“I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball; It will lead you in at heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall.” The Greeks also had a legend of a golden thread by which Jupiter drew up souls to heaven. Here we might mention the Golden Bough given to Æneas in order that he may visit the dead and yet retain his life (_Æneid_, bk. vi. 29). In the Kalevala, the great Finnish epic, Ilmater is invoked:-- “Ancient daughter of Creation, Come in all thy golden beauty.” And as Ilmater stands for wisdom, we are not surprised that Ecclesiasticus should say, “Get wisdom, and get much gold by her.” So also Keats writes:-- “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold.” In Babbit’s book on colour there is an illustration of the aura seen round the head of a man. Above the top part of the head is seen the colour yellow. Now, the phrenologist locates this as the seat of spirituality; thus we see that once more two studies agree in their conclusions. Yellow was thus to the ancients the greatest of all the colours, and had the most exalted meaning. * * * * * It is perhaps to be expected, then, that in its degraded meaning it is the saddest of all colours, for we recognise the deceitful Judas very often in ancient pictures from the fact that he is given dingy yellow robes. The Jews in Venice formerly had to wear yellow hats, to show the scorn in which the Venetians held them. Yellow is the colour of decaying vegetable life, of the poorness of life. Thus it means separation instead of unity. CHAPTER IV THE OLD LANGUAGE OF GREEN “Hope rules a land for ever green.”--WORDSWORTH. “Hope rules a land for ever green,” says Wordsworth. He means a land where nothing dies, for green is the colour of plant life, the colour of spring and of all that is fresh and young and joyous. When looking at Watts’ picture of Hope, we see that she sits almost like a picture of Despair, but she is trying to obtain music from her one last string. We notice that the green Watts uses is of a particularly hard, bluish character, so unlike the joyous green of spring. When Rossetti in “Dante’s Dream” depicts the two maidens lifting the veil from the face of Beatrice, we notice what a full rich green he uses for their robes, for he wishes to make his colour proclaim the fact that he feels no despair, but a sublime Hope and Faith which will go with him until the time that Beatrice will draw him into the “yellow of the Rose Eternal.” Shelley understood that green meant hope and gladness, for he wrote:--