"A virtuous well, about whose flow'ry banks
The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds,
By the pale moonshine, dipping oftentimes
Their stolen children, so to make them free
From dying flesh, and dull mortality."

Ariosto, in his "Orlando Furioso" (book xliii. stanza 98) says:

"I am a fayrie, and to make you know,
To be a fayrie what it doth import,
We cannot dye, how old so e'er we grow.
Of paines and harmes of ev'rie other sort
We taste, onelie no death we nature ow."

An important feature of the fairy race was their power of vanishing at
will, and of assuming various forms. In "A Midsummer-Night's Dream"
Oberon says:

"I am invisible,
And I will overhear their conference."

Puck relates how he was in the habit of taking all kinds of outlandish
forms; and in the "Tempest," Shakespeare has bequeathed to us a graphic
account of Ariel's eccentricities. "Besides," says Mr. Spalding,[23]
"appearing in his natural shape, and dividing into flames, and behaving
in such a manner as to cause young Ferdinand to leap into the sea,
crying, 'Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!' he assumes the
forms of a water nymph (i. 2), a harpy (iii. 3), and also the Goddess
Ceres (iv. 1), while the strange shapes, masquers, and even the hounds
that hunt and worry the would-be king and viceroys of the island, are
Ariel's 'meaner fellows.'" Poor Caliban complains of Prospero's spirits
(ii. 2):

"For every trifle are they set upon me;
Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me,
And after bite me: then like hedgehogs which
Lie tumbling in my bare-foot way, and mount
Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I
All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness."

[23] "Elizabethan Demonology," p. 50.

That fairies are sometimes exceedingly diminutive is fully shown by
Shakespeare, who gives several instances of this peculiarity. Thus Queen
Mab, in "Romeo and Juliet," to which passage we have already had
occasion to allude (i. 4), is said to come

"In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman."[24]

[24] Agate was used metaphorically for a very diminutive
person, in allusion to the small figures cut in agate for
rings. In "2 Henry IV." (i. 2), Falstaff says: "I was never
manned with an agate till now; but I will inset you neither in
gold nor s