Last night I saw St. Elmo’s stars,
  With their glimmering lanterns all at play ... 
  And I knew we should have foul weather to-day.

  Longfellow, The Golden Legend.

(St. Elmo is the patron saint of sailors.)

ELOA, the first of seraphs.  He name with God is “The Chosen One,” but the angels call him Eloa.  Eloa and Gabriel were angel friends.

Eloa, fairest spirit of heaven.  His thoughts are past understanding to the mind of man.  He looks more lovely than the day-spring, more beaming than the stars of heaven when they first flew into being at the voice of the Creator.  —­Klopstock, The Messiah, i. (1748).

ELOI (St.), that is, St. Louis.  The kings of France were called Loys up to the time of Louis XIII.  Probably the “delicate oath” of Chaucer’s prioress, who was a French scholar “after the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe,” was St. Loy, i.e. St. Louis, and not St. Eloi the patron saint of smiths and artists.  St.

Eloi was bishop of Noyon in the reign of Dagobert, and a noted craftsman in gold and silver. (Query, “Seint Eloy” for Seinte Loy?)

  Ther was also a nonne, a prioresse,
  That of hire smiling was full simp’ and coy,
  Hire greatest othe was but by Seint Eloy!

  Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (1388).

ELOPS.  There was a fish so-called, but Milton uses the word (Paradise Lost, x. 525) for the dumb serpent or serpent which gives no warning of its approach by hissing or otherwise. (Greek, ellops, “mute or dumb.”)

ELOQUENCE (The Four Monarchs of):  (1) Demonsthenes, the Greek orator (B.C. 385-322); (2) Cicero, the Roman orator (B.C. 106-43); (3) Burke, the English orator (1730-1797); (4) Webster, the American orator (1782-1852).

ELOQUENT (That old Man), Isocrates, the Greek orator.  When he heard that the battle of Chaeronea was lost, and that Greece was no longer free, he died of grief.

  That dishonest victory
  At Chaeronea, fatal to liberty,
  Killed with report that Old Man Eloquent.

  Milton, Sonnet ix.

In the United States the term was freely applied to John Quincy Adams, in the latter years of his life.

ELOQUENT DOCTOR (The), Peter Aurelolus, archbishop of Aix (fourteenth century).

ELPINUS, Hope personified.  He was “clad in sky-like blue” and the motto of his shield was “I hold by being held.”  He went attended by Pollicita (promise).  Fully described in canto ix. (Greek, elpis, “hope.")—­Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island (1633).

ELSA.  German maiden, accused of having killed her little brother.  At her trial a knight appears, drawn by a swan, champions her and vanquishes her accuser.  Elsa weds him (Lohengrin) promising never to ask of his country or family.  She breaks the vow; the swan appears and bears him away from her.—­Lohengrin Opera, by Richard Wagner.