indecisive and subdued tones; the mingled hues chiefly found in Nature,
or the tender "silvery-grey" of Andrea's placid perfection. He dazzles
us with scarlet and crimson; with rubies, and blood, and "the poppy's
red effrontery," with topaz, and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes
the sense ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect of all
by the boldest contrast. Who can doubt that he fell the more readily
upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that
the "Pomegranates" were to be "of blue and of purple and of scarlet,"
and the "Bells" "of gold"? He loves the daybreak hour of the world's
awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the
splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping
Florence in that "live translucent bath of air"[64]; he loves the blaze
of the Italian mid-day--

"Great noontides, thunderstorms, all glaring pomps
That triumph at the heels of June the god."

Even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue."[65] He loves the play
of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even
in the sombre South and the dusky East; Poiphyria and Lady Carlisle,
Evelyn Hope and the maid of Pornic, share the gift with Anael the Druse,
with Sordello's Palma, whose

"tresses curled
Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound
About her like a glory! even the ground
Was bright as with spilt sunbeams;"

and the girl in _Love among the Ruins_, and the "dear dead women" of
Venice. His love of fire and of the imagery of flame has one of its