It may be doubted indeed whether the expression of colour is not naturally more powerful than that of form or figure; for, though form has also its natural expression, it owes its chief force to the auxiliaries of custom, association, and consent; whence lines and forms have almost usurped the office of expression with the painter, but, aided by the influence of colour, they become irresistible. Perhaps colour and form have peculiarities of expression which ought to be distinguished; and, if we might venture an opinion on this head, the expression of form is more powerful in figuring the passions; and that of colour, in representing and exciting the more delicate perceptions of internal feeling and sentiment: the one is the rhythmus of expression, and, like those of poetry and music, strikes every eye; the other is the harmony that touches certain natural chords, which vibrate to an eye gifted or cultivated to perceive and feel it.

The choice of colours then which the artist infuses into, and with which he clothes and surrounds his figures, or his scenes and compositions, is by no means arbitrary, nor merely an affair of conformity to the natural object, or of sensible satisfaction to the eye; but has, in its highest view, a rational and moral reference to the mind, dependent on the subject, and the sentiment or moral he means to excite or convey and our common habits of thinking and speaking coincide herein when we attribute moral and sensible qualities to colours, by denominating them faint or strong, true or false, foul or fair, harmonious or discordant, dead or lively, sedate, fresh, good and bad, modest and meretricious, solemn, gloomy and gay, &c.; and it is hence by tone and colouring that the artist is able to aid and excite the ruling and subordinate sentiments of his performance in the manner of the musician; and that, although he should copy nature in his colouring, he will not do so servilely, but with taste, discrimination, and reference to these ends. There is the ideal in colouring, as well as in forms, which belongs to the perfection of beauty and sentiment, which it is the highest office of the painter to attain; and it is that in all these arts to which the philosophic minds of the Greeks aspired: "Is not painting, Parrhasius, a representation of what we see? By the help of canvas and a few colours you can easily set before us hills and caves, light and shade, straight and crooked, rough and plain, and bestow youth and age where and when it best pleaseth you; and when you would give us perfect beauty (not being able to find in any one person what answers your idea) you copy from many what is beautiful in each, in order to produce this perfect form."-Xenoph. Mem.

c. x. p. 167. It is the same in colouring, it must be induced or generalized. But of ideal beauty, in every case, nature must supply the means,-not individually, but in the way of selection, generalization, and refinement; for there is no other source of fine ideas in science or in art.

It is in the election of his colours, not less than in their use and arrangement, that the artist merits the reputation of a colourist; and he may perhaps borrow from, as well as contribute something to, the poet, who has not failed to avail himself of the powers of colours on the imagination in exciting, heightening, and extending ideas and sentiments,—in the construction of epithets, the decoration of figures natural and rhetorical, and in all the imagery and witchery of his art. We may indeed truly remark, with respect to the poets, that many of the most exquisite passages of their works are indebted to colours principally for their beauty and effect.

The expression of colour in poetry must of course be limited to the signification of terms, which, with respect to colours, is hitherto confined to their simple names and relations: poetry, therefore, falls far short of nature and painting in this respect; it is nevertheless open to all the refinements of language and art, on which point much remains to be done by the poet, and herein the painter may refund part of the obligation he owes to the bard:

Blend the fair tints, and wake the vocal string.

COLLINS.

Poets, like painters, are comparatively good or bad colourists; and it is remarkable that the poets of nature are invariably the best, while the poets of art, and imitators, are as indifferent colourists as those painters and copyists are who have studied colouring in pictures only. Hence some of the earlier poets, who probably drew their images more immediately from nature, have availed themselves more, and more truly, of the powers of colours than later poets; whence Spenser, and Shakspeare in particular, are painter poets. This remark is not quite applicable to the schools of painting in which, as before observed, colouring has been the latest attainment of the art, although not without exception, nor without traces of natural colouring in early examples of the art.

The latitude and licence of the poet with regard to the use and expression of colour is even wider than that of the painter, and hardly bounded by the usage of nature herself when it suits his sentiment to deviate in this respect; hence with the poet, the sea becomes the black ocean,' 'the green ocean,' 'the purple main,' the azure deep,' 'the white waves,' &c. ; and so it is with

the sky, the land, the forest, or other natural objects. Such also are the coloured garbs in which he clothes the. animate figures of gods and goddesses, &c. whereby the various parts of nature, &c. are poetically designated and expressed.

