Perfume

Perfume is a mixture of fragrant essential oils and/or aroma compounds, fixatives, and solvents used to give the human body, animals, objects, and living spaces a pleasant scent. The odoriferous compounds that make up a perfume can be manufactured synthetically or extracted from plant or animal sources. Perfumes have been known to exist in some of the earliest human civilizations either through ancient texts or from archaeological digs. Modern perfumery began in the late 19th century with the commercial synthesis of aroma compounds which allowed for the composition of perfumes with smells previously unattainable solely from natural aromatics alone.

Sourced

• In virtue, nothing earthly could surpass her,
  Save thine "incomparable oil," Macassar!
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto I, Stanza 17.

• And the ripe harvest of the new-mown hay
  Gives it a sweet and wholesome odour.
  • Colley Cibber, Richard III (Altered) (1700), Act V, scene 3, line 44.

• I cannot talk with civet in the room,
  A fine puss gentleman that's all perfume.
  • William Cowper, Conversation (1782), line 283.

• Soft carpet-knights all scenting musk and amber.
  • Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, Divine Weekes and Workes (1578), Third Day, Part I.

• And ever since then, when the clock strikes two,
  She walks unbidden from room to room,
  And the air is filled that she passes through
  With a subtle, sad perfume.
  The delicate odor of mignonette,
  The ghost of a dead and gone bouquet,
  Is all that tells of her story—yet
  Could she think of a sweeter way?
  • Bret Harte, Newport Legend. Quoted by Augustus Thomas in The Witching Hour; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 593-94.

• Look not for musk in a dog's kennel.
  • George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651).

• A stream of rich distill'd perfumes.
  • John Milton, Comus (1634), 556.

• Sabean odours from the spicy shore
  Of Arabie the blest.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book IV, line 162.

• An amber scent of odorous perfume
  Her harbinger.
  • John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), line 720.

• And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.
  • Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712, revised 1714 and 1717), Canto I, line 134.

• And all your courtly civet cats can vent
  Perfume to you, to me is excrement.
  • Alexander Pope, Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II, line 188; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 593-94.

• So perfumed that
  The winds were love-sick.
  • William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1600s), Act II, scene 2, line 198.

• From the barge
  A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
  Of the adjacent wharfs.
  • William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1600s), Act II, scene 2, line 216.

• Hast thou not learn'd me how
  To make perfumes? distil? preserve? yea, so
  That our great king himself doth woo me oft
  For my confections?
  • William Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1611), Act I, scene 5, line 12.

• The perfumed tincture of the roses.
  • William Shakespeare, Sonnet LIV (c. 1590-1595).

• Take your paper, too,
  And let me have them very well perfumed,
  For she is sweeter than perfume itself
  To whom they go to.
  • William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593-94), Act I, scene 2, line 151.

• Perfume for a lady's chamber.
  • William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (c. 1610-11), Act IV, scene 4, line 225.