Blue Books

“ And, in general, that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us; it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent—we look through it and see nothing but the blue; we may be convinced that there is something, but what it is no philosopher, I think, has yet clearly recognised. ”

“ The books themselves are forgotten by most booksellers to-day, [26] as I have discovered from many fruitless demands for copies.
The little square pamphlets by F. H. Bayley, to which allusion has already been made, include "Blue Beard;" ”

“ A PROTEST.--One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. The Blue-Book is rapidly becoming his ideal both for method and manner. ”

“ Our spirit, which is azure blue, transports thee to blue distances. Sweet tones allure thee, a mingling of many sounds. When the others sing bravely, we chime sweetly in, telling softly of blue mountains, clouds, fair skies; we are like the faint, clear background behind fresh green leaves. ”

“ I am like a dark black night, that has suddenly been flooded with the rapture of a golden sun. O hail! O bright great God, in the form of that blue-eyed beautiful thing before me, that fills me with astonishment and laughter and supreme delight. And presently he said: O thou with the blue flowers in thy hair and the blue wonder in thy enormous eyes, that resemble those of a child, how can it be that in a world so full of them, thou shouldst never yet have set those eyes on either a man or a horse?
Then she started as if from a dream. ”

“ I imagine that for many of us one of the most powerful elements in this billow of pleasurable feeling evoked by the vision of blue, is spiritual, in the fullest ethical meaning of the word;—that under the fleeting surface-plexus of personal emotion empirically associated with the color, pulses like a tide the transmitted religious emotion of unnumbered ages;—and that, quickening and vivifying all inherited sense of blue as beauty, is the inherited lucent rapture of blue as the splendor mystical,—as the color of the everlasting Peace. ”

“ His manner had the disconcerting intensity of a man who has been brooding overlong in solitude. “At a distance everything melts into the blue. I have seen blank blue sky where on another day there’s a range of mountains sharp and clear across the horizon. And they pretend that in all those millions of miles there is nothing—nothing but empty space!” ”

“ By thy mighty will do the silent, eternal hosts of Heaven sweep in sublime procession across the unmeasured blue. The perfect harmony of the spheres is attuned for thee, and by thee; the perfect coloring of the clouds, than which no mortal pigment can dare equal, are thy handiwork. ”

“ I asked a shepherd once. “The blueness of blueness,” he answered, in Gaelic. It is so. It is not blue one sees, but the bloom of blue; as on a wild plum, it is not the purple skin we note, but the amethyst bloom of purple which lies upon it. It is beauty, with its own loveliness upon it like a breath. Then the blue deepens, or greys, as the hour and the light compel. The most rare and subtle loveliness is when the grey silhouette of the mountain-ridge, serrated line, or freaked and tormented [Pg 23] peaks, or vast unbroken amplitude, sinks into the sudden deep clearness of the enveloping sky. ”

“ Who, be he old or young, does not take pleasure in hearing them? We still remember the stories of our youth and think regretfully of the time when we listened to them. But they are ever alive. We have been silently awaiting for eight centuries—ever since Marie de France—the return of the Blue Bird. ”

“ The blue flower, like the absolute ideal, is never found in this world, poets may at times dimly feel its nearness, and perhaps even catch a brief glimpse of it in some lonely forest glade, far from the haunts of men, but it is in vain to try to pluck it. If for a moment its perfume fills the air, the senses are intoxicated and the soul swells with poetic rapture." [27] It would lead us too far afield to follow up the traces of this mystical symbolism in the writings of our New England transcendentalists. ”

“ And I thought that dull, persistent cloud wavered and broke for an instant, and that I saw behind a glimpse of that blue which is heaven when we are on the earth—the blue sky—which is nowhere to be seen but in the mortal life; which is heaven enough, which is delight enough, for those who can look up to it, and feel themselves in the land of hope. ”

“ He will be struck at the loftiness of the sky; at the vividness of its blue and gold, the sharp, unsoftened light of the stars, and, as it were, the contracted pupil of the sun’s eye at mid-day. The sunset glories of our western heavens play upon a ground of rigid blue. ”

“ This world is a dream, say the old and the wise,
And its rainbows arise o'er the false and the true;
But the mists of the morning are made of our sighs,—
Ah, shatter them, scatter them, Little Boy Blue!
Little Boy Blue, if the child-heart knows,
Sound but a note as a little one may;
And the thorns of the desert shall bloom with the rose,
And the Healer shall wipe all tears away;
Little Boy Blue, we are all astray,
The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn,
Ah, set the world right, as a little one may ”

“ We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. ”

“ At all events, there they were, remembered again, looking at me from the past, blue eyes that were beautiful and dear to me, whose blue colour was associated with every sweetness and charm in child and woman and with all that is best and highest in human souls; and I could not and had no wish to resist their appeal.
Then came a new experience of the eye that is blue—a meeting with one who almost seemed to be less flesh than spirit. A middle-aged lady, frail, very frail; exceedingly pale from long ill-health, prematurely white-haired, with beautiful grey eyes, gentle but wonderfully bright. ”

“ You believe yourself to have a strong mind; who told you that certain phenomena would not go beyond your comprehension? Do you know who I am? Do you know where you are? Do you know in consequence of what strange mystery I offer you my hand? A comedy?" repeated Blue Beard bitterly, regarding the buccaneer with an appearance almost of fear; "can you not be made to understand that all this is not a play, sir? ”

“ We look above; all is a glistening, glowing mass of unearthly brilliancy. We look down and who may describe the ineffable beauty of those translucent basins of opaline-tinted water? The blue is like nothing else "in the heavens above, or the earth beneath." ”

