MORNING SCENTS

Northland Age, Volume 1, Issue 10, 11 December 1931, Page 9

MORNING SCENTS

Of all hours of the day there is none like the early morning for downright good odours A still morning is best, for the mist and the moisture seem to retain the odours which they have distilled through the night. Upon a breezy morning one is likely to get a single predominant odour as of clover when the wind blows across a hay field or of apple blossoms when the wind comes through the orchard, but upon a perfectly still morning, ’ it is wonderful how the odours arrange themselves in upright strata, so that one walking passes through them as from room to room in a t marvellous temple of fragrance. (I should have said, I think, if I had not been on my way tc dig a ditch, that it was like turning the leaves of some delicate volume of lyrics!) So it was this morning. As I walked along the margin of my field I was conscious, at first, coming within the shadows of the wood, of the cool, heavy aroma which one associates with the night: as of the moist woods and earth mould. The penetrating scent of the night remains long after the sights and sounds of it have dis- ♦ appeared. In sunny spots I had the fragrance of the open cornfield, the aromatic breath of the brown earth, giving curiously the sense of fecundity—a warm, generous odour of daylight and sunshine. Down the field, . towards the corner, cutting in sharply, as though a door opened (or a page turned to another lyric), came the cloying, sweet fragrance of wild crabapple blossoms, almost tropical ih their richness, and below that, as I came to my work, the thin acrid smell • of the marsh, the place of the rushes and the flags and the frogs.—David Grayson, in “Adventures in Contentment.” Upon Julia’s Hair Fill’d With Dew Dew sate on Julia’s hair, And spangled too, Like Leaves that laden are k With trembling Dew ; Or glitter’d to my sight, As when the Beams Have their reflected light, Danc’d by the Streams. Robert Herrick.