prove sweet-scented. Darwin says a considerably
larger proportion of white flowers are sweet-scented than of any other
color. The only sweet violets I can depend upon are white, _Viola
blanda_ and _Viola Canadensis_, and white largely predominates among
our other odorous wild flowers. All the fruit-trees have white or
pinkish blossoms. I recall no native blue flower of New York or New
England that is fragrant except in the rare case of the arrow-leaved
violet, above referred to. The earliest yellow flowers, like the
dandelion and yellow violets, are not fragrant. Later in the season
yellow is frequently accompanied with fragrance, as in the evening
primrose, the yellow lady's-slipper, horned bladderwort, and others.

My readers probably remember that on a former occasion I have mildly
taken the poet Bryant to task for leading his readers to infer that
the early yellow violet was sweet-scented. In view of the
capriciousness of the perfume of certain of our wild flowers, I have
during the past few years tried industriously to convict myself of
error in respect to this flower. The round-leaved yellow violet was
one of the earliest and most abundant wild flowers in the woods where
my youth was passed, and whither I still make annual pilgrimages. I
have pursued it on mountains and in lowlands, in "beechen woods" and
amid the hemlocks; and while, with respect to its earliness, it
overtakes the hepatica in the latter part of April, as do also the
dog's-tooth violet and the claytonia, yet the first hepaticas, where
the two plants grow side by side, bloom about a week before the first
violet. And I have yet to find one that has an odor that could be
called a perfume. A handful of them, indeed, has a faint, bitterish
smell, not unlike that of the dandelion in quality; but if every
flower that has a smell is sweet-scented, then every bird that makes a
noise is a songster.

On the occasion above referred to, I also dissented from Lowell's
statement, in "Al Fresco," that in early summer the dandelion blooms,
in general, with the buttercup and the clover. I am aware that such
criticism of the poets is small game, and not worth the powder.
General truth, and not specific fact, is what we are to expect of the
poets. Bryant's "Yellow Violet" poem is tender and appropriate, and
such as only a real lover and observer of nature could feel or
express; and Lowell's "Al Fresco" is full of the luxurious feeling of
early summer, and this is,