nature, for
nature does actually endeavour--if such a word as endeavour maybe used
where all is done without effort--to subdue the rawness of every
colour, and even to stain the white-wash we put upon her works, and
covers the lightest rocks with lichen.

But as the mind _colours_, and absolute naturalness is not necessary,
it results that there must be a science by which the mind can effect
its purpose.

For the cultivation of a sense arises from a want which the mind alone
at first feels, and to the mind in that state of desire things speak
suggestively that were before mute; discoveries are made into the
deeper and previously hidden secrets of nature, and new means are
invented of gratifying the awakened senses. Hence all art which is
above the merely common and uncultivated sense. All we see and all we
hear takes a vitality not its own from our thoughts, mixes itself (as
aliment does, and becomes our substance) with our intellectual
texture, and is anew created.

Winds might have blown, and wild animals have uttered their cries, but
it was the heightened imagination that heard them _howl_ and _roar_.
And it was from a further cultivation of the sense, giving forth, at
every step, new wants, that the nature of all sounds was investigated
and music invented--science but discovering wonderful mysteries,
secrets, and gifted faculties drawing them out of their deep
hiding-places, making them palpable, and combining and converting them
into humanities whereby mankind may be delighted and improved.

If, then, the ear has its science, so has the eye. There is the
mystery of colours as well as of sounds. Nor can it be justly said
that we are out of nature because we pursue that mystery beyond its
commonly perceptible and outward signs to its more intricate truths;
nay, on the contrary, as we have thereby _more_ of those truths, we
have _more_ of nature; and we know them to be truths by their power
and by their adoption.

This science of colour has been, perhaps, too much neglected. In
conversing with artists, one is surprised how little attention they
have paid to it; and even where it has been studied, it is only upon
its surface, and by those well known diagrams which show the
oppositions.

Few, indeed, consider colouring as a means of telling the story--as at
all sympathetic. In an historical subject, more attention is paid to
the exact naturalness of the light, the time of day, the local
colouring of the objects