The Charm of Color 
H3 
or an effect; at any rate it is said to be connected 
with the small number of humming-birds, who play 
an important part in the fertilization of many of the 
red flowers. There are no humming-birds in 
Europe; and the Aquilegia, red and yellow here, 
is blue there, and is then fertilized by the assist- 
ance of the bumblebee. Without humming-birds the 
English successfully accomplish one glorious sweep 
of red in the Poppies of the field ; Parkinson 
called them “a beautiful and gallant red" — a very 
happy phrase. Ruskin, that master of color and of 
its description, and above all master of the descrip- 
tion of Poppies, says : — 
u The Poppy is the most transparent and delicate of all 
the blossoms of the field. The rest, nearly all of them, 
depend on the texture of their surface for color. But the 
Poppy is painted glass ; it never glows so brightly as when 
the sun shines through it. Whenever it is seen, against the 
light or with the light, it is a flame, and warms the wind 
like a blown ruby.” 
There is one quality of the Oriental Poppies 
which is very palpable to me. They have often 
been called insolent — Browning writes of the 
cc Poppy’s red affrontery ” ; to me the Poppy has 
an angry look. It is wonderfully haughty too, and 
its seed-pod seems like an emblem of its rank. 
This great green seed-pod stands one inch high 
in the centre of the silken scarlet robe, and has an 
antique crown of purple bands with filling of lilac, 
just like the crown in some ancient kingly portraits, 
when the bands of gold and gems radiating from a 
