He saw but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.
While the sapphire at its best still captures the blue of a cloudless sky, it brings with it today a vision of more serene beauty.
Emerald
The emerald is the most precious of the large beryl group of stones. It has been deemed precious from ancient times. Cleopatra’s emerald mines are still being worked. A flawless deep green emerald of good size is extremely rare. Such a gem, normally, is table cut. The emerald also may be pierced for use as a bead, or engraved. In Egypt, the usual carving was a scarab—Cleopatra possessed one; in India, the carving often was a god.
The word emerald, before the sixteenth century, was esmeraldus and smaragdus; the Sanskrit word for the gem was marakta. As recently as the last century, Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up the chief sensuous impressions of the Orient: “Color, taste, and smell: smaragdus, sugar, and musk.”
There are few colors at once as striking and as restful as the green of an emerald. It seems to have the depths of the pure rays in a calm ocean. Coleridge in The Ancient Mariner used it for another form of the ever-changing waters:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.