Colour

Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?
— Holy Bible, Isaiah, 63:1.

How boring, how small Shakespeare’s people are!
Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar.
— D. H. Lawrence, quoted by W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973),  ‘The Globe’, in The Dyer’s Hand, Faber, 1963, 177.

The colour I think of little moment; and am of the opinion with our friend Foote, respecting his negro friend, that a good dog, like a good candidate, cannot be of a bad colour.
— Peter Beckford (1740 – 1811), Thoughts upon hare and fox hunting.

An ‘Artificial Spectrum Top’, devised by Mr. C. E. Benham, and sold by Messrs Newton and Co., furnishes an interesting phenomenon to students of physiological optics. The top consist of a disc, one half of which is black, while the other half has twelve concentric circles drawn upon it. Each arc subtends an angle of forty-five degrees. In the first quadrant there are three such concentric arcs, in the next three more, and so on; the only difference being that the arcs are parts of circles of which the radii increase in arithmetic progression. Each quadrant thus contains a group of arcs differing in length from those of the other quadrants. The curious point is that when this disc is revolved, the impression of different colours is produced upon the retina.
— Nature, November 29, 1894.

I have taken great pains to inform myself of the growth and extent of the heinous crime of self-painting …
— Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694 – 1773), Letters from a Celebrated Nobleman to his Heir.

Colours are the smiles of Nature
— (James Henry) Leigh Hunt (1784 – 1859).

My heart leaps when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began:
So is it now I am a man
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die.
— William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) The Rainbow.

Old solders never dye
— Duncan Bain (1944 – ) ‘Resistance is useless’ in Canary Row, Breek-Anathema Press, 1985.

… All this long eve
Have I been gazing at the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green:
And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye!
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834), Dejection, 1802.

That God is colouring, Newton does shew,
And the devil is a Black outline, all of us know.
— William Blake (1757 – 1827), To Venetian Artists, 1811.

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