O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet south
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour....”
Will anyone deny that there is music in these lines, that the singular impression produced by them is due not only to the perfection of a thought perfectly expressed, to the scent of violets exquisitely and instantly evoked by the cunning of genius, but to the actual words? The phrase rises and falls. Read or heard, it is the same, a strain of melody.
To one of the writers the two words, “Scarlet Verbena,” have always produced the impression as of a trumpet blast. Hoffmann used to say that he never smelt a red carnation without hearing the winding of a horn.
No doubt the senses are indefinably intermixed.
“Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden thro’ the budded quicks,
O tell me where the senses mix,
O tell me where the passions meet”—