by writers in general until about our own time. At all events, the earliest allusion I can find to it is in “Les Fleurs du Mal” of Baudelaire :
“Lecteur, as-tu quelquefois respiré
Avec ivresse et lente gourmandise
Ce grain d’encens qui remplit une église
On d’un sachet le muse inveteré ?
“Charme profond, magique, dont nous grise
Dans le présent lc passé restauré”…
Shortly after Baudelaire’s time Bret Harte, on the other side of the Atlantic, imported it into “The Newport Romance” :
“But the smell of that subtle, sad perfume,
As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast
The mummy laid in his rocky tomb,
Awakes my buried past.
“And I think of the passion that shook my youth,
Of its aimless loves and its idle pains,
And am thankful now of the certain truth
That only the sweet remains.”
But the most precise and definite allusion to this curious power of odours seems to have first been made by Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Here is what he says, and it will be noted that he makes as high a claim for the power of olfaction as I have done :
“Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily reached through the sense of smell than by almost any other channel.”
