occult meanings. The principal circumstance which marks the seriousness
of the early Venetian mind is perhaps the last in which the reader would
suppose it was traceable;--that love of bright and pure color which, in
a modified form, was afterwards the root of all the triumph of the
Venetian schools of painting, but which, in its utmost simplicity, was
characteristic of the Byzantine period only; and of which, therefore, in
the close of our review of that period, it will be well that we should
truly estimate the significance. The fact is, we none of us enough
appreciate the nobleness and sacredness of color. Nothing is more common
than to hear it spoken of as a subordinate beauty,--nay, even as the
mere source of a sensual pleasure; and we might almost believe that we
were daily among men who

"Could strip, for aught the prospect yields
To them, their verdure from the fields;
And take the radiance from the clouds
With which the sun his setting shrouds."

But it is not so. Such expressions are used for the most part in
thoughtlessness; and if the speakers would only take the pains to
imagine what the world and their own existence would become, if the blue
were taken from the sky, and the gold from the sunshine, and the verdure
from the leaves, and the crimson from the blood which is the life of
man, the flush from the cheek, the darkness from the eye, the radiance
from the hair,--if they could but see for an instant, white human
creatures living in a white world,--they would soon feel what they owe
to color. The fact is, that, of all God's gifts to the sight of man,
color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly
of gay color, and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay.
All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy,
and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the
most.

Sec. XXXI. I know that this will sound strange in many ears, and will be
especially startling to those who have considered the subject chiefly
with reference to painting; for the great Venetian schools of color are
not usually understood to be either pure or pensive, and the idea of its
pre-eminence is associated in nearly every mind with the coarseness of
Rubens, and the sensualities of Correggio and Titian. But a more
comprehensive view of art will soon correct this impression. It will be
discovered, in the first place, that the more faithful and earnest t