have not
the same honour as the sense of sight or of hearing is that no way has
yet been found to make a true art of either. For sight, we have
painting, sculpturing, photography, architecture, and the like; and for
hearing, music; and for both, poetry and the drama. But the other senses
are more purely personal, and have not only been little studied or
thought about, but are the ones least developed, and most dimmed and
clogged by the customs of our lives.

For the sense of smell we have, indeed, the perfumer's art, but a poor
rudimentary art it is, giving little freedom for the artist who would
draw his inspirations freshly from nature. I can, indeed, describe
poorly in words the odours of this June morning--the mingled lilacs,
late wild cherries, new-broken soil, and the fragrance of the sun on
green verdure, for there are here both lyrical and symphonic odours--but
how inadequate it is! I can tell you what I feel and smell and taste,
and give you, perhaps, a desire another spring to spend the months of
May and June in the country, but I can scarcely make you live again the
very moment of life I have lived, which is the magic quality of the best
art. The art of the perfumer which, like all crude art, thrives upon
blatancy, does not make us go to gardens, or love the rose, but often
instils in us a kind of artificiality, so that perfumes, so far from
being an inspiration to us, increasing our lives, become often the badge
of the abnormal, used by those unsatisfied with simple, clean, natural
things.

And as a people deficient in musical art delights in ragtime tunes, so a
people deficient in the true art of tasting and smelling delights in
ragtime odours and ragtime tastes.

I do not know that the three so-called lesser senses will ever be
organized to the point where they are served by well-established arts,
but this I do know--that there are three great ways of entering upon a
better understanding of this magic earth which are now neglected.

I think we have come upon hasty and heated days, and are too much
mastered by the god of hurry and the swift and greedy eye. We accept
flashing pictures of life for life itself; we rush here and rush there
and, having arrived, rush away again--to what sensible purpose? Be still
a little! Be still!

I do not mean by stillness, stagnation not yet lazy contentment, but
life more deeply thought about, more intensely realized, an activity so
concentrated that it is quiet. Be s