l twilight waves, red with the last
kiss of day; like the fierce struggles of the storm-beaten ocean floods
come the lightning waves, blazing through the thunder clouds, howling in
riven agony: so great is the variety of character in these orbicular
disturbances, which, acting upon the optic nerves, produce the sensation
of multiform light and color.

Waves of light, like waves of sound, are of different lengths, and while
the eye prefers some single waves to others, it recognizes a harmony in
certain combinations, which it cannot discover in different ones.

While, however, the constitution of individual eyes acknowledges one
color more pleasing than another, there is none, perhaps, which does not
prefer the coldest monochromatic to entire absence of color, as in blank
white, or to an absolute vacancy of light, as in black.

Sepia pieces are more agreeable than the neatest drawings in China ink,
or the most graceful curves done in chalk upon a blackboard. But however
the eye may admire a severe and simple unity, it relishes still more a
harmonious complexity; and a very mediocre little _pensee_ in water
colors, will prove more generally attractive than the monochromatic
copies in the Liber Veritatis.

But to this complexity there must be limits--an endless and incongruous
variety teases and revolts; the discordant effect of innumerable tints,
among which some are sure to be uncongenial to each other, is always
extremely irritating. There ought, then, to be a scale of color, it
would seem, within whose limits the purest harmonies are to be found,
and beyond which subdivisions should be no more allowed than in constant
musical notes. When this idea strikes, as it must have, many artists,
reason, consideration, instinct, and all, refer at once to the solar
spectrum as such an one. The analogy between this scale, which governs
the chromatics of the sunset and thunderstorm, and that which the
science of man has established, empirically, for harmonies, is
remarkable, and we shall try to make it patent. They are both scales of
seven: the tonic, mediant, and dominant, find their types in red,
yellow, and blue, while the modifications on which the diatonic scale is
constructed, resemble, numerically and esthetically, the well-known
variations in the spectrum.

The theory of harmonies in optics is the same as in acoustics, the same
as in everything--it is based on simplicity. Those colors, like those
notes, the number of wh