When all your world of beauty’s gone.
What the maiden answered is not on record, but it is sadly pleasant to think, three hundred years later, that somewhere today that ruby is still beautiful and still enjoyed.
Sapphire
Sapphire is the current form of a Sanskrit word meaning dear to Saturn, an olden god whose reign was regarded as the golden age. The stone has been known since earliest times, although what the ancients called sapphire was probably the lapis lazuli, our sapphire being called by them the hyacinth. It is hard to tell, however, just what gem is intended when in the Song of Songs the Queen of Sheba sings of Solomon, her beloved: “His hands are as gold rings set with beryl; his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires.”
Our sapphire is a bluish transparent variety of native crystalline aluminum oxide, the same corundum that when it is red we call a ruby. The sapphire may be sky blue or cornflower blue, and shade through the lighter hues to an almost colorless stone, called white or water sapphire.
The sapphire is often used as a figure for the stars or for blue eyes: “Those eyes, those sparkling sapphires of delight”... “Now glowed the firmament with living sapphires.” This last line is by Milton, from Paradise Lost, which he dictated to his daughters when he was blind. The poet Gray pictures Milton as becoming blinded by his great vision:
He passed the flaming bounds of place and time,
The living throne, the sapphire-blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,