crimson; with rubies, and blood, and "the poppy's
red effrontery," with topaz, and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes
the sense ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect of all
by the boldest contrast. Who can doubt that he fell the more readily
upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that
the "Pomegranates" were to be "of blue and of purple and of scarlet,"
and the "Bells" "of gold"? He loves the daybreak hour of the world's
awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the
splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping
Florence in that "live translucent bath of air"[64]; he loves the blaze
of the Italian mid-day--

"Great noontides, thunderstorms, all glaring pomps
That triumph at the heels of June the god."

Even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue."[65] He loves the play
of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even
in the sombre South and the dusky East; Poiphyria and Lady Carlisle,
Evelyn Hope and the maid of Pornic, share the gift with Anael the Druse,
with Sordello's Palma, whose

"tresses curled
Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound
About her like a glory! even the ground
Was bright as with spilt sunbeams;"

and the girl in _Love among the Ruins_, and the "dear dead women" of
Venice. His love of fire and of the imagery of flame has one of its
sources in his love of light. Verona emerges from the gloom of the past
as "a darkness kindling at the core." He sees the "pink perfection of
the cyclamen," the "rose bloom o'er the summit's front of stone." And,
like most painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar intensity
into his glooms. When he paints a dark night, as in _Pan and Luna_, the
blackness is a solid jelly-like thing that can be cut. And even night
itself falls short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the Eastern vision,
breaking in despair "against the soul of blackness there," as the gloom
of Saul's tent discovers within it "a something more black than the
blackness," the sustaining tent-pole, and then Saul himself "gigantic
and blackest of all."

[Footnote 64: "I never grow tired of sunrises," he wrote in a letter,
recently published, to Aubrey de Vere, in 1851 (_A. de Vere: A Memoir_,
by Wilfrid Ward).]

[Footnote 65: _Two Poets of Croisic_.]

But mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, contrast. He sees the
"old June