The Green

“ The play of light and variety of colour of the green surfaces of the clipped evergreens is a delight to the trained colour-eye. Sometimes in shadow, cold, almost blue, reflecting the sky, with a sunlit edge of surprising brilliancy of golden-green—often all bright gold-green when the young shoots are coming, or when the sunlight catches the surface in one of its many wonderful ways. For the trees, clipped in so many diversities of form, offer numberless planes and facets and angles to the light, whose play upon them is infinitely varied. ”

“ There, in the long aisles, settles that depth of shade which no pencil can give, and that colouring which no canvas can retain, as the sunlight pierces through the green web of leaves, flinging, as it sets, a crown of gold round each tree-trunk.
Let no one, however, think they know anything of the Forest by simply keeping to the high road and the beaten tracks. ”

“ The green sun rises in the green East. The green seal peers through a green hole in the ice. Men and women, bears and birds, all green—oh, a horrible land”; and wildly shaking his head, he hobbled away. ”

“ These two complementary colours, red and green, delight us most when seen thus—a little red to a good deal of green, and the more luminous the red and vivid the green the better they please us. We see this in flowers—in the red geranium, for example—where there is no brown soil below, but green of turf or herbage. I sometimes think the red campions and ragged-robins are our most beautiful wild flowers when the sun shines level on the meadow and they are like crimson flowers among the tall translucent grasses. ”

“ Green on the hillside! green in the meadows and pastures! green everywhere—all around is changeless and everlasting green! as if hillside and valley, forest and field, had but a single dress for morning, noon, and night, and that only and always green! True, there is the music of the birds, joyous notes and variant, happy and hilarious, in the spring-time, but there is no cricket under the flat stone in the pasture, his song is not heard in the stone wall, or in the corner of the fences ”

“ How charming this is—this old English green, the horse pond at one end, the various houses, the inn, the grocery business, the linen drying in that yard, the smith, and the wheelwright. I don't like that modern Queen Anne school-house, and I wish I could remove the dead level of the embankment and see the sea. The green is better from this side with the view of the Downs—those lines waving against the sky, where the gorse grows and the sheep feed, and inclining to the road all the fields pale green and deep green. ”

“ The whole country is green at this moment, more so than at any other period of the year. The earth is completely decked in delicate verdure of varied shades: the fruit-trees have dropped their blossoms, and the orchards and gardens are green; the forest has just put on its fresh foliage, the meadows are yet uncolored by the flowers, and the young grain-fields look grassy still. ”

“ Of all the miracles of the green world none surpasses that of the grass. It has many names, many raiments even, but it is always that wonderful thing which the poets of all time have delighted in calling the green hair of earth. ‘Soft green hair of the rocks,’ says a Breton poet. Another Celtic poet has used the word alike for the mosses which clothe the talons of old trees and for the forests themselves. No fantastic hyperbole this: from a great height forests of pine and oak seem like reaches of sombre grass. ”

“ Away behind, the town was encircled by a broad green girdle, a dark green one, only the green lived, as though something alive were flying along through the grass; every now and then it seemed as if a living being, a sweet smell, a little life, darted up shining in a different place ”

“ From seashore to seashore races the green tide;
With the pricking green of hedges by the wet roadside
—Or ever March triumphant comes with great, glad stride—
There is green, there's green in England, and a tale of Paradise. ”

“ Would you moralise on the lawn’s green expanse with the great modern interpreter of nature?—learn, then, the secret of humility from the grass before you. Its very end is to be trodden under foot, and yet it rises stronger after it. Mow or roll it as much as you will, and it only sends up thicker shoots. Even in winter it is always green, always cheerful; type of perpetual youth and perpetual freshness, its very uniformity like a reflection of the unclouded sky above. Truly they were wise men, those old monks, who loved so much a spacious courtyard of grass! ”

“ Almost all the green is grave, not sad and not dull. It has a darkened and a daily colour, in majestic but not obvious harmony with dark grey skies, and might look, to inconstant eyes, as prosaic after spring as eleven o'clock looks after the dawn. ”

