The sapphire is often used as a figure for the stars or for blue eyes: “Those eyes, those sparkling sapphires of delight”... “Now glowed the firmament with living sapphires.” This last line is by Milton, from _Paradise Lost_, which he dictated to his daughters when he was blind. The poet Gray pictures Milton as becoming blinded by his great vision: He passed the flaming bounds of place and time, The living throne, the sapphire-blaze, Where angels tremble while they gaze, He saw but, blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night. While the sapphire at its best still captures the blue of a cloudless sky, it brings with it today a vision of more serene beauty. _Emerald_ The emerald is the most precious of the large beryl group of stones. It has been deemed precious from ancient times. Cleopatra’s emerald mines are still being worked. A flawless deep green emerald of good size is extremely rare. Such a gem, normally, is table cut. The emerald also may be pierced for use as a bead, or engraved. In Egypt, the usual carving was a scarab—Cleopatra possessed one; in India, the carving often was a god. The word emerald, before the sixteenth century, was _esmeraldus_ and _smaragdus_; the Sanskrit word for the gem was _marakta_. As recently as the last century, Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up the chief sensuous impressions of the Orient: “Color, taste, and smell: smaragdus, sugar, and musk.” There are few colors at once as striking and as restful as the green of an emerald. It seems to have the depths of the pure rays in a calm ocean. Coleridge in _The Ancient Mariner_ used it for another form of the ever-changing waters: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald. Tennyson used it for the widespread carpet of the land. A livelier emerald sparkles in the grass. In a lighter vein, it has been used to suggest the color of unripe fruit, as in Eugene Field’s verses on the peach: A little peach in an orchard grew, A little peach of emerald hue; Warmed by the sun and wet by the dew, It grew. The green of the emerald makes it, in many minds, the most beautiful of colored gems. _Pearl_ The pearl is the only one of the five gems that is the product of life. It gives body to the eternal paradox that out of evil springs good; out of deformity, beauty. For these reasons, the pearl is most frequently, of all gems, woven into symbols of man’s activity. “Honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house,” said Shakespeare, “as your pearl in a foul oyster.” A pearl, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, is a nacreous concretion formed within the shell of various bivalve molluscs around some foreign substance (i.e., a grain of sand), composed of filmy layers of carbonate of lime interstratified with animal membrane.