Who can doubt that he fell the more readily upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that the "Pomegranates" were to be "of blue and of purple and of scarlet," and the "Bells" "of gold"?
He loves the daybreak hour of the world's awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping Florence in that "live translucent bath of air"[64]; he loves the blaze of the Italian mid-day-- "Great noontides, thunderstorms, all glaring pomps That triumph at the heels of June the god." Even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue."[65] He loves the play of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even in the sombre South and the dusky East; Poiphyria and Lady Carlisle, Evelyn Hope and the maid of Pornic, share the gift with Anael the Druse, with Sordello's Palma, whose "tresses curled Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound About her like a glory! even the ground Was bright as with spilt sunbeams;" and the girl in _Love among the Ruins_, and the "dear dead women" of Venice.

His love of fire and of the imagery of flame has one of its sources in his love of light.

Verona emerges from the gloom of the past as "a darkness kindling at the core." He sees the "pink perfection of the cyclamen," the "rose bloom o'er the summit's front of stone." And, like most painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar intensity into his glooms.

When he paints a dark night, as in _Pan and Luna_, the blackness is a solid jelly-like thing that can be cut.

And even night itself falls short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the Eastern vision, breaking in despair "against the soul of blackness there," as the gloom of Saul's tent discovers within it "a something more black than the blackness," the sustaining tent-pole, and then Saul himself "gigantic and blackest of all." [Footnote 64: "I never grow tired of sunrises," he wrote in a letter, recently published, to Aubrey de Vere, in 1851 (_A.