“ We fancy we can live without green sometimes; it comes third; but it is the hue associated with all the labours of man on the earth, since he began to labour. It is the colour of Industry. Blue has always been, since man commenced to think, and always will be, until he shall have ceased to think,—associated with his spiritual sense,—his idea of many gods or of One,—his hopes of a second life, his faith, his good purposes, his perception of duty. Still, all who pray, turn up their faces toward the eternal azure. ”

“ It is blue like the air that you were born into, and always live in. It is as deep as gentians, and has their gleams of green in it, and it is precious all through within and without, as Susie herself is. ”

“ And, secondly, there is a very good reason why they should have supposed so, in the fact that when we refer to introspection and try to discover what the sensation of blue is, it is very easy to suppose that we have before us only a single term. The term ‘blue’ is easy enough to distinguish, but the other element which I have called ‘consciousness’—that which sensation of blue has in common with sensation of green—is extremely difficult to fix. That many people fail to distinguish it at all is sufficiently shown by the fact that there are materialists. ”

“ The blue eye—all blues and greys being here included—is, par excellence, the eye of intellectual man; that outer warm-colored pigment hanging like a cloud, as it were, over the brain absorbs its most spiritual emanations, so that only when it is quite blown away are we able to look into the soul, forgetting man’s kinship with the brutes. ”

“ I am told that down in Devonshire there are young ladies innumerable, who read crabbed manuscripts with the palms of their hands, and newspapers with their ankles, and so forth; and who are, so to speak, literary all over. I begin to understand what a blue-stocking means, and have not the smallest doubt that Lady —— (for instance) could write quite as entertaining a book with the sole of her foot as ever she did with her head. ”

“ The Blue Envelope is simple, straightforward, absorbing and thoroughly enjoyable because of the perfect naturalism of narration. We don’t mean realism—abused word! We mean naturalism. And what is naturalism? Why, simply the knack, art, faculty or gift of inventing incidents, drawing characters, writing conversation, describing action in such an unaffected manner that it all seems the most natural thing in the world! ”

“ THE IDEAL
"Not the treasures is it that have awakened in me so-unspeakable a desire, but the Blue Flower is what I long to behold."—Novalis.
SOMETHING I may not win attracts me ever,—
⁠Something elusive, yet supremely fair,
Thrills me with gladness, but contents me never,
⁠Fills me with sadness, yet forbids despair. ”

“ At one time, he appears with the mildest, softest, kindest, clearest, heavenly blue eyes;—at another, with the keenest, blazing, and yet the blackest eyes that ever flashed wit, and eloquence, and expressing all the passions that the heart ever darts through its open portals. ”

“ Possibly the wave of pleasurable emotion excited by a glorious vision of blue is not more complex than the feeling aroused by any massive display of any other pure color;—but it is higher in the quality of its complexity. ”

“ For, instead of being black beneath their dark brows, the man's eyes were blue, an intense, fiery blue; with the clear depths and the temper touch that one sees nowhere else save in the strong type of the hardy mountain race. ”

“ She ever occupied, without claiming attention, charming continually by her singularly pleasant voice, while the earnestness and truth that beamed from her bright blue—very blue—eyes increased the value of every word she uttered. ”

“ There is the deep blue and the light; the light blues not esteemed—not admitted at Almacks. The deep-dyed in the nine times dyed blue—is that with which no man dares contend. The blue chatterer is seen and heard every where; it no man will attempt to silence by throwing the handkerchief. ”

“ Blue wells a-twinkle, arch and lewd and pious—
To darken all sudden into Stygian gloom,
And paint disaster with uplifted whites,
Is life's epitome. She prates and prates—
A waterbrook of words o'er twelve small pebbles.
And when she dies—some grey, long, summer evening,
When the bird shouts of childhood through the dusk,
'Neath night's faint tapers—then her body shall
Lie stiff with silks of sixty thrifty years. ”

“ In this time of earth stress, and after, when civilization is remaking itself in men’s minds, with the loyal ‘spirit of the time’ we must all think gold and blue, the gold of the sun by which our bodies live, blue of the sky when inspirations come. ”

“ Oh! regard the blue eyes of women, those eyes that are as deep as the sea, as changeful as the sky, so sweet, so soft, soft as the breezes, sweet as music, luscious as kisses; and transparent, so clear that one sees behind them, discerns the soul, the blue soul which colors them, which animates them, which electrifies them. Yes, the soul has the color of the looks. The blue soul alone contains in itself that which dreams ”

“ The eye of a poet is always seeing the poetic possibilities in current incidents, and when Mr. Finch saw this news item in his favorite daily paper, he not only saw the romance and pathos of the situation, but thought that such an exhibition of generosity should be at once met and welcomed in the same temper. It was out of that impulse that The Blue and the Gray grew into being. ”

“ The eyes of the Goddess of Love were blue; the sky above is blue; the bird of paradise is blue; the deep sea is blue. Press your thumbs on your eyes and what do you see? Blue—the deepest blue imaginable: it is the light of the mind and soul burning in your head, dear; and that is why poets and singers are so fond of blue.'
'Then you think——'
'Think? I know, child. Besides, a man with a blue beard is different from all other men; and besides, again, in the dark all beards are black.'
'But even in the light, dear mother, you think it is changing—just a little?'
'Yes, my darling, I do. ”

“ And, misted by the winter damps,
The shops shine bright anew—
Blue comes to earth, it walks the street,
It dyes the wide air through;
A mimic sky about their feet,
The throng go crowned with blue. ”

“ Now, to get rid of all these ambiguities and troublesome words at once, be it observed that the word ‘Blue’ does not mean the sensation caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation; and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the earth. ”