“ Is the green life in the hedges and in the sweet pastures starred with rathe primroses, and in the hidden copses blue with hyacinths, a failure, because the east wind bites shrewdly, and 'the tender ash delays to clothe herself with green'? ”

“ Nothing so nearly approaches pure white as the palest blue; nothing is so nearly black as the darkest.
Green has been assigned by nature the place of the universal background. It is the complementary colour of red, softening and assimilating it by reflected shadows, and setting off the glory of every flower and fruit. The expression of green is gaiety and modesty, light and tenderness, shadow and repose, to both the eye and the mind. ”

“ The road lay straight across the prairie, green now with the tender green of spring, and dotted thick with blue anemones. A prairie fire, the fall before, had burned away all the old grass, and so everywhere the country was of the richest dazzling green, varied only in the shades—the tender, soft green of the young wheat, the bluish green of the oat-fields, with here and there splendid groves of poplars, making a scene which, to Pearl's eyes, was of untold beauty. ”

“ My friendss, how could there be a green man? You are acquainted with green grass, with green leaves, with green cheese, with green chartreuse. I ask if any one of you, however wide her social circle, has ever been acquainted with a green man. Surely, surely, it is evident, my friendss, that this is an imperfect version, an abbreviated version, of the original words. What can be clearer than that the original expression, was ‘the green-turban’d man,’ in allusion to the well-known uniform of the descendants of the Prophet? ”

“ To be sure, there are spots of green where fruit-trees have been planted and water from the river or from some irrigation ditch is led in and out through the orchard. But to one who has seen the beauty of an eastern landscape, before whose eyes comes a vision of stately trees and luxuriant meadows and babbling brooks of clear, cold water, those little dabs of green in the midst of wide stretches of dreariness awaken pity and not admiration. ”

“ Green are the uplands where the little lambs go,
Green and glad the forests that are old.
Once again the summer weaves on her magic loom,
Cloth of clover,—fairy web of wheat;—
Only Mary's alabaster box of perfume
Ever made the passing wind more sweet. ”

“ Then the flowers come forth, meadows and groves are clad in green, the birds make ready to build, and sing sweetly for solace of the soft summer that follows thereafter. The blossoms bud and blow in the hedgerows rich and rank, and noble notes enough are heard in the fair woods. ”

“ Hemlock and pine made dark green patches interspersed with the brighter green of maple, tulip, poplar and beech, enlivened with the frosty blossoms of the chestnut and the creamy tints of the basswood; then there was the rich green of the meadows, the silvery bluegreen of the oats fields, and the golden green of the ripening wheat—all so well blended and harmonized by that mysterious illuminating veil of blue that it challenged the admiration of the most critical observer. On such glorious days as these we seem to imbibe the gladness of the hills. ”

“ It was a sad sight to see neat rectangular patterns of roads and highways, cultivated fields and orangegroves, checkered towns and sprawling suburbs come to an abrupt stop where they were blotted out by the regimented uniformity of the onrushing grass. For miles we flew above its dazzling green until our eyes ached from the sameness and our minds were dulled from the lack of variety below. ”

“ Meadows of the most exquisite green seem as if suspended far above us, silvery rocks jutting out from among their black firs, gigantic oaks grasping the heights of the precipices, their crowns of verdure glittering in the wind.... It is a fantastic apparition. One has visions in one’s childhood of unknown regions, of enchanted forests guarded by genii, but one never thought to contemplate these marvels in reality. ”

“ They possess a permanent dignity and interest, always occupying the ground and embellishing it, displaying distinct tints of ever-grateful green in spring and summer, waving majestically before the gusts of autumn, and beautiful when bearing on their deepest green the snows of winter. ”

“ Under this one intense thought, colours all seemed to be transformed into one shade: the blue sky became green, the roads were green, the sea-shore was green, the rocks were green, water and wine seemed green as absinthe ”

