A late poet unwinds into verse the fatal hair around his heart:--
"Seeing thy face, with all thy fluctuant hair Falling in dull gold opulence from thy brow, Watching thy light blue eyes, now fired, or now Laughterful, or now dim as with despair, I wonder, friend, that it should be God's care To have made at all (what matter when or how?) A being so sadly, desolately rare, So beautifully incomplete as thou!
"O rank, black pool, with one star's imaged form! O deep, rich-hearted rose, with rot at core! O summer heaven, half-purpled with stern storm! O lily, with one white leaf dipt in gore! O angel shape, whom over curves and clings The awful imminence of a devil's wings!"
Greek genius understood of course that when Pandora was endowed with gifts, Aphrodite took a double handful of the golden foam off Cyprus, whence her own blondness rose, and gilded Pandora's clay. What a pity that the mischievous Hermes put a thieving flattery into that gracious form! It ran into the fingers with an instinct to baffle man's profoundest forethought. In one of her Greek aspects she was called Ἁνησἱδωδοϛ, bestower of presents, like those of Ceres, colored like the golden-bearded rye and corn.
Lydgate married Miss Rosamond, that piece of unexceptionable blondness, whose temper during matrimonial crises was so cool and even as to amount to the highest provocation. A perfectly well-regulated bit of Nature's chasteness was this wife, who went about the town prevaricating and misrepresenting when her husband's affairs had become involved, telling fresh fibs to cover the flanks of her first ones; thus building a track that shunted him off into ever new embarrassments. Infantile bloominess of flesh and even-tempered eyes were nothing but the skim of tortuous pride; and a lie dropped from her lips the prettiest product in the world.
Shakspeare fancied that Caliban's mother, Sycorax, was a "blue-eyed hag." Bianca Capello, a woman of solid and whole-souled powers of mischief, was the "golden-haired" sorceress of Venice.
The women of the Huzules, a Sclavonic tribe that has settled in the Carpathian range, are vastly superior to the men. The blonde type predominates. They ride horses astride, and in morals are perfect Messalinas, filling the villages with intrigues which frequently have most tragic terminations.