hould,
however, try, as I said, to give _preciousness_ to all your colours; and
this especially by never using a grain more than will just do the work,
and giving each hue the highest value by opposition. All fine colouring,
like fine drawing, is _delicate_; and so delicate that if, at last, you
_see_ the colour you are putting on, you are putting on too much. You
ought to feel a change wrought in the general tone, by touches of colour
which individually are too pale to be seen; and if there is one atom of
any colour in the whole picture which is unnecessary to it, that atom
hurts it.

Notice also, that nearly all good compound colours are _odd_ colours.
You shall look at a hue in a good painter's work ten minutes before you
know what to call it. You thought it was brown, presently, you feel that
it is red; next that there is, somehow, yellow in it; presently
afterwards that there is blue in it. If you try to copy it you will
always find your colour too warm or too cold--no colour in the box will
seem to have any affinity with it; and yet it will be as pure as if it
were laid at a single touch with a single colour.

As to the choice and harmony of colours in general, if you cannot
choose and harmonize them by instinct, you will never do it at all. If
you need examples of utterly harsh and horrible colour, you may find
plenty given in treatises upon colouring, to illustrate the laws of
harmony; and if you want to colour beautifully, colour as best pleases
yourself at _quiet times_, not so as to catch the eye, nor to look as if
it were clever or difficult to colour in that way, but so that the
colour may be pleasant to you when you are happy, or thoughtful. Look
much at the morning and evening sky, and much at simple
flowers--dog-roses, wood hyacinths, violets, poppies, thistles, heather,
and such like--as Nature arranges them in the woods and fields. If ever
any scientific person tells you that two colours are "discordant," make
a note of the two colours, and put them together whenever you can. I
have actually heard people say that blue and green were discordant; the
two colours which Nature seems to intend never to be separated and never
to be felt, either of them, in its full beauty without the other!--a
peacock's neck, or a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with
green lights though it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to
clouds at sunrise, in this coloured world of ours. If you have a good
eye