Purple

“ Real secondary purple has a depth, richness, saturation and bloom which cannot be approached by any other colour, the aggressive qualities of the red are effectively subdued by the retiring qualities of the blue, whilst in both is a strength of character which is the basis of the undoubted handsomeness of the purple. There is an air of quiet dignity about purple, qualities are held in reserve which do not strike the eye at first sight, and these undoubtedly form the basis of its use for ceremonial robes, where it is desired to give the fullest expression to dignity, pomp and power. ”

“ A purple aster flower and a red one
Standing alone in a withered desolation.
The garden plants are shattered and seeded,
One brittle leaf scrapes against another,
Fiddling echoes of a rush of petals.
Now only you and I nodding together.
Many were with us; they have all faded.
Only we are purple and crimson,
Only we in the dew-clear mornings,
Smarten into color as the sun rises. ”

“ Purple is not wanting, rich as that around the neck of the wild pigeon—nor emerald either, bright as the hue that glitters on the body of the house-fly—nor glossy black, deep as the thunder-cloud’s bosom when coming to scathe and destroy. Ah, how the tints glow—ah, how they tremble, such as in the rainbow show, such do they resemble. Ah, how the tints glow, and mingle, and pulsate—now are they woven in one gorgeous robe that really makes plain Pleasant Pond look like some paradisiacal scene of “the reign of Haroun Alraschid.” But at last the colors fade—they die, alas! ”

“ With Caucasian nations it has been the symbolic color of royalty, until 'invest with the purple,' in the course of ages, comes to mean kingdom, government, power, to rule. Purple is formed by the union of blue and red, truth and valor. Happy the people who are truly governed by truth and valor! The Tyrian purple was famous in Homer's days, and our dreams of Tyre and its splendor are all colored by this most gorgeous of dyes, the manufacture of which from a species of shell fish gave this ancient city a celebrity which all its other arts combined could not equal. ”

“ The few days of sunshine since we were last there have clothed the whole earth with delicate purple and white blossoms, a little resembling the wood anemone, but growing close to the soil, and making one think of violets with their pale purple colour: they have no fragrance whatever. ”

“ Rich and beautiful as it is, purple madder cannot be called brilliant; while Mars violet is, of course, ochrous. Unlike green and orange, therefore, purple can point to no original pigment at once vivid and durable: as regards purple, brilliancy implies a semi-stability that borders more or less closely on fugacity. Until the advent of a perfect palette, however, brilliancy and semi-stability will doubtless hold their own. ”

“ Some which stand under our cliffs quite dazzle me with their purple stems now and early in September. They are as interesting to me as most flowers, and one of the most important fruits of our autumn. Every part is flower, (or fruit,) such is its superfluity of color,—stem, branch, peduncle, pedicel, petiole, and even the at length yellowish purple-veined leaves. Its cylindrical racemes of berries of various hues, from green to dark purple, six or sever) inches long, are gracefully drooping on all sides, offering repasts to the birds ”

“ 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 has not admired the lustre and beauty of those eyelets,—the kidney-like nucleus of deepest purple, the surrounding band of green, widening in front and filling the notch of the pupil, the broad circle of brown, and the narrow black ring edged with chestnut, and then the decomposed barbs of the feather, gilded green, all presenting the effulgence of burnished metal, or rather the glitter and glow of precious gems, flashing in the varying light? ”

“ You may melt your crimson into purple, your purple into blue and your blue into green, but you must not melt any of them into black. You should, however, try, as I said, to give preciousness to all your colours; and this especially by never using a grain more than will just do the work, and giving each hue the highest value by opposition. All fine colouring, like fine drawing, is delicate; and so delicate that if, at last, you see the colour you are putting on, you are putting on too much. ”

“ To me the closed gentian usually shows a deep blue or even purple countenance, although like the fringed gentian and so many other flowers its color is lighter in the shade than in the sunlight. But Thoreau claims for it a “transcendent blue,” “a splendid blue, light in the shade, turning to purple with age.” ”

“ The showman gets animated, and the three balls are sent spinning rapidly from hand to hand: they seem all to be in the air at once, blending and dashing about each other until there is no red, or yellow, or blue, no distinct orange, purple, or green, but a thousand indefinite shafts and ripples of colour. Is it red, blue, green, orange, purple, yellow, or gems and sparkles of fire? They are only three, three that are a host, three that have become brown, grey, black, all sorts of browns, every description of that subtle and endless grey. ”

“ Because they are not shown in true contrast to the sky, and to other high lights. Nature paints her shadows in pale purple, and then raises her lights of heaven and sunshine to such height that the pale purple becomes, by comparison, a vigorous dark. ”

“ From the East, the smiling purple,
from the South, the pure white, wondrous,
from the North, the black blustering moaning wind,
from the West, the babbling dun breeze.
The red, and the yellow along with it,
both white and purple ;
the green, the blue, it is brave,
both dun and the pure white.
The grey, the dark brown, hateful their harshness,
both dun and deep black ”

“ In the 'Laws of Fésole,' chap, vii., §§ 20, 21, I have made this dark pansy the representative of purple pure; the viola odorata, of the link between that full purple and blue; and the heath-blossom of the link between that full purple and red. ”

