Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/46

 yellow and red, lighted by the marble, glowed upon those seaward heights and capes towards the sunrise, and that the noble stone was not quenched by azure and purple paint! Why then there would not be this discomfort in our thoughts of Grecian colour. Of some among the boldly and delicately-tinted old palaces of the Genoese coast you can hardly tell, at the hour of sunset, whether their rose is their own or the light's.

To the Londoner eye of Charles Dickens there seems to have been something gaily incongruous in a fortress house with walls centuries old, and barred with ancient iron across the lower windows, yet thus softly coloured; he expressed the cheerful liberal ignorance in which he travelled by calling one such palace a pink gaol; but this old faint scarlet is a strong colour as well as a soft; and above all it is warm. A cold colour, and no other, suggests meanness, insecurity, and indignity. Colour the battering walls of Monte Cassino, now warm with the hue of their stone, a harsh blue, and their visible power is gone; whereas no daubing with orange or rose, however it might disfigure them, would make them seem to fail. But a dark colour of any kind, whether hot or cold, would make them visibly lose their profound hold on their rock, and their long, searching, and ancient union with their mountain.

This is what the householder should be persuaded to consider—the harshness and weakness of the dark colour, the harmony and strength of that which is rather a white warmly