Sally lies
in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-
crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage,
garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions,--
stateliest of vegetables,--all are gone, but the breath of a
marigold brings them all back to me.
Perhaps the herb EVERLASTING, the fragrant immortelle of our autumn
fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me
dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions
that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling
flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had
been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain
on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality
in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless
petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and
carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border
the River of Life.
- I should not have talked so much about these personal
susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them which I
believe is a new one. It is this. There may be a physical reason
for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind.
The olfactory nerve--so my friend, the Professor, tells me--is the
only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the
parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the
intellectual processes are performed.
Pages:
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94