not want, and that God restoreth my soul! And it is among huge and solitary mountain masses of grey castellated rock, in the crevices of which the stinted pine, and the cedar with its brown and tattered trunk, struggle out a hard and scanty existence and are yet covered with never-fading verdure—mountains to which the Saviour of mankind might have retired to meditate and pray—that I feel that the Lord is my Shepherd, and shall bring me to the green pastures, and lead me beside the still waters; my Rock! my fortress! and my high tower!
Sometimes my heart takes a fancy altogether for brown hues; and as you cannot at all times command these in the country, I seat myself down quietly in front of a precious Cuyp with which God hath endowed me, and that (except the sky and water) is composed entirely of them in every gradation and shade; and when I rise up from the contemplation of it, I feel that it is in brown hues that God restoreth my soul.
Sometimes I dwell upon the silvery trunk of the birch-tree, or upon the darker hue of the beech. Sometimes my soul drinks the full beauties of the umbrageous chestnut; or revels in the golden berries, and the graceful branches that seem overladen with them, of the mountain-ash. As I grow old I wave often in the grey pendulous mosses of the South, or stand in thought under the gigantick branches of the live oak, with all its leaves of laurel, and its heroick gesture. Good God! I say, when I think that we might all have been born, ate, drank, smoked, grown up, built, propagated, and died, as thoroughly and effectually as we now do, and all these precious objects of our sight and joy been made for us—out of the one desolate colour of an old pipe!
And Water—that element of Life, that upon the plaintain-leaf looks so like a molten mass of diamond that you can hardly persuade yourself it is aught else, might as well have been created of a mere drab quaker-colour; or not even as bright as a bit of Quartz Rock! and yet have satisfied our thirst as well as if it had gushed forth from the limpid sources of the Croton; or been drawn from the transparent body of Lake George; or from those mountain streams of sparkling chrystal that, in alternate shade and gleams of light of tropical brilliancy, bound and gush and dance their way downward from rock to rock to the sound of their own musick, and make themselves into rivers of joy as they descend along the Grand Etang of the Island of Grenada!
And Wine, that God hath sent to make glad the heart of man, and hath blessed it in the cup; and which might perhaps have had the same hilarious effect, though it were of the dingy colour of the ashes of the grate by which I sit; but which, for our more perfect happiness, He hath made to outvie the Topaz and the Ruby, in its lustre and its varied hue!
There are many of us who have this one quality, the love of colour, in common with the magnificent David, whose precious inspiration I have quoted at the head of my Essay, and who in a thousand passages interweaves it like a golden thread amid his works; but as in the minds of many others, it may be a blessing only half appreciated, I have thought that a few words upon this subject might fall not unfruitfully upon the heart, perchance of some one young Reader of this article, just opening to the knowledge of this peculiar work of the great Master of mankind, Colour.
Even Music, although itself an occupation revealed to us as of the Angels of Light, is, except perhaps as they enjoy it—with whom poetry and modulated sound adapted to the thought are inseparably one—even music is less refined, less gentle, perfect, unobtrusive. For the enjoyment of Colour involves no possible interruption of another’s tastes; no outbreak upon the quiet stillness of the day; no intrusion on ‘the ear of night;’ nor yet any expression, that by pouring abroad the sensations, might diminish the deep earnestness of the soul; which, all sight, all ear, becomes the Recipient. The enjoyment of colour is the Spirit within us listening to the language of God! to the mute expression of His unspeakable Love! Colour—the conception He hath chosen for His bow of promise in the Heavens! by which He decorates the Earth, and tells of Himself in the ocean, and in the sky, and by which He restoreth the Soul of man!
And in that state of celestial existence which attends the redeemed Soul disenthralled from ‘the body of this death,’ is it to be doubted, that among the joys that ‘the eye hath never seen, nor the heart conceived,’ there exist colours beautiful beyond all earthly wealth of imagination; beyond the poet’s fancy and the painter’s dream? There where the pure gold of which the city is constructed, is transparent as glass, and each gate is one pearl, and the very foundations of the walls are of jasper, and chalcedony, sapphire, emerald, ruby, amethyst and topaz; and the glory of God is the light that lightens it!
But it is not to another world that the joys of colour are postponed, nor even to another climate that we need look for the precious satisfaction that they impart. We have not the carpets of flowers of rainbow tints, that spread themselves over whole prairies of Texas and Mexico, but what a gem upon the bosom of Earth when it is unexpectedly found among us is the blue campanula! And the small white lily of the valley, sheltered and concealed in its green leaves like a hidden tear of Joy, and almost as rare! And the bright and graceful lobelia cardinalis that loves the neighbourhood of the still waters. And the fringed gentian of a tint so cerulean that our true poet derives it from the firmament; as his own spirit, if left to approach its kindred element, might claim affinity with the overshadowing expanse of celestial life!3
I speak not to thee of the gorgeous sunsets and of those piles of massy clouds of living and ever-varying colours on which the Day pillows himself to rest in a luxurious repose; but open thine heart upon the Eastern bank of the Hudson at the grey of morning, and look with the Sun upon the opposite shore; and as the mists arise and are dispelled from before thee, there shall come change after change of colour neutral and calm and slowly warming into beauty, until a violet haze shall rest upon the hill-tops and the cliffs that might outvie the golden haze of Italy, and that shall raise thy thoughts in silent thankfulness, and educate thee to enjoy the untold treasuries of colour that glow in upper Heaven; and hope shall spring forth renewed within thee; and sorrow shall fade from thy widowed, or thy childless heart; the peace which passeth understanding shall come over thee; and God even thine own God shall bless thee; and to thine eyes, now opened to the wonders of His goodness, all the ends of the Earth shall shew forth
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