Metaphorsmic

I really enjoyed this excerpt from Gogol's St. John's Eve:

My late grandfather's aunt used to say - and you know it's easier for a woman to kiss the devil, meaning no offense, than to call another woman a beauty - that the Cossack girl's plump cheeks were as fresh and bright as the first pink poppy when, having washed itself in God's dew, it glows, spreads its petals, and preens itself before the just-risen sun; that her eyebrows were like the black cords our girls now buy to hang crosses and ducats on from the Muscovites who go peddling with their boxes in our villages, arched evenly as if looking into her bright eyes; that her little mouth, at the sight of which the young men back then licked their lips, seemed to have been created for chanting nightingale songs; that her hair, black as the raven's wing and soft as young flax (at the time our girls did not yet wear braids with bright-coloured ribbons twined in them), fell in curly locks on her gold-embroidered jacket.