“Phosphorus fires this tram of associations in an instant ; its luminous vapours with their penetrating odour throw me into a trance ; it comes to me in a double sense, ‘trailing clouds of glory.’”
“Perhaps the herb everlasting, the fragrant immortelle of our autumn fields, has the most suggestive odour 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 the 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.”
In introducing the subject, Holmes states that he has “occasionally met with something like it in books, somewhere in Bulwer's novels, … and in one of the works of Mr. Olmstead.”
When one considers the obvious poetic appeal of this psychic phenomenon as exemplified in the touching expressions we have just quoted, it seems strange that the older writers made no use of it.
Even omniscient Shakespeare, although odorous images and allusions are not uncommon in his works, seems to have overlooked this sportive trick of the sense, Otherwise we might have had Lady Macbeth sleep-walking because her night-posset exhaled the vapour of the draught she had drugged Duncan's guards with.
Several seventeenth century writers make a
