critiques about "The Ethics of Elfland," he could toss off mature, insightful analyses of Browning and Dickens, marred primarily by their inaccurate quotes (he was too lazy to look up the original passages...
...giant roc that soars over the earth, with "the blue sky on its back," and the other a timid sparrow "scared stiff" in his bush. The world is in chaos ("Gunfire licks the heavens,/ Shells pit the earth"), and the sparrow wants to escape to "a jeweled palace in Elfland's hills." The roc replies angrily...
...Britain writes some of its loveliest prose. Lord Dunsany takes childish pride in the sag of his coat and the splay of his collar, what time he gets lost on a golden road to nowhere, beholding faery sights. Shadows are among his specialties. For The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924) he invented a whole zone of twilight, where unicorns browsed and cabbage-roots were thunderbolts. Now he writes of a crone, cheated of her shadow by a magician of old Spain, and of a romantic worldling who came to the magician's wood to learn the making...
...that point, the Princess Lirazel, hungry once more for the pleasures of Earth, prevailed upon her father to employ his last rune in pushing forward Elfland's frontier so as to include the Vale of Erl. Just as Alvaric returned, sore and weary from his travels, a shining line was seen gliding over the fields and houses, making all that it passed young and calm forever...
...KING OF ELFLAND'S DAUGHTER Lord Dunsany-Putnam...