"She doth not, with lying long abed, spoil both her complexion and conditions, ... she rises, therefore, with chanticleer, her dame's cock, and at night makes the lamb her curfew. In milking a cow, and straining the teats through her fingers, it seems that so sweet a milk-press makes the milk the whiter or sweeter; for never came almond glove or aromatic ointment on her palm to taint it. The golden ears of corn fall and kiss her feet when she reaps them, as if they wish to be bound and led prisoners by the same hand that felled them. Her breath is her own which scents all the year long of June, like a new made haycock. She makes her hand hard with labour, and her heart soft with pity: and when winter evenings fall early (sitting at her merry wheel), she sings a defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. She doth all things with so sweet a grace, it seems ignorance will not suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well.... She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none: yet to say truth, she is never alone, for she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones....
"Thus lives she, and all her care is she may die in the springtime, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet."
[76]. "Cypresse black as ere was Crow."
Cypresse (according to a memorandum from one of Mr. Nahum's books) is the fine cobweblike stuff we now call crape. Peaking-stickes, or poking-sticks, were gophering irons for frilling out linen, flounces, etc., etc., and not, as one might guess, curling tongs (since a pointed beard, and the V of hair on the forehead, used to be called peaks). A quoife or coif is a lady's head-dress, such as is still worn by nuns; while as for "maskes for faces," fine ladies in Shakespeare's day customarily wore them (as old pictures show) when they went to see his plays. Masks were useful too in disguising the faces of his players, when—as was the custom in the London theatres up to 1629—boys took women's parts; and in the streets eyes gleamed out of the holes in them, worn then for keeping the skin fair, untanned, and unfreckled, as Julia says of herself in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona:
But since she did neglect her looking-glasse,
And threw her Sun-expelling masque away,
The ayre hath starved the roses in her cheekes,
And pinched the lily-tincture of her face....
[78]. Fairing. (line 5)
In this—the earliest known letter of Shelley's—he too asks for a fairing—the kickshaws and gewgaws sold in the booths of a fair—and a toothsome one; though I haven't yet been able to discover what he meant by "hunting nuts":