a. [f. LUSTRE sb.1 + -OUS. Cf. OF. lustreux.] Having luster, sheen or gloss.
1601. Shaks., All’s Well, II. i. 41. My sword and yours are kinne, good sparkes and lustrous.
1742. Collins, Oriental Eclog., i. But dark within, they drink no lustrous light.
1820. Keats, Ode to Nightingale, 29. Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes.
1842. Tennyson, Locksley Hall, 162. Slides the bird o’er lustrous woodland.
1870. Dickens, E. Drood, ii. Thick, lustrous, well-arranged black hair and whiskers.
1872. Yeats, Techn. Hist. Comm., 135. The Romans manufactured a red lustrous ware on the banks of the Rhine.
b. fig. (Cf. LUSTRE sb.1 4.)
1605. Bacon, Adv. Learn., II. xx. § 1. A certaine … lustrous masse of matter chosen to giue glory … to the eloquence of discourses. Ibid. (1626), Sylva, § 956. The more Lustrous the Imagination is, it filleth and fixeth the better.
1822. Lamb, Elia, Ser. I. Decay Beggars. The Blind Beggar … whose story doggrel rhymes … cannot so degrade or attenuate, but that some sparks of a lustrous spirit will shine through the disguisements.
1898. G. Meredith, Odes Fr. Hist., 40. She saw the Lustrous, her great lord, appear.
Hence Lustrously adv. Lustrousness.
1839. Bailey, Festus (1848), 17/2. Like stars … They shall … be lost All meanly In its moonlike lustrousness.
1849. E. B. Eastwick, Dry Leaves, 56. The clemency and moderation, which shine so lustrously in the English crown.
1884. Harper’s Mag., June, 79/1. The steel … becomes lustrously white.
1892. Henley, Song Sword, etc., Lond. Voluntaries, ii. 26. With this enchanted lustrousness.
