With spikenard weaved and marjorams between
And starred with yellow-golds and meadows-queen.
The very names indeed of the aromatic herbs seem to "perfume the air"—bergamot, lavender, meadowsweet, costmary, southernwood, woodruff, balm, germander. And flowers even though dead remain sweet in their dust, as every bowl of potpourri proclaims. To have "a repository of odours" always with them, when streets were foul and pestilence was a peril, gentle-people would in old times carry fresh nosegays or pomanders. The pomanders were of many kinds; an orange stuffed with cloves, etc., for the hand; or—for pocket or chatelaine—some little curiously-devised receptacle of silver containing tiny phials of precious essences—possibly no bigger than a plum. Or they might be compounded of rare ingredients: "Your only way to make a good pomander is this. Take an ounce of the purest garden mould, cleansed and steeped seven days in change of motherless rose water. Then take the best labdanum, benjoin, both storaxes, ambergris, civet, and musk. Incorporate them together, and work them into what form you please. This, if your breath be not too valiant, will make you smell as sweet as any lady's dog."
[285].
I have pondered over the thirteenth and eighteenth lines of this poem, but am not yet certain of all that they were intended to convey. But what scope for the imagination is in it! The next epitaph is by Stephen Hawes, whose Passetyme of Pleasure or History of Graunde Amoure, and La Bel Pucel, was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1509:
O mortal folk, you may behold and see
How I lie here, sometime a mighty knight.
The end of joy and all prosperity
Is death at last, thorough his course and might:
For though the day be never so long,