Great Possessions

CHAPTER I.
THE WELL-FLAVOURED EARTH

“Sweet as Eden is the air
    And Eden-sweet the ray.
No Paradise is lost for them
Who foot by branching root and stem,
And lightly with the woodland share
    The change of night and day.”

For these many years, since I have lived here in the country, I have hadit in my mind to write something about the odour and taste of thiswell-flavoured earth. The fact is, both the sense of smell and the senseof taste; have been shabbily treated in the amiable rivalry of thesenses. Sight and hearing have been the swift and nimble brothers, andsight especially, the tricky Jacob of the family, is keen upon thebusiness of seizing the entire inheritance, while smell, like hairyEsau, comes late to the blessing, hungry from the hills, and willing totrade its inheritance for a mess of pottage.

I have always had a kind of errant love for the improvident andadventurous Esaus of the Earth. I think they smell a wilder fragrancethan I do, and taste sweeter things, and I have thought, therefore, ofbeginning a kind of fragrant autobiography, a chronicle of all the goododours and flavours that ever I have had in my life.

As I grow older, a curious feeling comes often to me in the spring, asit comes this spring more poignantly than ever before, a sense of thetemporariness of all things, the swiftness of life, the sadness of abeauty that vanishes so soon, and I long to lay hold upon it as itpasses by all the handles that I can. I would not only see it and hearit, but I would smell it and taste it and touch it, and all with a newkind of intensity and eagerness.

Harriet says I get more pleasure out of the smell of my supper than Iget out of the supper itself.

“I never need

BU KİTABI OKUMAK İÇİN ÜYE OLUN VEYA GİRİŞ YAPIN!

Sitemize Üyelik ÜCRETSİZDİR!