Breathless with adoration.”
It is the image of a pure soul exhaling itself before God, in a rapture of ecstatic contemplation.
The June scents of the Villino garden are very wonderful, peculiarly so this year, under the searching brilliancy of the unclouded heavens. There is the sweetbriar, and there are the pinks, and there is one long border all of nepeta—against the Dorothy Perkins hedge still only green—with its pungent, wholesome savour. And there is the gum cistus, that smells exactly as did the insides of the crimson Venetian bottles which stood in the great white and blue and gold drawing-room in the Signora’s Irish home. It was an old custom to put a drop of attar of roses at the bottom of these favourite ornaments in those days when the Signora was a little girl, and it was one of her great joys to be allowed to lift the stopper and sniff. The strange far-off Eastern incense that hangs about the rather uncomely straggling shrub—another instance of the Almighty’s exceptions—brings the mistress of the Villino back with a leap to her childhood; to the late Georgian drawing-room, with its immense plate-glass windows hung with curtains of forget-me-not blue brocade which cost a hundred pounds a pair—people spent solid money then for solid worth; the white marble chimney-piece, with its copy of a fraction of the Parthenon frieze—Phaeton driving his wild, tossing horses; the immense cut-glass chandelier sparkling and quivering with a thousand elfin rainbow lights; the white and gold panels, the plastered frieze of curling acanthus leaves; and the smiling face of the adored mother looking down upon the little creature in the stiff piqué frock, who was the future Padrona. No child analyzes its mother’s countenance. It is only in later years that the beauty of that smile was recognized by her. It was a beauty that endured to the very last of those eighty-five years of a life that was so well filled. It was a smile of extraordinary sweetness and, to that end, full of youth. That’s what the gum cistus brings back; a fragrance of memory, poignant and beloved. Everyone knows that through the sense of smell the seat of memory is most potently reached. The merest whiff of a long-forgotten odour will bring back so vividly some scene of the past that it is almost painful. It is to be wondered why ghosts do not more often choose this form of return to the world. The story told by Frederick Myers in his “Human Personality” of the phantom scent of thyme by which a poor girl haunted the field where she had been murdered is, we believe, unique; but we know another record. This was not the struggle of any reproachful shade to bring itself back to human recollection, but the ghost of a fragrance itself. The late Bret Harte told the tale to a friend of ours. On a visit to an old English castle he was lodged in a tower room. Every afternoon he used to withdraw for literary labours, and at a certain hour the whole of the old chamber would be filled with the penetrating vapour of incense. He sought in vain for some explanation of the mystery. There was nothing within or without, beneath or above, which could produce such a phenomenon. Then he bethought himself of investigating the past, and found that his room was exactly over what had once been the chapel in the days of our ancient Faith, and that it had been the custom to celebrate Benediction at the hour when the incense—that wraith of a bygone lovely worship—now seemed to surround him.
A few steps beyond the gum cistus the buddleia trees this June have their brief splendour of bloom and their intoxication of perfume. It is as if all the honey of clover and gorse, with something of a dash of clove spice, was burning in a pyre of glory to the sunshine. What wonder that the bees gather there and chant the whole day long! Happy bees, drunk with bliss in the midst of their labour!
It is all very well to speak of bees as a frugal, hard-working community, to hold them up to the perpetual emulation of the young. Few people seem to remember how extremely dissipated they become when they come across a good tap of honey. Who has not seen them—so charged with the luxuriance that they can scarcely stagger out of the calyx—buzz away, blundering, upon inebriated wing?
Greatly favoured by Nature, the bees combine the extreme of laudable activity with the extreme of self-indulgence. Anyone who wants to hear their pæan of rapture at its height, let him provide them with Buddleia globosa.
We have by no means exhausted the list of scents in the June garden. There are the irises! All Florence is in the sweetness that flows from them: a sweetness, by the way, not adapted to rooms, where, to be unpoetical, it assumes something faintly catty. The way the perfume of irises rolls over Florence in May is something not to be described to anyone who has not breathed it. We were once the guests of a kindly literary couple, who dwelt in one of those charming, quaint, transmogrified farmhouses outside the city that makes us—even we who own the Villino Loki—hanker. It was called Villa Benedetto. One drove out from Florence along a road now only vaguely remembered. It skirted the river, and there were wild slopes on one side and poplar-trees; then one darted aside into the Italian hills and up a steep ascent—this vision is also vague; but we remember the little garden-gate and the narrow brick path and the irises! Irises and China roses! It is a lovely mixture for colour; and as for scent! anyone who knows anything about scent (and we wonder why there are not artists in it, as well as for music and painting) anyone who knows anything about scent, we repeat, is quite aware that orris, the pounded iris root, is the only possible fragrance to keep constantly about. It combines the breath of the mignonette and the subtle delight of the violet. It preserves, too, its adorable freshness of impression. You never sicken of it, you never tire of it. Of course it has the fault of its delicacy, it is evanescent; but, then, it is never stale. Any woman who wishes an atmosphere of poetry should use nothing but orris, the pure pounded root without any addition, and that perpetually renewed. Precious quality, it cannot be overdone.
The odour of the flower itself in the sunshine is a different thing, far more piercing and far more pronounced. It must be enjoyed in the sunshine, or after a spring storm. Those other incomparable banquets to the sense which a bean-field or a clover-meadow will spread for you cannot be captured and refined in the same manner. More’s the pity!
Lafcadio Hearn declares that human beings have lamentably failed to cultivate the rich possibilities of the sense of smell. In this respect, he says, dogs are infinitely superior. Who can tell, he asks, what ecstasy of combination, what chords, what symphonies of harmony and contrast, might we not be able to serve ourselves? But we do not think the idea will bear development, and certainly many suffer enough from an over-sensitiveness of nostril already to prevent them from desiring any further cultivation of its powers.