It seems strange that this should be a rarer personal gift than the musical sense, since nature apparently is far more lavish of her lessons for the eye than for the ear; and it is curious that colour, which at first sight seems a more apparent and simple fact than music, has not yet been written.

Undoubtedly there is a colour scale, which has its sharps and flats, its high notes and low notes, its chords and discords, and it is not impossible that in the future science may make it a means of regulated and written harmonies:--that some master colourist who has mechanical and inventive genius as well, may so arrange them that they can be played by rule; that colour may have its Mozart or Beethoven--its classic melodies, its familiar tunes.

The musician, as I have said--has gathered his tones from every audible thing in nature--and fitted and assorted and built them into a science; and why should not some painter who is also a scientist take the many variations of colour which lie open to his sight, and range and fit and combine, and write the formula, so that a child may read it?
We already know enough to be very sure that the art is founded upon laws, although they are not thoroughly understood.

Principles of masses, spaces, and gradations underlie all accidental harmonies of colour;--just as in music, the simple, strong, under-chords of the bass must be the ground for all the changes and trippings of the upper melodies.
It is easy, if one studies the subject, to see how the very likeness of these two esthetic forces illustrate the laws of each,--in the principles of relation, gradation, and scale.
Until very recently the relation of colour to the beauty of a house interior was quite unrecognised.

If it existed in any degree of perfection it was an accident, a result of the softening and beautifying effect of time, or of harmonious human living.