[Footnote 3: Spinosa died in 1677; Fox in 1681.—ED.]
April 24. 1832.
COLOURS.
Colours may best be expressed by a heptad, the largest possible formula for things finite, as the pentad is the smallest possible form. Indeed, the heptad of things finite is in all cases reducible to the pentad. The adorable tetractys, or tetrad, is the formula of God; which, again, is reducible into, and is, in reality, the same with, the Trinity. Take colours thus:—
Prothesis,
Red, or Colour [Greek: kat exoch_en].
^
/1\
/ \
Mesothesis, or Indifference of / \
Red and Yellow = Orange. 4/ \5 Indigo, Violet = Indifference
/Synthesis\ of Red and Blue.
/—6 \
Thesis = Yellow. 2 3 Blue = Antithesis.
\Green indi-/
\componi- /
\ble /
\ /
\ /
To which you must add \7/ which is spurious or artificial
v synthesis of Yellow and Blue.
Green, decom- ponible
April 28. 1832.
DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.—EPIC POEM.
The destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now remaining for an epic poem; a subject which, like Milton's Fall of Man, should interest all Christendom, as the Homeric War of Troy interested all Greece. There would be difficulties, as there are in all subjects; and they must he mitigated and thrown into the shade, as Milton has done with the numerous difficulties in the Paradise Lost. But there would be a greater assemblage of grandeur and splendour than can now be found in any other theme. As for the old mythology, incredulus odi; and yet there must be a mythology, or a quasi-mythology, for an epic poem. Here there would be the completion of the prophecies—the termination of the first revealed national religion under the violent assault of Paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion; and then you would have the character of the Roman and the Jew, and the awfulness, the completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five; but, alas! venturum expectat.
April 29. 1832.