Perhaps the most striking example of this Divine care for human enjoyment is to be seen in the lovely mantle of Colour in which the earth is robed. Like all things very common, we do not sufficiently prize this robe of beauty which Nature puts on for our gratification. It is in such complete harmony with our visual sense, that-like musical harmony also, when long continued-its sweetness fails to impress us if not broken at times by a discord. But suppose the case of a man born blind, and to whom the aspect of the outer world-nay, the very meaning of the word "colour"-has remained a mystery until he has reached the years of reflection. Fancy such a man's eye at length released from darkness, and endeavour to imagine his impressions. A thrill passes through him as the coloured beams first rush in, and awaken the emotions of a new sense. All around, he beholds a tinted mass: earth and sky, land and water, are seen by him only as expanses of varied colour. Everything is coloured,-and the forms of nature are to him but tinted surfaces, whose outline consists of the bordering of one colour upon another. Below and around him is a far-reaching expanse of green,-above him, a mighty canopy of blue; and he feels that nothing could suit so well, for wide and permanent beholding, as this lively green of the earth, and the cool calm azure of the skies. But variegating those vast surfaces of blue and green, he sees spots and shadings of all diverse hues the purple of the heath-clad mountains, the golden bloom of the furze upon their lower slopes, the rich mosaic of the autumnal woods, the grey of rocks and ruins, or the yellow of the waving corn-fields. Above, by night, he sees the dark-blue expanse sparkling all over with the light of stars, or decked with a silvery veil by the radiance of the moon ;by day, he sees it checkered and sailed over by clouds, everchanging in aspect, and at length bursting into the gorgeous magnificence of sunset, when clouds and sky are alike filled with richest colouring, with brilliant ever-shifting hues which at once dazzle and mock the gaze. All this is new to him. He has walked the earth for years, tasted its fruits, felt and understood many of its forms,-he has known how useful it is, but not till now does he comprehend its beauty. He stands amazed at the spectacle which his new-born vision reveals to him the sights are all strange, but not so the emotion which they produce in him. The same nameless pleasure, the same indescribable sensation of enjoyment, which now swells and thrills within him, he has felt before, when listening to the strains of music, or when some love-born joy has set the chords of his heart a-vibrating. It is a joyous excitement,—he nor any man can tell you no more; but he knows from previous experience that it is a sign of the soul having found something in rare harmony with itself. A garden-or those graceful crystal pavilions which are now devoted to the culture and display of fine exotic plants and flowers-is the place where beauty of colour may be seen in its greatest variety and perfection. There colour is seen in peculiar gorgeousness, and combined with so much else that is attractive, as to constitute Flowers but another name for the beautiful. The most popular of Transatlantic novelists, in a burst of enthusiasm, styles them "Earth's raptures and aspirations-her better moments-her lucid intervals." Certainly they are the lovely offspring of earth's brightest hours; and so ravishing are they, from the blended charms of brilliant colour, graceful form, and exquisite odour, that no one need wonder that they should be chosen for so many sweet purposes of life, or to symbolise in the poetic regions of the South the language and emotions of mankind. "The greatest men," says Mrs H. B. Stowe, "have always thought much of flowers. Luther always kept a flower in a glass, on his writing-table; and when he was waging his great public controversy with Eckius, he kept a flower in his hand. Lord Bacon has a beautiful passage about flowers. As to Shakespeare, he is a perfect Alpine valley, he is full of flowers; they spring, and blossom, and wave in every cleft of his mind. Witness the Midsummer Night's Dream. Even Milton, cold, serene, and stately as he is, breaks forth into exquisite gushes of tenderness and fancy when he marshals the flowers, as in Lycidas and Comus." Whatever be the subsidiary sources of attraction in flowers, Colour unquestionably is the supreme one. Men often talk disparagingly of this kind of beauty, as if it were something far lower in its nature than the beauty of Form and Sound, and indeed hardly worthy of our regard at all. This is a great mistake, and is owing to the circumstance either that the majority of mankind are not very sensitive to any kind of beauty, or because a certain fashion of speaking has led them insensibly to disregard this particular manifestation of it. "Such expressions," says Mr Ruskin, "are used for the most part in thoughtlessness; and if such disparagers of colour would only take the pains to imagine what the world and their own existence would become if the blue were taken from the sky, and the gold from the sunshine, and the verdure