could be less Grecian, or more eccentric in form and position, than the
eyes. They were placed obliquely, in a way that I do not remember to
have seen repeated in any other face whatever. Large they were, and
particularly long, tending to an almond-shape; equally strange, in
fact, as to color, shape, and position: but the remarkable position of
these eyes would have absorbed your gaze to the obliteration of all
other features or peculiarities in the face, were it not for one other
even more remarkable distinction affecting her complexion: this lay in
a suffusion that mantled upon her cheeks, of a color amounting almost
to carmine. Perhaps it might be no more than what Pindar meant by the
_porphyreon phos erotos_, which Gray has falsely [Footnote: Falsely,
because poxphuxeos rarely, perhaps, means in the Greek use what we mean
properly by _purple_, and _could_ not mean it in the Pindaric passage;
much oftener it denotes some shade of _crimson_, or else of _puniceus_,
or blood-red. Gibbon was never more mistaken than when he argued that
all the endless disputing about the _purpureus_ of the ancients might
have been evaded by attending to its Greek designation, namely,
_porphyry_-colored: since, said he, porphyry is always of the same
color. Not at all. Porphyry, I have heard, runs through as large a
gamut of hues as marble; but, if this should be an exaggeration, at all
events porphyry is far from being so monochromatic as Gibbon's argument
would presume. The truth is, colors were as loosely and
latitudinarially distinguished by the Greeks and Romans as degrees of
affinity and consanguinity are everywhere. _My son-in-law_, says a
woman, and she means _my stepson._ _My cousin_, she says, and she means
any mode of relationship in the wide, wide world. _Nos neveux_, says a
French writer, and means not _our nephews_, but _our grandchildren_,
or more generally _our descendants_.] translated as "the bloom of
young desire, and PURPLE light of love." It was not unpleasing, and
gave a lustre to the eyes, but it added to the eccentricity of the