the clouds of dawn themselves; and explain the modes of
sexual preference and selective development which had brought _them_ to
their scarlet glory, before the cock could crow thrice. Putting all these
vespertilian speculations out of our way, the human facts concerning colour
are briefly these. Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and
wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them--in sky, sea,
flowers, and living creatures.

On the other hand, wherever men are ignoble and sensual, they endure
without pain, and at last even come to like (especially if artists,)
mud-colour and black, and to dislike rose-colour and white. And wherever it
is unhealthy for {85} them to live, the poisonousness of the place is
marked by some ghastly colour in air, earth, or flowers.

There are, of course, exceptions to all such widely founded laws; there are
poisonous berries of scarlet, and pestilent skies that are fair. But, if we
once honestly compare a venomous wood-fungus, rotting into black
dissolution of dripped slime at its edges, with a spring gentian; or a puff
adder with a salmon trout, or a fog in Bermondsey with a clear sky at
Berne, we shall get hold of the entire question on its right side; and be
able afterwards to study at our leisure, or accept without doubt or
trouble, facts of apparently contrary meaning. And the practical lesson
which I wish to leave with the reader is, that lovely flowers, and green
trees growing in the open air, are the proper guides of men to the places
which their Maker intended them to inhabit; while the flowerless and
treeless deserts--of reed, or sand, or rock,--are meant to be either
heroically invaded and redeemed, or surrendered to the wild creatures which
are appointed for them; happy and wonderful in their wild abodes.

Nor is the world so small but that we may yet leave in it also unconquered
spaces of beautiful solitude; where the chamois and red deer may wander
fearless,--nor any fire of avarice scorch from the Highlands of Alp, or
Grampian, the rapture of the heath, and the rose.

* * * * *

{86}

CHAPTER V.

PAPAVER RHOEAS.

BRANTWOOD, _July 11th, 1875_.

1. Chancing to take up yesterday a favourite old book, Mavor's British
Tourists, (London, 1798,) I found in its fourth volume a delightful diary
of a journey made in 1782 through various parts of England, by Charles P.
Moritz of Berlin.

And in the fourteenth page of