Yes, and Elendil too! (you certainly know his name means "elf-friend... you may know also that the Old English version of this name is Aelfwine, though what was historically meant by "alf, alb" is very different... but I digress!) He managed to form an alliance with Gil-Galad by treating Elves as equal and separate, instead of many other Numenoreans who pridefully tried to sail towards the West as though it was their right, and of course Sauron, who just tried to use Elves. And it's true, Bilbo and Frodo approached the Elves with respect, and ultimately Sam and Gimli too, I think, while for many they were just a bizarre wonder, a bit weird and distrusted. Gimli's experience is interesting and true: he starts bigoted and ends up a friend through his admiration for the Lady of the Woods and his comradeship with Legolas.

I've been trying to clarify my thought even to myself *g* and I think that my perception of Elves as children is mainly based on the feelings they evoke in me. They were an extremely ancient race, and very complex and certainly not childish in their behaviour, and indeed steeped in nature. But this, I think, can make one remember a distant time where as a child, too, she thought that she was immortal, and that nature and the woods were full of magic and beauty, and almost that she had a knowledge that went far, far back... the closeness to the mystery of birth, maybe... which, growing up, is lost almost completely, if not in the experience of poets.

Wordsworth, I think, expresses very similar concepts: I can quote "Intimations of Immortality", which title is in itself poignant: one may not share the Christian view but to me (though I am a Christian) it's a concept of spirituality that goes beyond definition. Sorry for the lenghty quote but I think it's meaningful:

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth

(...)

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

So, for me there is a whole, worthy civilization, which symbolizes the "glory" that has "passed from the earth", while we mortals, now conscious of it, remain with "the light of common day", a beautiful thing in itself because it means growing up, working, getting married, having a family, *living*, but it's not that semi-divine state anymore, reached sometimes only in dreams.

We cannot choose to stay back, of course, but Tolkien gives up some examples of what could happen if we could, in the persons of the Half-Elven. Elrond is content with his fate; but Arwen chooses "the light of common day", expressed in one of the best moments of the movie, for me. When she sees Eldarion, she decides to give up eternal life for... life, plain and simple. With all the pleasures and torments it entails.