196 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 



most spiritual emanations, so that only when it is 

 quite blown away are we able to look into the soul, 

 forgetting man's kinship with the brutes. When 

 one is unaccustomed to it from always living with 

 dark-eyed races, the blue eye seems like an 

 anomaly in nature, if not a positive blunder; for 

 its power of expressing the lower and commonest 

 instincts and passions of our race is compara- 

 tively limited ; and in cases where the higher facul- 

 ties are undeveloped it seems vacant and meaning- 

 less. Add to this that the ethereal blue color is 

 associated in the mind with atmospheric phenom- 

 ena rather than with solid matter, inorganic or 

 animal. It is the hue of the void, expressionless 

 sky; of shadows on far-off hill and cloud; of wa- 

 ter under certain conditions of the atmosphere, 

 and of the unsubstantial summer haze, 



whose margin fades 

 For ever and for ever as I move. 



In organic nature we only find the hue sparsely 

 used in the quickly-perishing flowers of some frail 

 plants ; while a few living things of free and buoy- 

 ant motions, like birds and butterflies, have been 

 touched on the wings with the celestial tint only 

 to make them more aerial in appearance. Only 

 in man, removed from the gross materialism of 

 nature, and in whom has been developed the high- 

 est faculties of the mind, do we see the full beauty 

 and significance of the blue eye the eye, that is, 



