Blue

“ These with full blue breathed between them at the zenith, and green blue nearer the horizon, form the scales and chords of color possible to the morning and evening sky in pure and fine weather; the keynote of the opposition being vermilion against green blue, both of equal tone, and at such a height and acme of brilliancy that you cannot see the line where their edges pass into each other.
No colors that can be fixed in earth can ever represent to you the luster of these cloudy ones. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His inner light, to that time, had been a little drab tinged with blue—a delicate blue, to be sure, but blue nevertheless; blue, conceded to be the color dedicated to dejection and moroseness, ennui and weariness. ”

“ Two unique tints struck our view; blue and white—the blue as vivid as turquoises, sapphires, or cobalt, in fact the very deepest azure that can be imagined, and the white as pure as silver, snow, milk, marble, or the finest crystallized sugar! The blue was the sky repeated by the sea; the white was the town. It is impossible to conceive anything more radiant and more dazzling—to imagine light more diffused, and, at the same time, more intense. ”

“ That far outline was blue, not the turquoise blue of the sky above the clouds, but the blue that we see on cabbage leaves, or such blue as the moonlight makes when it falls through a frosted pane—steel blue, so full of light as to be luminous in itself. ”

“ The blue was like the blue of the Mediterranean at evening, when lights are in it both of ships and of sunset, and lights of harbours being lit one by one, and the light of Venus perhaps and about two other stars, so deeply did it stare and so twinkled, near its edges, with lights that were strange to that room, and so triumphed with its clear beauty over the night outside. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We follow the Red and the Blue today,
And love thee forever more.
Blue is the heav'nly hue that shows
When a cloud above us parts;
Red is the tint of the tide that flows,
The life-blood of our hearts ”

“ 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. ”

“ Blue and green have been termed discordant, and in painting they may undoubtedly be made so. Yet those are two colours which nature seems to intend never to be separated, and never to be felt, either of them, in its full beauty, without the other—a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with green lights through it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to clouds at sunrise, in this coloured world of ours. A good eye for colour will soon discover how constantly nature puts green and purple together, purple and scarlet, green and blue, yellow and neutral grey, and the like ”

“ The blue, the fresh, the ever free;
Without a mark, without a bound,
It runneth the earth's wide regions round.
It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies,
Or like a craddled creature lies. ”

“ The blue has so much of the property of light in it, and of the tint of air—is so purely a sky-colour, and hence so singularly adapted to the direct and reflex light of the sky, and to become the antagonist of sunshine—that it is indispensable to the painter. Moreover, it is so pure, so true, so unchangeable in its tints and glazings, as to be no less essential in imitating the marvellous colouring of nature in flesh and flowers. ”

“ Why cannot blue be enough? Light in the sky, dark in the sea, the shades between. The green of fields, red clover, buttercups. Bridal white of apple blossoms, burial earth, hawk's feather, snakeskin. Monarchs, Anita, feeding on purple aster, fluttering up, sun glowing orange, brown, bronze through black edged wings, twenty joining twenty joining a hundred, down, up, over, from color to color to Mexico.
Clouds booming over the washed woods, blue sun, Finn eats chop suey from a pot while I shave. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the blues are there, from the faintest shoal-water suggestion of the color, detectable only in the shadow of some overhanging object, all the way through, a little blue and a little bluer still, and again a shade bluer, till you strike the deep, rich Mediterranean splendor which breaks the heart in your bosom, it is so beautiful. ”

“ Blue, from the arch of the winter sky.
O’er our fatherland outspread;
Blue to show that as wide as heaven.
Shall justice to all mankind be given,
At the hands of American men.
All together—
Red, White, and Blue, and the light of stars,
Through our holy colors shine ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Red is the colour of blood,—a colour allied necessarily from time immemorial with violent mental impressions, whether of war, or love, or the chase, or religious sacrifice. Green itself is the colour of the world. Blue,—the blue of the far away sky,—has necessarily always been for man the colour mysterious and holy,—always associated with those high phenomena of heaven which first inspired wonder and fear of the Unknown. ”

“ Green, grey, orange, purple, and, in the farthest distance, blue as of the heaven itself, make the land one vast rainbow, and fit dwelling-place for its sunny folk, still happy and industrious—once the most cultivated and luxurious people in Europe. ”

“ As I said before, I always consider blue by far the pleasantest colour to live with, which is one reason why I advocate blue in the nursery; but of course endless combinations of colour could be had which would be equally pleasing and successful, but not as nice to live with always. ”

“ You would think, by the way she paints, that her colors cost her something enormous; she will only give you a single pure touch, just where the petal turns into light; but down in the bell all is subdued, and under the petal all is subdued, even in the showiest flower. What you thought was bright blue is, when you look close, only dusty gray, or green, or purple, or every color in the world at once, only a single gleam or streak of pure blue in the center of it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The earth is penetrated with blue light, suffused by it, merged in it, ever blue. Vague forms, still and shadowy, of hills and trees, soppy with light, are blue within the blue. The brief expanse of bay is deeply luminous and within the pervasive tempering light resolves itself into the cool and solemn reaches of the sky which bends down and touches it. ”

“ A man walking by the water-side sees by chance a kingfisher fly past, its colour a wonderful blue, far surpassing in beauty and brilliancy any blue he has ever seen in sky or water, or in flower or stone, or any other thing. ”

“ The water is remarkably clear, but when undisturbed is the deepest blue possible to imagine. From the surrounding rim this blue is intense, and is equally so when seen from a boat, but is then of a more brilliant hue. One who has never seen it can not comprehend the intensity of color. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Green would be the dominant color, but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil—a veil the vapory transparent folds of which the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about herself anew. ”

“ 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 there's nothing like constancy under the sun.
My own blue bell, &c.
Some Belles are Blues, invoking the Muse
And talking of vast intellectual views:
Their crow-quills’ tip in the ink they dip,
And they prate with the lore of a learned lip. ”

“ In art, blue is apt to be discordant in juxtaposition with green, and less so with purple, both which are cool colours; consequently blue requires its contrast, orange, in equal proportion whether of surface or intensity, to compensate or resolve its dissonances and correct its coldness. ”

“ You know there are grey days and golden days; as there are crimson and heliotrope evenings, white, and, alas! also black nights—well, this is a blue day. There is sunlight, but it is not in your eyes, it only gives light without shedding its own colour on the landscape. The atmosphere seems to be blue; the sky is blue, except on the horizon, where it pales into a clear grey. Blue forest-clad hills rise, in the middle [39] distance, from an azure plain, and the distant mountains are sapphire, deep sapphire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Blue is the color of the Religious thoughts, ranging, however, through a great variety of stages, from the dull shade of superstitious religious belief, to the beautiful violet of the highest religious emotion or thought. ”

“ Blue includes all blues, from ultramarine, or violet, to the palest blue of a pale sky; and all greys down to the grey that is almost white. Our preference for this or that colour is supposed to depend on nothing but individual taste, or fancy, and association. I believe it is something more, but I do find that we are very apt to be swayed this way and that by the colour of the eyes of the people we meet in life, according as they (the people) attract or repel us. ”

“ We are familiar with the effects of red which are stimulating, exciting, or irritating. The toreador, recognizing this principle, waves a flaming red mantle before the bull. Blue has an exactly opposite effect. It quiets and soothes, and when it runs into violet, it becomes depressing. Experiment with purple lights and you will find that they give a note of gloom, mystery, or of impending disaster. Yellow is the color that brings gaiety and light-heartedness, as you will recall when you contrast your own feelings on a sunshiny day and on a gray day. ”