from the leaves, and the crimson from the blood which is the life of man, the flush from the cheek, the darkness from the eye, the radiance from the hair,-if they could but see for an instant white human creatures living in a white world, they would soon feel what they owe to colour. The fact is, that, of all God's gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay colour and sad colour, for colour cannot at once be good and gay. All good colour is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy; and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most." Mr Ruskin is not a correct thinker. Eminently sensitive to the impressions of external nature and art, he is destitute of the analytic power to ascertain the real character of those impressions. He lacks the turn of mind by which a man is enabled to "know himself;" and hence, when he comes to expound his views, founded upon those impressions, he not seldom arrives at most absurd conclusions. Right as to his feelings, he is far wrong as to the inferences he draws from them. Thus, instead of understanding the feeling of repose which symmetry tends to produce in the beholder, he roundly charges Greek architecture, which is of all others most symmetrical, with being "dead" and "atheistic" in its spirit; while Gothic architecture, which is eminently irregular and expressive in its style, he quite as absurdly discovers to be symbolic of all the Christian graces. In the sentences upon Colour here quoted, he falls into a similar error. In speaking of the "sacredness" and "holiness" of colour, and in expressing his conviction that all artists who were fine colourists (i. e., dealing in pure and bright colours) were good religious men, he falls into another of his fantastic mistakes, although in this case his misinterpretation of his feelings does not lead him very wide of the mark. Gifted with a fine sensibility, he feels, when pure bright colours are harmoniously presented to his eye, a thrill of elevated pleasure,-calm and pure, because free from all tincture of passion, and felt all the more divine because nameless, indefinite, and mysterious,—because baffling language to describe, or the mind to analyse it. But this sensation is not occasioned by the "holiness" of colour,— it is produced by its beauty. True, the emotion of the beautiful is in one sense sacred and holy; because it arises from our being brought face to face with perfection,—with objects which bear most deeply impressed upon them the signet-mark of their Maker, and which the soul of man yearns towards and welcomes with delight. It is a noble and divine feeling, but not the one for which Ruskin here mistakes it. It is physical beauty, not the "beauty of holiness," which charms us in Colour, just as it does in music or the chefs-d'œuvres of Form. And when Ruskin goes on to say, that colour "cannot be at once good and gay," that "all good colour is pensive, and the loveliest melancholy," he enunciates only a half-truth. In so far as his remark is true, it refers not to colour only, but to every other embodiment of the beautiful. For I have ever - felt myself and believe that the feeling is common to all persons of ordinary sensibility—that the beholding of high beauty, whether in nature or art, excites a sentiment of joy which is ever mingled with pensiveness, if not with melancholy. It is not a depression--on the contrary, it is an elation of spirits. It is not painful, but pleasing. The heart clings to it, and feels as if elevated and purified by its presence. It is a divine sadness, occasioned by the presence of some object so beautiful, so divinely perfect, so native in character to the soul, yet so rarely met with, that the spirit yearns towards it as to a visitor from a higher sphere from which we are exiles, and for which, in such moments, our heart is pining, it may be unconsciously, as does the wandered mountaineer for his native hills. It is this perfect harmony between beautiful objects and the soul,-it is this strange tender delight at the presence of anything supremely lovely, that led Plato to account for earthly love by the romantic theory of Reminiscence, by the supposition that lovers, and especially lovers at first sight, are attracted to each other not, as is really the case, by a congeniality of nature, on the world-wide principle of "like draws to like," but because their souls existed together as twins in a prior and higher state of existence, and long to reunite and blend themselves together again when they happen to meet on earth. A fancy so beautiful that one might say with Cicero, "Malim cum Platone errare quam desipere aliis!" In point of richness and gorgeousness of colour, flowers are unrivalled. If we may be allowed the simile, the ethereal phenomenon of colour in them gains as much by a union with earthly substance, as the spiritual nature of man is rendered more rich and beautiful by the action of the sensuous emotions. But if we would see colour in its native purity and brilliance, even Flowers must be put aside as too gross and earthy in their structure. We must turn to gems, and fire, and light itself. Throw a few grains of chemical stuff into a bright-burning fire, |