Sylphs

Sylphs, in the fantastic system of the Paracelsists, are the elemental spirits of the air, just as the salamanders are of fire and the gnomes of earth. They hold an intermediate place between immaterial and material beings. They eat, drink, speak, move about, beget children, and are subject to infirmities like men; but, on the other hand, they resemble spirits in being more nimble and swift in their motions, while their bodies are more diaphanous than those of the human race. They also surpass the latter in their knowledge, both of the present and the future, but have no soul, and when they die nothing is left. In form they are ruder, taller, and stronger than men, but stand nearest to them of all the elemental spirits, in consequence of which they occasionally hold intercourse with human creatures, being especially fond of children and of simple harmless people; they even marry with our race, like the Undines and the Gnomes, and the children of such a union have souls and belong to the human race. In common usage the term sylph is applied to a graceful maiden—a change of meaning probably owing to the popularity of Pope's Rape of the Lock, which introduced the term into the world of fashion and literature. For although even in Pope the sylph that guards Belinda is masculine, yet the poet so refined and etherialised his spiritual agents that they soon came to be identical with ideas of feminine grace and beauty.