“ We have three species of these charming rose-purple composites, all of which flower late in summer and remain to display their marvels of beauty long after the tender plants have served their time.
Among all the late blossoms there are none for which I have a greater fondness than the gentians. They come, with their mingled purple and blue, at a time when those colors have become unusually rare, for they are never common at any time of year. Some of the species bear flowers that long seem upon the verge of coming into full bloom, and disappoint those who look for wide-open flowers. ”

“ The rest of the world wear blue and purple, or orange and green, entirely ignorant of the harmonies of nature even as bearing on their domestic surroundings. For myself, I have always held that the most perfect harmonies required in either wall decoration, furniture, dress goods, or any other fabrics that color enters into, have their exact counterpart in some color tones of nature—that the russet-browns and yellows of autumn; the contrasting opalescent hues of a morning sky, rose-pink, pale blue, or delicate tea-rose yellow ”

“ Nature employs this hue beautifully in landscape, as a sub-dominant, in harmonizing the broad shadows of a bright sunshine ere the light sinks into deep orange or red. Girtin, who saw Nature as she is, and painted what he saw, delighted in this effect of sunlight and shadow. As a ruling colour, whether in flesh or otherwise, purple is commonly too cold, or verges on ghastliness, a fault which is to be as much avoided as the opposite extreme of viciousness in colouring, stigmatized as foxiness. ”

“ Born to the purple, born to joy and pleasance,
⁠Thou dost not toil nor spin,
But makest glad and radiant with thy presence
⁠The meadow and the lin.
The wind blows, and uplifts thy drooping banner,
⁠And round thee throng and run
The rushes, the green yeomen of thy manor,
⁠The outlaws of the sun. ”

“ But even as we stand in doubt there is a gleam of purple through the mist, and yonder, on a boss of rock, is a cluster of the rubies we have come not to steal but to admire. What strikes one about the purple saxifrage, when seen at close quarters, its many bright flowerets peering out from a cushion of moss, is the largeness of the blossoms in proportion to the shortness of the stems ”

“ The purple of the Manet school, [12] steeping the whole visible creation in bluish glamour, the half-tones, or, rather, phantom-colours of the ‘Archaists,’ that seem to have risen, faded and nebulous, out of some primeval tomb, and all these palettes of ‘dead leaves,’ ‘old ivory,’ evaporating yellows, smothered purple, attract on the whole more rapturous glances than the voluptuous ‘orchestration’ of the Besnard section. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It originally was used in reference to the nobility of Europe, as purple was the insignia of royal blood, due to the fact that purple was the rarest and most costly color and only the rich and noble could buy it. When used in referring to live stock, it signifies that the animal in question has a long line of blooded ancestry. ”

“ The kerchief about her shoulders over a light chemise rivals the rainbow. I try to fix my eyes on some predominating colour, but when I decide that it is yellow, in will blaze a green stronger than the yellow, and then huge red roses splash their lurid colour into the yellow and green, and royal purple and blue daisies and magenta buttercups career around in wild indifference as to conventional form and tint. ”

“ If you examine one of these Welsh slates freshly broken, you will find its purple colour clear and vivid; and although never strikingly so after it has been long exposed to weather, it always retains enough of the tint to give rich harmonies of distant purple in opposition to the green of our woods and fields. Whatever brightness or power there is in the hue is entirely owing to the oxide of iron. ”

“ Bizarres, which have yellow grounds shaded with dark red or purple, and which are sub-divided into flamed, in which the red or purple is in a broad stripe or band, rising from the bottom of the petal,—and feathered, in which the dark colour forms a marginal edging to the petals, descending into them in various little delicate feathery veins. ”

“ Blue is a colour which it serves to mellow, or follows well into shade. The contrast or harmonizing colour of purple is yellow on the side of light and the primaries; while purple itself is the harmonizing contrast of the tertiary citrine on the side of shade, and less perfectly so of the semi-neutral brown. As the extreme primaries, blue and yellow, when either compounded or opposed, afford, though not the most perfect harmony, yet the most pleasing consonance of the primary colours; so the extremes, purple and orange, yield the most pleasing of the secondary consonances. ”

“ I am unable to think that either myself or a bee can determine the white form of some blue Gentian, some rose-pink Ononis (Rest-Harrow) , or some yellow Primrose. If colour is not in the flower, then neither is it in a lady’s dress, nor in a nation’s flag, nor in a picture. What reason should the world and his wife have for unanimously declaring a dress to be brown and purple if, in reality, it is no colour at all—if, that is to say, it is black, or the highest refinement of black, which is white? ”

“ 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. ”

“ When I say "no kinship, no human quality," I refer to flowers that are entirely pure white or pure yellow; in some dull or impure yellows, and in white and yellow flowers that have some tinge or mixture of red or purple, we do get the expression of the red and purple flower. The crystalline and snow white of the whitest flowers do indeed resemble the white of the eyeballs and the teeth in human faces; but we may see that this human white colour by itself has no human association in a flower. ”

“ We may with exactness determine what the true colour was of the purple of the ancients, by attending to two passages of Pliny, wherein he says, that the whole aim of the Tyrians and Phœnicians, in bringing their purple to the utmost perfection, was to render it in colour as like as possible to the oriental amethyst. Plin. Hist. Natur. lib. ix. c. 38 & 41, et lib. xxxvii. c. 9.
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Hùc secundus ventus nunc est ”