brown and crackling
leaves, lo the blue hoods of English violets! The fragrance of the
violet! What flower scent is like it? Does not the subtle
sweetness--half caught, half lost upon the wind--at times sweep over one
a vague and thrilling tenderness, an exquisite emotion, partly grief and
partly mild delight?

The violet is the poet's darling, perhaps because its frail breath seems
to waft from out the delicate blue petals the rare imaginings native to
a poet's soul.

May it not be that thus, in the eloquence of perfume, it is but
rendering to him who can best respond thereto, a revelation of its inner
essences?--showing, to him who can comprehend the sign, a reason why it
grows.

Is this too fanciful? Certainly the violet was not made in vain--and in
the Eternal Correspondence known to higher intelligences than our own,
there surely must exist a grand and beautiful Flower lore, wherein each
blossom has an individual word to speak, a lesson to unfold, by form and
coloring, and, more than all, by exhaled fragrance.

Doubtless there is a mystery here too deep for us in this gross world to
wholly understand; but can we not search after knowledge? Would we not
like to grasp an enjoyment less merely of the senses from the geranium's
balm and the mayflower's spice?

And notice here how strongly association binds us by the sense of
smell--the sense so closely connected with the brain that, through its
instrumentality, the mind, it is said, is quickest reached, is soonest
moved. So that when perfumes quiver through us, are we oftenest
constrained to blush and smile, or shrink and shiver. Perhaps through
perfumes also memory knocks the loudest on our heart-doors; until it has
come to pass that unto scented handkerchief or withering leaf has been
given full power to fire the eye or blanch the cheek; while from secret
drawers one starts appalled at flower breaths, stifling, shut up long
ago. The sprays themselves might drop unheeded down--dead with the young
hopes that laid them there--but the old-time emotion wraps one yet in
that undying--ah, how sickening! fragrance.

So in the very nature of the task proposed is couched assistance, since
thus to the breath of the flowers does association lend its own
interpretation, driving deep the sharpest stings or dropping down the
richest consolation through the most humble plants. But is this the end
of the matter? Is there not, apart from all that our personal interest
may disc