For me the angel that shall take my hand,
When winds are ceasing, and my work is done,
And, like a king leading a beggar child,
Shall open death and lead me through the veil,
And gently guide me, dazzled with the light,
Till my hand rests on all that I have lost.

PERKINS'S PURPLE.

LET other men sing the praise of Hector and
of Agamemnon, be it for me to sing the praise
of Perkins, the inventor of the new purple.

Perkins (Mr. Perkins), I should at once
mention, is the gentleman who, by his skill in
chemistry, has lately discovered this beautiful
purple colour now so common, and which
tradesmen foolishly call Mauve—a French word, I
believe, derived from the name of the mallow
plant, but why or wherefore used I know not,
except that the mallow flower is of a dull brown
purple, and is utterly unlike the delicious
violet of Perkins, to which the Tyrian purple of
the Caesars is tame, dull, and earthy indeed.

It is a pleasant thing to draw similes from
the fact, that this exquisite colour was extracted
by Mr. Perkins from coal tar. The black sticky
juice of fossil plants seems, at the first blush, a
curious source for so pure and bright a dye; most
men to obtain which would have boiled down
chaldronfuls of wood violets, or waggon-loads
of pansies and Venus's looking-glass. Mr.
Perkins, a man who has fought his way up through
the mysteries of chemistry, groped for it in the
seething kettle of the ship-builder, and found it.
Did the purple shadows of clouds throwing
laburnum-coloured tints on the surrounding sea
suggest the search, or did the sea itself whisper
and moan out her dyer's secret? Not it.
Perkins tracked the purple out in the products of
distilled indigo, grasping the secret from amidst
the red glare and ponderous smoke of an ordinary
unenchanted laboratory in a London street.

Chemistry is hard at work seeking for
remedies for disease. It is filtering water, and
separating air, and melting diamonds, and making
ice in red-hot crucibles, and performing all sorts
of juggling tricks; it is brewing poisons and
searching dead men's stomachs for poisons it
has invented; it is watching artificial digestion
in artificial pouches; it is doing all over the
world, simultaneously, thousands of useful,
dangerous, and curious things. It has all
but discovered gold; it has all but discovered
Nature's receipt for making diamonds;
but never, though, has it discovered how to
stop the death-flood of cholera, the sloughing
throat of diphtheria, or the new plague of
London now seething in the Thames. Never
does it work so hard and with such staring, eager
eyes and acid-stained fingers as when it works
at the bidding of trade; commerce being, as we
have at last discovered, the special ambition and
object of England as a nation. The Celt, Saxon,
and Norman were fused together that we
should trade; Magna Charta and our 1688
guarantee were obtained that we should trade.
We conquer to trade, we missionarise to trade,
we wage war that we might have unimpeded
trade. Last of all, we make chemical experiments
that we may trade, and of the discoveries
of our commercial chemistry Mr. Perkins's
discovery is one of the greatest and most brilliant.

All discoveries do not bring fortunes to the
discoverer. Fame comes; but, when the money
should flow in, there is a hitch, a frost, a blight.
M. Schönbein, the German country usher,
discovered gun cotton, but now it is used only for
blasting; but there is chloroform, that great
gift of Heaven and blessing to mankind. The
same alchemist who discovered gin and water
discovered the more useful phosphorus, to which
we partly owe the comfort of lucifer-matches.

A new colour is worth a fortune. Fortunate
Mr. Perkins discovered his purple after long
experimenting on coal tar and benzole, that
product of benzoic acid which is used to clean white
kid gloves, and which cleans them without the
noxious smell of morphine, which is a poisonous
preparation of opium.

The Persian king, who offered a large reward
to the discoverer of a new pleasure, by which he
did not necessarily mean a new sin, would have
buried Mr. Perkins in a well full of diamonds.
He would have pelted him to death with gold
pieces, or have erected to his honour golden
statues.

The chemical experiments that result in leaving
deposits of colour in glass tubes, or in
crucibles, are innumerable. Red oxide of
manganese fused with glass communicates a
beautiful violet tint. Iodine is rich in dyeing dolphin
tinges; safflower gives cerise, madder is a powerful
agent in dyeing our soldiers' coats blood red;
but few of these are permanent colours, many
of them pass away quick and volatile as the
summer rainbow, many are mere phenomena,
gone almost before they can be seen.

It had been for years known that benzole,
exposed to a reducing action and oxidised,
became aniline, and that a dirty fugitive purple
appeared in the course of the transmutations
of this aniline, and was, indeed, a test of its
presence. It took Mr. Perkins three anxious
years, however, before repeated oxidisations
worked their spells, and Mauve flashed upon his
(Perkins's) eyes. It is a liquid purple, perfectly
transparent and soluble in alcohol. It is
patent, and has to be purchased directly or
indirectly from the clever inventor. It can be
deepened with Prussian blue to any tint, but
only at the expense of its valuable property of
permanence.

It is rich and pure, and fit for anything; be it
fan, slipper, gown, ribbon, handkerchief, tie, or
glove. It will lend lustre to the soft changeless
twilight of ladies' eyes—it will take any shape to
find an excuse to flutter round her cheek— to
cling (as the wind blows it) up to her lips—to
kiss her foot—to whisper at her ear. O
Perkins's purple, thou art a lucky and a favoured
colour!

The proper complementary colour to Mauve is
a greenish yellow, not an orange. And this is
well for ladies to know who do not understand