Long as a maste and upright as a bolt.
The Miller’s Tale.
From the darkening lashes of her eyes
She breathed enamouring odour.]
I am satisfied that this is to be taken in a literal, not in a metaphysical or poetic sense. Nearly all the Greek female epithets had a reference to some artificial mode of heightening the personal allurements: as rosy-fingered; rosy-elbowed: I think κυανεαων, black, is an epithet of the same cast: and alludes to the darkening of the eye-lid by the rim drawn round it with a needle dipped in antimonial oil. “The eye-lashes breathing of Venus,” has a palpable connexion with this. Athenæus, xv. describes the several unguents for the hair, breast, and arms, which were in use among the Greeks, as impregnated with the odour of rose, myrtle, or crocus. The oily dye employed by the women to blacken their eye-brows and eye-lashes was doubtless perfumed in the same manner. Virgil probably had in his mind the perfumed hair of a Roman lady, when he described the tresses of Venus breathing ambrosia, Æn. i. 402:
She spoke and turn’d: her neck averted shed
A light that glow’d ‘celestial rosy red:’
The locks that loosen’d from her temples flew
Breathing heaven’s odours, dropp’d ambrosial dew.