nd has an immortal and celestial character. It
ascends to the highest and descends to the lowest tones of
_chiaro-oscuro_. Nothing so nearly approaches pure white as the palest
blue; nothing is so nearly black as the darkest.

Green has been assigned by nature the place of the universal
background. It is the complementary colour of red, softening and
assimilating it by reflected shadows, and setting off the glory of
every flower and fruit. The expression of green is gaiety and modesty,
light and tenderness, shadow and repose, to both the eye and the
mind.[290]

It must be allowed that it is by the earliest associations of the
individual, or by those derived from the family, the tribe or the
nation, that colours are connected with such attributes welded by art
and time into traditional meanings, which they absolutely
possess,[291] and from which fashion cannot disconnect them; such,
for instance, is the royalty of purple.

The word purple is so indiscriminately used as a poetic epithet,
rather than as a distinctive appellation, that much confusion has been
caused by it. Historically, among the Persians, Greeks, and Romans it
appears to have been simply the royal colour, varying from the purest
blue, through every shade of violet, down to the deepest crimson.
Sometimes, poetically, "purple" seems to have described only a
surface. The breezy or stormy sea was purple; the sky was purple; the
hyacinthine locks of Narcissus, the rosy lips of Venus were purple. As
a textile, velvet was purple, even when it was white.[292]

The epithets "purple" and "wine-coloured" are often bestowed on the
Mediterranean Sea, and are justified by its occasional hue:--

"As from the clouds, deep-bosom'd, swell'd with showers,
A sudden storm the purple ocean sweeps,
Drives the wild waves, and tosses all the deeps."

Pope's Homer, "Iliad," b. xi. v. 383.

Professor Tyndall suggests that the soft green of the sea, shadowed by
clouds, assumes a subjective purple hue. Homer must have observed this
before he became blind.

Pliny gives us much information about this colour; he enumerates the
different sea-shores and coasts, Egyptian, Asiatic, and European,
whence came the shell-fish (the murex and pelagia) that produced the
so-called Tyrian purple dyes.[293]

He says that Romulus wore the purple, and that the dyed garments, all
purple, were sacred to the gods in those days. After saying that it
was still a