Fragrance Topics

yet it seems
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
And there’s but common greenness after that.
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

But it chanced the other day that I scented a white water- lily.... It is the emblem of purity.... What confirmation of our hopes is in the fragrance of this flower! I shall not so soon despair of the world for it, notwithstanding slavery, and the cowardice and want of principle of Northern men. It suggests what kinds of laws have prevailed longest and widest, and still prevail, and that the time may come when man’s deeds will smell as sweet. Such is the odor which the plant emits.... It reminds me that Nature has been partner to no Missouri compromise. I scent no compromise in the fragrance of the water-lily.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

The hedge [of hawthorns] formed a type of suite of chapels disappearing under the wall of their flowers heaped as on an altar; under them, the sun placed on the ground a grid of light, as if it had come through a glass window; their fragrance was as smooth and as clearly defined in its form as if I had stood before the Virgin’s altar, and the flowers, so ornamented, each distractedly held its dazzling bouquet of stamens, fine and shining ribs of flamboyant style like those which in the church line the ramp of the rood-screen or the mullions of stained-glass windows and which bloomed into the white flesh of strawberry blossoms.
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)