Prose Fancies (Second Series) by Richard Le Gallienne
page 54 of 122 (44%)
page 54 of 122 (44%)
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and Mr. Unwin have endeavoured to naturalise the custom here; but,
though in cloth yellow has emphatically 'caught on,' in paper it still hangs fire. The ABC Railway Guide is probably the only exception, and that, it is to be hoped, is not fiction. Mr. Lang has recently followed the fashion with his _Yellow Fairy Book_; and, indeed, one of the best known figures in fairydom is yellow--namely, the Yellow Dwarf. Yellow, always a prominent Oriental colour, was but lately of peculiar significance in the Far East; for were not the sorrows of a certain high Chinese official intimately connected with the fatal colour? The Yellow Book, the Yellow Aster, the Yellow Jacket!--and the Yellow Fever, like 'Orion' Home's sunshine, is always with us' somewhere in the world.' The same applies also, I suppose, to the Yellow Sea. Till one comes to think of it, one hardly realises how many important and pleasant things in life are yellow. Blue and green, no doubt, contract for the colouring of vast departments of the physical world. 'Blue!' sings Keats, in a fine but too little known sonnet-- '... 'Tis the life of heaven--the domain Of Cynthia--the wide palace of the sun-- The tent of Hesperus, and all his train-- The bosomer of clouds, gold, grey, and dun. Blue! 'Tis the life of waters ... Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest green, Married to green in all the sweetest flowers.' Yellow might retort by quoting Mr. Grant Allen, in his book on _The Colour Sense_, to the effect that the blueness of sea and sky is mainly poetical illusion or inaccuracy, and that sea and sky are found blue only in one experiment out of fourteen. At morning and evening they are |
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