Few people recognise that colours are powers, forces, vitalities, and vibrations.[2] Yet such they are, and on the physical plane we are now learning to enlist them in all kinds of occupations, as varied as that of the physician, the gardener, the brewer, and the baker. Every year we are finding out more clearly how we can use these vibrations for the benefit of man. Every year new hospitals are being opened for colour healing. Every year we are finding out how we can obtain better crops by means of the application of coloured rays.[3] The meteorologist[4] has taken up the colour of the sky as an indication of weather, and is making exhaustive tabulation of facts in order to make more definite the lore which we learnt as children in such rhymes as:-- “Evening red and morning grey Sets the traveller on his way; Evening grey and morning red Brings down rain upon his head.” When we think of colours and read into them some of the wonderful truths with which they have been associated for many centuries, we are astonished to find that there is a direct correspondence between the value apportioned to a colour on the physical plane and the value given symbolically. Swedenborg was continually insisting that there was no true symbolism without a direct correspondence. Thus, if we take the lions at the base of Nelson’s column and substitute any other animals, our minds would be instinctively offended. Why? Because Nelson and his men had in them the same quality or qualities that we associate with the lion. [2] See Appendix V. [3] See Appendix VI. [4] See Appendix III. Elizabeth Barrett Browning grips this great truth and expresses it in her poem of _Aurora Leigh_:-- “Verily I was wrong, And verily many thinkers of this age, Ay, many Christian teachers, half in heaven, Are wrong in just my sense, who understand Our natural world too insularly, as if No spiritual counterpart completed it, Consummating its meaning, rounding all To justice and perfection, line by line, Form by form, nothing single or alone; The great below clenched by the great above.” CHAPTER II THE OLD LANGUAGE OF RED “The Holy Grail, rose-red, with beatings in ’t, as if alive.” TENNYSON.