In collating the poets for instances of this poetical painting, none appears to our view to have had juster conception of the beauties and powers of colours than our great dramatist, whose genius seems to have been almost universal. Sometimes he harmonizes with the primary colours, as thus

Thou shalt not lack

The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose; nor

The azured harebell, like thy veins.

CYMBELINE.

Sometimes he employs the secondaries, as in the order of Titania to the Fairies to honour her Love, so much admired by Dryden for its poetic beauty:

Feed him with apricots, and dewberries,

With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries.—
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies
To fan the moon-beams from his sleeping eyes :—
Nod to him, Elves, and do him curtesies.

MIDSUM. NIGHT'S DREAM.

In both these instances one of the three colours is kept back, inferred but unexpressed or subdued, as it is generally in nature, particularly in flowers, and even in their species; e. g. we have roses, red, yellow, and compounds only, for nature does not produce a blue rose, but in its place roses inclined to purple, in which blue is subdued by red and black; the same may be observed of the hollyhock and other flowers. Colours nevertheless, it is true, are sometimes given to flowers, &c. in pictures which nature never dared to give; and though the colours may be required in the picture, yet when they are so given, it is an offence to truth, which makes its impression upon the mind of the observer. This adherence to nature and truth-this best policy of honesty in all things, is one of Shakspeare's greatest charms, and belongs to excellence in every intellectual art. How natural, tender, expressive, beautiful, and true, is the following inquiry concerning an occasion of grief:

What's the matter,

That this distemper'd messenger of wet,

The many-colour'd Iris, rounds thine eye?

That Shakspeare discriminated nicely in colours is apparent from the following:

And again :

If you will see a pageant truly play'd,

Between the pale complexion of true love

And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain,
Go hence a little.

There was a pretty redness in his lip;

A little riper and more lusty red

Than that mix'd in his cheek; 'twas just the difference

Betwixt the constant red and mingled damask.

With what truth and effect he avails himself of the chromatic discord of green and yellow, which he uses metaphorically for freshness and jealousy, by natural feeling or discernment, as if he theorized in colours, in the following hackneyed passage:-

She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought;

And, with a green and yellow melancholy,

She sat like Patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief.

The discord therein resolves itself in "damask," which is the perfect contrast or equivalent of " green and yellow." Of this species of contrast in colouring, Shakspeare is a great master; witness the blood of Duncan on the hand of Macbeth, contrasted or opposed by the colour of the ocean :

MACBETH. Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

LADY M.

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnardine,

Making the green one red! *

My hands are of your colour, but I shame

To wear a heart so white.

Numberless instances might be adduced of the correctness of his judgment and feeling, in employing the beautiful and peculiar relations and effects of

red and white when mingled or opposed; but the latter and following quotations may suffice:

I have mark'd

A thousand blushing apparitions start
Into her face; a thousand innocent shames
In angel whiteness bear away those blushes.

Go, prick thy face, and over-red thy fear,
Thou lily-liver'd boy!

Not to fatigue by multiplying instances, we refer the inquirer to the sections under which each colour is treated of, for examples more particularly in point from the poets, having preferred here a general illustration from a single authority; of which we have found none equal to Shakspeare, who often produces these chromatic effects by mere allusion, clothing immaterial things in imaginary colours :

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought!

He does not deem it necessary to tell us that "the native hue of resolution" is hot and fiery red, nor that it is subdued or "sicklied o'er" by the cold, dull, livid "cast of thought;"-the very means the painter would have taken to lower such "native hue." Indeed Shakspeare in the employment of colours always evinces a refined feeling of our art; but in what feeling or sentiment could he be wanting who drew all his resources from the fountains of nature and truth ?—

And he the Man whom Nature's self had made
To mock herself, and truth to imitate

With kindly counter under mimic shade,—
Our pleasant WILLY,-ah! is dead of late.

SPENSER'S TEARS OF THE MUSES.

Milton and other poets abound with fine examples of colouring, but they have not always the natural truth and simplicity of Shakspeare's. Byron's palette is principally set with black and red; but in this there is something not less characteristic than is the purple and gold of Homer.

Ere we close this sketch we will subjoin one more illustration, an exception to our intention with regard to the Bard of Avon, from a genuine pupil