"Henna" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Claudian's Rape of Proserpine (A.D. 400) is one of the most rich and elaborate poems ever written. It has in common with Milton the circumstance that its whole action is contained in a solitary event, viz., the carrying off of Proserpine from the vale of Henna by Pluto, All the personages, too, are superhuman; and the incident itself supernatural. Claudian's ambition was to overlay his story with the gold and jewellery of expression and invention. Nothing is named without being carved, decked, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... large, with broad and smooth thick velvety leaves, but omitted to write down the name. It produces a milky juice, with which the people dye the palms of their hands, instead of with henna. The plant has a disagreeable odour, and every appearance of being poisonous; but they say it is not so, ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... do no harm to Kathryn, but I own that if George were not at present quite madly in love with a darling being at least fifteen years older than himself I should pause to reflect. Mrs. Stacy will keep him steady—Mrs. Alan Stacy, you know—the one with the magnificent henna hair, and the eyes that droop. No boy of twenty-two can resist her. They call her adorers ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and matted bed of thick green myrtle, and brought water in his two hands to bathe the bruised head, whimpering the while. Then he chafed the small bare feet and warmed them in his own warm breast; and gathering handfuls of pungent mint and the sweet-scented henna, he crushed them and held them to the boy's nostrils. And these devices failing, he sat disconsolate, the curves of his mobile face falling into unwonted lines of half-weary, half-sorrowful dejection. "I know not how it may be," he said to himself, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... was a cloth-merchant, like many of the Meccan chiefs. He is described as very fair with bulging brow, deep set eyes and thin-checked, of slender build and lean loined, stooping and with the backs of his hands fleshless. He used tinctures of Henna and Katam for his beard. The Persians who hate him, call him "Pir-i-Kaftar," the old she-hyaena, and believe that he wanders about the deserts of Arabia in perpetual rut which the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... If they were going to shut up those girls, they had no business to bring them up on modern ideas. If they kept the mashrubiyeh on the windows and the yashmak on their faces they ought to keep the kohl on their eyes and the henna on their fingers and education ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... to appear through the cross-hatchings of the bandages. Attached to a thick gold wire round the neck and placed over the heart was a scarab of green basalt, mounted in a gold setting; and on the henna-stained little finger of the left hand was another of steatite. As the right arm was freed from its artificially tightened grasp a peculiar wooden cylinder rolled on to the floor into the heap of scented mummy dust ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... cedarn doors; Scattered over mosaic floors Are anemones, myrtles, and violets, And a musical fountain throws its jets Of a hundred colors into the air. The dusk Sultana loosens her hair, And stains with the henna-plant the tips Of her pointed nails, and bites her lips Till they bloom again; but, alas, that rose Not for the Sultan buds and blows! Not for the Sultan Shah-Zaman When he goes to ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... and showed her gravely a powder-puff, powder, kohl, with a tiny blunt instrument of ivory used in Egypt for its appliance, a glass bottle of rose-water, paste of henna, of smoke-black with oil and quick-lime, and other preparations commonly used in the East for the decoration of women. She examined them curiously and minutely, then looked up at him and smiled, thinking of Nigel's gentle but ardent protest. Yes, she could be strangely at home with ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... airy as the rainbow, wreathe her round, from the snowy breast to the finely rounded limbs half buried in billowy cushions; the attitude is the very poetry of repose, languid it may be, but glowing life thrills beneath that flower-soft exterior, from the varying cheek and flashing eye, to the henna-dyed taper fingers, that capriciously play with her rosary of beads. The blaze of sunshine is round her kiosk, but she sits in the softened shadow so dear to the painter's eye. And so she dreams away the warm ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... eternal silence. The hair, exceedingly fine, silky, and soft, dressed in light curls, did not fall below the tops of the ears, and was of that auburn tint so much prized by Venetian women. It looked like a child's hair dyed with henna, as one sees it in Algeria. I do not think that this colour was the natural one; Nes Khons must have been dark like other Egyptians, and the brown tone was doubtless produced by the essences and ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... most in demand are gulab-pani or rose-water and phulel or essence of tilli or sesamum. Scents are usually sold by the tola of 18 annas silver weight, [37] and a tola of attar may vary in price from 8 annas to Rs. 80. Other scents are made from khas-khas grass, the mango, henna and musk, the bela flower, [38] the champak [39] and cucumber. Scent is manufactured by distillation from the flowers boiled in water, and the drops of congealed vapour fall into sandalwood oil, which they say is the basis of all scents. Fragrant ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... imagine that when they dip their heads in henna twenty years suddenly slips from off them into the mess. As a matter of fact, they invariably pick up an additional ten years with the dye every time. After all, the hair, even at its dullest and greyest, shows fewer of the painful signs of Anno Domini than almost any part of the body. ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... which might have been made either in Paris or Vienna. The face was very pretty, regular of feature and oval in contour, but the effect of its beauty was marred by the hair above it, which was dyed with henna a saffron red. But she wore a flower at her breast, and in spite of her artificialities exhaled the gayety of youth. She smiled very prettily and came forward with a confiding air, giving Marishka ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... now and then," observed the sharpest of the three Wermant sisters. "Extraordinary is just the word for it. At present it is dark red. Henna did that, I suppose. Raoul—our brother—when he was in Africa saw Arab women who used henna. They tied their heads up in a sort of poultice made of little leaves, something like tea-leaves. In twenty-four hours the hair will be ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... dimple. Her hand which turns the leaves of her book is worthy of such an arm; the nails, very long and of the transparency of agate. The tips of the fingers shade to a deep rose color, such as is imparted by the henna ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... did she see; at least, not one that was not congested with women sitting smoking or eating sticky sweetmeats, or drying their heads plastered in the henna clay which would eventually dye their hair the ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... called Hoolia, in a gorgeous rida of red silk and gold brocade; a Frenchwoman, called Josephine, with embroidered red slippers and black stockings; and a Jewess, called Sol, with a band of silk handkerchiefs tied round her forehead above her coal-black curls, with her fingers pricked out with henna and ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... head uncovered—it is permissible at sunset—and with her face lifted, as she listened to the call to prayer, so that a sun-ray silting in through the silks blazed down upon the positively red curls which rioted all over her head and were of a tone sharper than henna, yet many times removed from the shades of red known as carrots ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... sure she is the daughter of the Emperor. Her nails are stained with henna. They are like the petals of a rose. She has come here to weep ...
— A Florentine Tragedy—A Fragment • Oscar Wilde
... The eyelashes, eyebrows, and also the tips and extremities of the eyelids, are colored black. The soles, and sometimes other parts of the feet, as high as the ankles, the palms of the hands, and the nails, are dyed with a yellowish-red, with the leaves of a plant called Henna (Lawsonia inermis), the leaf of which somewhat resembles the myrtle, and is dried for the purposes above mentioned. The back of the hand is also often colored and ornamented in this way with different devices. On holidays they paint their cheeks of a red ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... herded into the zenana. The Amishman glimpsed one of the ladies, perhaps Sarki Kazunzumi's most junior wife, dashing toward the female sanctuary. Her eyes were lozenges of antimony; her hands, dipped in henna, seemed clad in pale kid gloves. Aaron, recalling pointers on Murnan etiquette he'd received at Georgetown, elaborately did not see the lady. He removed his hat as the turbaned butler bowed him to a plush-covered sofa. Waziri was cuffed to a ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... dark as night, were tinged (It is the country's custom, but in vain), For those large black eyes were so blackly fringed, The glossy rebels mocked the jetty stain, And in their native beauty stood avenged: Her nails were touched with henna; but, again, The power of Art was turned to nothing, for They could not ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron |
