Fanciful

The next Tone and Attitude Word I had on my list is one of my personal favorites. 

Fanciful

Here is the definition that I put together:

Characterized by, or showing fancy, capricious or whimsical in appearance, suggested by fancy, imaginary, unreal, led by fancy rather than by reason or experience, whimsical

And the excerpt that I came up with to demonstrate this term is one of my personal favorites as well, dating back from when I was about 2. 

C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian

This excerpt comes after Lucy and her siblings arrive in Narnia for the second time.  They are traveling to find Prince Caspian with the dwarf Trumpkin.  They have been traveling for a couple days now, lost their way and had to come all the way back to where they started, where they make camp for the night. This is Lucy's fanciful experience...

“Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.  She thought a first it was her father’s voice, but that did not seem quite right.  Then she thought it was Peter’s voice, but that did not seem to fit either. She did not want to get up; not because she was tired – on the contrary she was wonderfully rested and all the aches had gone from her bones – but because she felt so extremely happy and comfortable.  She was looking straight up at the Narnian moon, which is larger than ours, and at the starry sky, for the place where they had bivouacked was comparatively open.

‘Lucy,’ came the call again, neither her father’s voice nor Peter’s.  She sat up, trembling with excitement but not with fear.  The moon was so bright that the whole forest landscape around her was almost clear as day, though it looked wilder.  Behind her was the fir-wood; away to her right the jagged cliff tops on the far side of the gorge; straight ahead, open grass to where a glade of trees began about a bow-shot away.  Lucy looked very hard at the trees of that glade.

‘Why, I do believe they’re moving,; she said to herself. ‘They’re walking about.’

She got up, her heart beating wildly, and walked towards them.  There was certainly a noise in the glade, a noise such as trees make in high wind, though there was no wind tonight.  Yet it was not exactly as ordinary tree-noise either.  Lucy felt there was a tune in it, but she could not catch the tune any more than she had been able to catch the words when the trees had so nearly talked to her the night before…and now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving – moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance…she went fearlessly in among them, dancing herself as she leaped this way and that to avoid being run into by these huge partners.  But she was only half interested in them.  She wanted to get beyond them to something else; it was from beyond them that the dear voice had called.” 

Happy Fanciful reading!