Arbor in a Salem Garden.
The influence of color has ever been felt by other senses than that of sight. In the Cotton Manuscripts, written six hundred years ago, the relations and effects of color on music and coat-armor were laboriously explained: and many later writers have striven to show the effect of color on the health, imagination, or fortune. I see no reason for sneering at these notions of sense-relation; I am grateful for borrowed terms of definition for these beautiful things which are so hard to define. When an artist says to me, "There is a color that sings," I know what he means; as I do when my friend says of the funeral music in Tristan that "it always hurts her eyes." Musicians compose symphonies in color, and artists paint pictures in symphonies. Musicians and authors acknowledge the domination of color and color terms; a glance at a modern book catalogue will prove it. Stephen Crane and other modern extremists depend upon color to define and describe sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, ideas, vices, virtues, traits, as well as sights. Sulphur-yellow is deemed an inspiring color, and light green a clean color; every one knows the influence of bright red upon many animals and birds; it is said all barnyard fowl are affected by it. If any one can see a sunny bed of blue Larkspur in full bloom without being moved thereby, he must be color blind and sound deaf as well, for that indeed is a sight full of music and noble inspiration, a realization of Keats' beautiful thought:—
"Delicious symphonies, like airy flowers
Budded, and swell'd, and full-blown, shed full showers
Of light, soft unseen leaves of sound divine."
CHAPTER XI
THE BLUE FLOWER BORDER
"Blue thou art, intensely blue!
Flower! whence came thy dazzling hue?
When I opened first mine eye,
Upward glancing to the sky,
Straightway from the firmament
Was the sapphire brilliance sent."
—James Montgomery.