May Flaming Flowers of Broom. 163 



rounded by delicate tertiary colors, because it kills 

 them at once. What it requires is the neighborhood 

 of other colors pure enough to hold their own against 

 it. This theory is fully borne out by the coloring of 

 two places which I will now describe. The first is a 

 beautiful bit of river-shore, very delicately tinted and 

 covered with pansies and violets, with a mountainous 

 distance usually in tender gray. All this is lovely indeed 

 till the broom explodes into flames of chrome-yellow, 

 but after that what becomes of such a thing as a pansy ? 

 You may take it up, of course, and satisfy yourself by 

 minute inspection that it is a beautiful flower of pale 

 parchment-yellow, with a bold touch of cadmium on the 

 lower lip of the corolla, and seven effective little black 

 streaks ; but the moment you look at it on the ground 

 you can see nothing but gray. The other place is the 

 edge of an abandoned quarry, where the red earth is as 

 hot in the sunshine as it can be ; and as you look up 

 at it from below, the edge is brought against the intens- 

 est azure of the sky. Just along this edge grow twenty 

 or thirty magnificent plants of broom, and between the 

 azure of the sky and the fiery red of the sun-lighted 

 earth below they hold their own effectively enough with 

 their blaze of yellow, but are unable to extinguish either 

 the azure or the red. It is just one of those tournaments 

 of natural colors that the English painters seem born 

 to enjoy, and the French to run away from, a spectacle 

 to delight the strong natural sense in its naivett, but not 

 either the tender or the educated sense. It answers in 

 music, to a brass band playing fortissimo with blare of 



