Then, odours enter more readily than other sense perceptions into those—
“Sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,”
which add so much to the sum of our happiness, because they unite themselves so readily with our purely incorporeal joys by links of association. “I never smell woodruff without being reminded——” is the sort of thing we hear and say continually, but we do not trouble ourselves to realise that we owe a double joy to the odour of the woodruff (or it may be, alas! a reflected sorrow)—the joy of the pleasant influences about us when we pluck the flower, and the possibly more personal joy of that other time with which we associate it. Every new odour perceived is a source, if not of warning, of recurrent satisfaction or interest. We are acquainted with too few of the odours which the spring-time offers. Only this spring the present writer learned two peculiarly delightful odours quite new to her, that of young larch twigs, which have much the same kind and degree of fragrance as the flower of the syringa, and the pleasant musky aroma of a box-hedge. Children should be trained, for example, to shut their eyes when they come into the drawing-room and discover by their nostrils what odorous flowers are present, should discriminate the garden odours let loose by a shower of rain:—
“Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it.
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The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odourless,
It is for my mouth for ever, I am in love with it.
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