_All moral pulsations in the wave of inherited feeling which responds to the impression of blue, belong only to the beautiful and tender aspects of faith._
And thus much having been ventured, I may presume a little further.
I imagine that for many of us one of the most powerful elements in this billow of pleasurable feeling evoked by the vision of blue, _is_ spiritual, in the fullest ethical meaning of the word;--that under the fleeting surface-plexus of personal emotion empirically associated with the color, pulses like a tide the transmitted religious emotion of unnumbered ages;--and that, quickening and vivifying all inherited sense of blue as beauty, is the inherited lucent rapture of blue as the splendor mystical,--as the color of the everlasting Peace. Something of all human longing for all the Paradises ever imagined,--of all pre-existent trust in the promise of reunion after death,--of all expired dreams of unending youth and bliss,--may be revived for us, more or less faintly, in this thrill of the delight of azure. Even as through the jewel-radiance of the Tropic Stream pass undulations from the vaster deep,--with their sobbings and whisperings, their fugitive drift and foam,--so, through the emotion evoked by the vision of luminous blue, there may somehow quiver back to us out of the Infinite--(multitudinous like the billion ether-shiverings that make the blue sensation of a moment)--something of all the aspirations of the ancient faiths, and the power of the vanished gods, and the passion and the beauty of all the prayer ever uttered by lips of man.
[75] Blue jewels, blue eyes, blue flowers delight us; but in these the color accompanies either transparency or visible softness. It is perhaps because of the incongruity between hard opacity and blue that the sight of a book in sky-blue binding is unendurable. I can imagine nothing more atrocious.
[76] This essay was written several years ago. During 1897 I noticed for the first time since my arrival in Japan a sprinkling of dark greens and light-yellows in the fashions of the season; but the general tone of costume was little affected by these exceptions to older taste. The light-yellow appeared only in some girdles of children.