COLOURS OF NAMES.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I have followed with much interest the correspondence in your paper on the colours of names, having myself this peculiar characteristic of associating names with colours of their own. I have never met with any one who possessed this peculiarity, excepting one of my own cousins. As children we often talked of it and compared our ideas on the subject, and one of our games was to write down as many names as we could think of and paint their colours beside them. But we never could get the washes of colour as clear as we saw them in our mind's eye. I asked her, since we were grown up, whether she still saw names with colours, and she tells me that she does. I myself have kept the sense so strongly that, were I choosing names for any child I was interested in, my choice would be influenced by their colours ; I would not put two or three names together whose colours did not harmonize in my own mind.
I think the association of names and colours is an involuntary mental process. When once a colour has linked itself with any particular name in my mind, it never changes or wavers; every time I think of the name it seems as though written in space in its own colour before my mental vision. There are certain names, however, which suggest no very distinctive colour to me. Seeing that the colour cannot be determined by each separate syllable of a word, I think it is suggested, either by the sound as a whole, or by the first letter of the word. Names beginning with a "D " or a " J " are always (to me) of a dark or sombre hue ; as John, a soft greenish black ; Jack is a jet black ; James, dark grey ; Jane is, however, of a lighter grey. Names beginning with " W " are of a steel or water grey; as William, Wilfrid, Winifred. Stephen is steel colour; Hugh, a faint vapour grey. Names beginning with " A " are sometimes of a sandstone pink, as Anna and Annie; with "V," a soft yet vivid green, as Vernon. Those beginning with a soft " C " are white or cream-colour : Celia, Cecilia, Cecil, white ; Charles, a pure cream ; also Mary. Percy is yellow ochre ; Ralph, a russet colour; Francis and Frances, vivid orange. Robert is green; and many other names of various tones of green. Henry and Henrietta are of a burnt sienna brown ; Harry and Harriet, dark red. Margaret is a deep heavy red, but the lighter sounding French form, Marguerite, is pink. Elizabeth is a deep sage green ; but Bess, a lavender grey. Maude is a delicate transparent blue-green ; Claude, a clear sea-green ; Clara, a clear amber, like Sauterne wine ; Helen, a deeper liquid amber ; Nell, the same. Cynthia seems like frosted silver, Silvia like quicksilver. Lucy is sky-blue : I always thought of it as this clear vivid blue, even before I knew that the Italian word for light is lace, and the name derived from it Lucia. Among the names of Shakespeare's heroines, as I imagine them, Hermione is a deep hyacinthine purple ; Beatrice, purple-crimson ; Rosalind, raspberry-red—a bright soft sweet william red ; Perdita, white; -Viola, a soft, delicate vivid green; Sebastian is a clear straw-yellow.
Professor Rimington declares that music is closely associated with colour in the minds of certain individuals, and it would be interesting to discover whether painters and others with artistic gifts associate colours with abstract objects, and whether any living scientist is able to explain the phenomenon. It might be that these peculiar colour-instincts are dormant and capable of being developed into a valuable mental possession.—I am, Sir,
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