create “a wilderness of sweets.” It is as these exhalations are passing off from the economy to which, if retained, they would be noxious ([851]), that they become
“Exhalations of all sweets
That float o’er vale and upland;”
and which refresh and delight even more than the forms and colours of the “aery leaf” or “the bright consummate flower.”
944. And the human body, when the functions of its economy are sound and vigorous, is fresh and fragrant as the flower ([862]); and by that intellectual faculty by which man is capable of associating his conception of beauty and delight with whatever object has been the source of exquisite gratification, the fragrance of the flower is but suggestive of what, to him, is inexpressibly sweeter and dearer.
“As new waked from soundest sleep,
Soft on the flow’ry herb I found me laid
In balmy sweat, which with his beams the sun
Soon dry’d——
By quick instinctive motion up I sprung,