“Perhaps the herb _everlasting_, the fragrant _immortelle_ of our autumn fields, has the most suggestive odour to me of all those that set me dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that come to me as I inhale the aroma of the pale, dry, rustling flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.” In introducing the subject, Holmes states that he has “occasionally met with something like it in books, somewhere in Bulwer’s novels, ... and in one of the works of Mr. Olmstead.” When one considers the obvious poetic appeal of this psychic phenomenon as exemplified in the touching expressions we have just quoted, it seems strange that the older writers made no use of it. Even omniscient Shakespeare, although odorous images and allusions are not uncommon in his works, seems to have overlooked this sportive trick of the sense. Otherwise we might have had Lady Macbeth sleep-walking because her nightposset exhaled the vapour of the draught she had drugged Duncan’s guards with. Several seventeenth century writers make a general reference to odours as “strengthening the memory.” Here is one for which I am indebted to my friend F. W. Watkyn-Thomas: “OLFACTUS (_loq._)— Hence do I likewise minister perfume Unto the neighbour brain, perfume of force, To cleanse your head, and make your fancy bright To refine wit and sharp invention, _And strengthen memory_: from whence it came That old devotion incense did ordain To make man’s spirit more apt for things divine....” (“Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses,” Act IV., Sc. 5, Anthony Brewer (_circa_ 1600): Dodsley’s “Old Plays,” Vol. V., p. 179, 1825.) And Montaigne may be alluding to it when he says: “Physicians might (in my opinion) draw more use and good from odours than they do. For myself have often perceived, that according unto their strength and qualitie, _they change and alter, and move my spirit, and worke strange effects in me_: Which makes me approve the common saying, that invention of incense and perfumes in Churches, so ancient and so far-dispersed throughout all nations and religions, had an especiall regard to rejoyce, to comfort, to quicken and to rowze and to purifie our senses, ...”