sky from which the beam has passed direct, will be seen as orange. Possibly the appearance of complementary colours in plants may arise from a similar division of the beam-one portion being' reflected, and the other being absorbed, to come forth at a future time."

The separation of colours and the lovely blending is seen in the rainbow, that wonderful ethereal fabric "whose warp is the rain-drop of earth, and whose woof is the sun-beam of heaven."

The appreciation of the beauty of colour, however, depends very much on the sentiments of nations. The Venetians and Spaniards love black, and the Chinese yellow, because they are imperial colours, and convey ideas of magnificence and royalty. Black, with us, is associated with mourning, and white with innocence and cheerfulness; but in China white is a symbol of death. We in England love the pink rose, the blue sky, and the green meadows; and, as a symbol of amity, we love the union of the rose, the shamrock, and the thistle.

We generally associate the idea of colour with vision; but it is a beneficent arrangement of the great Creator that colour may be at least partially apprehended by the blind. We have a remarkable example of this in the case of Dr. Blacklock, D.D. He was born at Annan in 1721 and died at Edinburgh in 1791. Before he was six months old he lost his sight; and, although his parents were poor, before he reached middle age he was an accomplished scholar, a cultivated thinker, and a respectable poet. He wrote about colours with the same charm and

appositeness as though he had seen them all. He learned to love colours from association, and by conversation acquired the power of associating proper ideas with them; for example, using white to express cheerfulness and innocence, black to indicate gloom and melancholy, and purple as indicating majesty.*

The colours of Nature must form the true basis of our general taste; for what God, the Uncreated Beauty and Supreme Good, has so beneficently spread around us in foliage, flowers, insects, animals, dells, and mountains, and in cloud scenery, must be beautiful in form and colour, and therefore accordant with our natural perceptions and the real ground for our judgment. "The best image which the world can give of Paradise is in the slope of the meadows, orchards, and corn fields on the sides of a great alp, with its purple rocks and eternal snows above; this excellence not being in anywise a matter referable to feeling or individual preferences, but demonstrable by calm enumeration of the number of lovely colours on the rocks, the varied grouping of the trees, and quantity of noble incidents in stream, crag, or cloud, presented to the eye at any given moment."

There can be no doubt that the tone of landscape colour is very much heightened by the purple, violet, and deep ultramarine blue, caused by the mountains. "In an ordinary lowland landscape we have the blue of the sky; the green of grass, which * "Chambers's Encyclopædia,” and Alison “On Taste,” p. 219.

I will suppose (and this is an unnecessary concession to the lowlands) entirely fresh and bright; the green of trees; and certain elements of purple, far more rich and beautiful than we generally should think, in their bark and shadows (bare hedges and thickets, or tops of trees, in subdued afternoon sunshine, are nearly perfect purple, and of an exquisite tone), as well as in ploughed fields, and dark ground in general. But among mountains, in addition to all this, large unbroken spaces of pure violet and purple are introduced in their distances; and even near, by films of cloud passing over the darkness of ravines or forests, blues are produced of the most subtle tenderness; these azures and purples passing into rose-colour of otherwise wholly unattainable delicacy among the upper summits, the blue of the sky being at the same time purer and deeper than in the plains. Nay, in some sense, a person who has never seen the rose-colour of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve or fifteen miles away, can hardly be said to know what tenderness in colour means at all; bright tenderness he may, indeed, see in the sky or in a flower, but this grave tenderness of the far-away hill-purples he cannot conceive.

"Together with this great source of pre-eminence in mass of colour, we have to estimate the influence of the finished inlaying and enamel-work of the colour-jewellery on every stone; and that of the continual variety in species of flower; most of the mountain flowers being, besides, separately lovelier than the lowland ones. The wood hyacinth and wild rose are, indeed, the only supreme flowers that

the lowlands can generally show; and the wild rose is also a mountaineer, and more fragrant in the hills, while the wood hyacinth, or grape hyacinth, at its best, cannot match even the dark bell-gentian, leaving the light-blue star-gentian in its uncontested queenliness, and the alpine rose and highland heather wholly without similitude. The violet, lily of the valley, crocus, and wood anemone are, I suppose, claimable partly by the plains as well as the hills; but the large orange lily and narcissus I have never seen but on hill pastures, and the exquisite oxalis is pre-eminently a mountaineer.

"And, observe, all these superiorities are matters plainly measurable and calculable, not in any wise to be referred to estimate of sensation. Of the grandeur or expression of the hills I have not spoken; how far they are great, or strong, or terrible, I do not for the moment consider, because vastness, and strength, and terror, are not to all minds subjects of desired contemplation. It may make no difference to some men whether a natural object be large or small, whether it be strong or feeble. But loveliness of colour, perfectness of form, endlessness of change, wonderfulness of structure, are precious to all undiseased minds; and the superiority of the mountains in all these things to the lowland is, I repeat, as measurable as the richness of a painted window matched with a white one, or the wealth of a museum compared with that of a simply furnished chamber. They seem to have been built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; full of treasures of illuminated

manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness for the worshipper. And of these great cathedrals of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars,-of these, as we have seen, it was written, nor long ago, by one of the best of the poor human race for whom they were built, wondering in himself for whom their Creator could have made them, and thinking to have entirely discerned the Divine intent in them—That they are inhabited by the beasts.'

While the foregoing quotations illustrate points and principles, and furnish specimens of the beauty of language, we hope they will tend to create or strengthen a taste for the beautiful.

Thoughtful men have pointed out the fact, that there is an identity between the Divine Mind and the creature mind, in reference to form and colour. Man imitates the contrivances of the Divine Architect and Artificer in mechanical forms, and also imitates the colours God has impressed on natural productions. The colours which pleased the ancient Thebans, now please the inhabitants of London. It is with much pleasure that I can quote the words of the lamented Hugh Miller, as illustrating these facts. He says, "And just as we infer from the mechanical contrivances of the Creative Worker, that He possessess a certain identity of mind in the constructive department with His creature workers,and this on the principle on which we infer an