“ When law can stop the blades of grass from growin' as they grow,
And when the leaves in summer-time their colour dare not show,
Then will I change the colour, too, I wear in my caubeen
But 'till that day, please God, I'll stick to wearin' o' the Green. ”

“ There is nothing to be seen but the brown, winding roadway, the dense green of the undergrowth, and the trunks of the trees tall and straight as Nelson's column and brown or white against the prevailing green. And there are all shades of green, from that so pale that it is almost golden to that so dark it is almost black, but never a flower breaks the monotony, the monotony that is not monotony but dignity, and the flowers of an English spring or an autumn in Australia would but cheapen the forest of the Gold Coast. ”

“ All these woods there are for rambles, flushed in the spring with wood-anemones and wood-sorrel, set in the green moss and the greener heather of the bilberry. Nowhere, too, in the Forest, than in these woods, have I seen more lovely sunsets. Through some deep-cut oriel of the trees have I watched the sun begin to sink, each moment burning brighter, and then suddenly its great brand of fire would fall, reddening each tree trunk, and crimson billows of clouds come rolling eastward. ”

“ WHEN THE GREEN GITS BACK IN THE TREES. In spring, when the green gits back in the trees, And the sun comes out and stays, And yer boots pulls on with a good tight squeeze, And you think of yer barefoot days; When you ort to work and you want to not, And you and yer wife agrees It's time to spade up the garden lot, When the green gits back in the trees— Well! work is the least o' my idees When the green, you know, gits back in the trees! ”

“ Green, in his History of the English People, "was the one theme of troubadour and trouveur; but it was a love of refinement, of romantic follies, of scholastic discussions, of sensuous enjoyment—a plaything rather than a passion. Nature had to reflect the pleasant indolence of man; the song of the minstrel moved through a perpetual May-time; the grass was ever green; the music of the lark and the nightingale rang out from field and thicket. There was a gay avoidance of all that is serious, moral, or reflective in man's life. ”

“ But with the dawn everything changed! A thousand servants set to work, and in one short half hour the garden showed green. Green carpets, green trees, green water falling from the fountains like liquid emeralds. And by-and-bye came green crowds, every shade of green mixing and mingling in harmony. And inside the arched pavilion of the house of Good Fortune were green rustlings of silk, green shimmerings of satin as three hundred ladies of the Court, all veiled with green veils, took their seats in a semicircle. Three hundred ladies in green all dressed alike! Which was Queen Humeeda? ”

“ I always lingered as much as I could in passing the iron railings, to have a peep at the beauty within. The grass was now of a delicious green, and the tulips and hyacinths and crocuses were in full bloom, in their different oval-shaped beds, framed in with the green. Besides these, from the windows of a greenhouse that stretched back along the street, there looked over a brilliant array of other beauty ”

“ The famous green loses nothing, as you may imagine, on a nearer view. A green more vividly cool and pure it is impossible to conceive. It is to the vulgar greens of earth what the blue of a summer sky is to artificial dyes, and is, in fact, as sacred, as remote, as impalpable as that. ”

“ Every conceivable tint of green is there, besides shades of pink and lavender in leaf case and catkin, but what dominates and translates the whole? The great hemlocks on the crest and the dark pointed cedars off on the horizon where the woodland thins toward the pastures. Whether you separate them or not, they are there. People are only just beginning to understand the value of evergreens in their home gardens, both as windbreaks and backgrounds. ”

“ Green enough, indeed, in the spring-fed meadows and folds of the hills, where the early grass flashes into vividest emerald, but in the woods the soft mist-colored mazes of multitudinous twigs still show through their veilings and dustings of color—palest green of birches, gray-green of poplar, yellow-green of willows, and redder tones of the maples; and along the fence-lines and roadsides—blessed, untidy fence-lines and roadsides of New England—a fine penciling of red stems—the cut-back [pg 119] maple bushes and tangled vines alive to their tips and just bursting into leaf. ”