Last week, I published an article about a mid-nineteenth century essay by a factory girl titled A Weaver’s Reverie. Ella, the essayist, wrote the following line in her beautiful-but-melancholy essay:
I think I said there was a cloudless sky; but it was not so. It was clear, and soft, and its beauteous hue was one of ‘the hyacinth’s deep blue’—but there was one bright solitary cloud, far up in the cerulean vault; and I wished that it might for once be in my power to lie down upon that white, fleecy couch, and there, away and alone, to dream of all things holy, calm, and beautiful.
I produced an HTML file containing Ella’s entire essay for people to read along with my piece about the essay. Owed to Ella’s describing the color of the sky in her dream as being “the hyacinth’s deep blue,” I sought a hyacinth color on Simplicable to use as the backround for my re-production of A Weaver’s Reverie.
In January, I discussed the process I went through to transfer all of the photos on my BlackBerry Classic to my computer using KDE Connect. I was looking through those photos when I came across a spring 2019 photo of grape hyacinth flowers taken at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
The left edge is a bit fuzzy and my photo-retouching skills leave much to be desired, but the overall presentation is acceptable. There, standing out among the green, are a number of grape hyacinth flowers. I have always been a fan of the grape hyacinth, both for its deep color and also its unique form. But when I came across them in my photo collection, I thought of that essay by Ella where she used the hyacinth (admittedly she was probably not referring to the grape hyacinth) to describe the color of the sky in her workday reverie.
