AMONG THE GRASSES 



137 





as pleasant hay-fields in other lands as in England, but it 

 is certain that the smell of ' new-mown hay ' is everywhere 

 regarded as English in a peculiar sense. The phrase is 

 established in the French 

 language and very freely used 

 though no phrase could be 

 easier to translate; and one 

 would say that the words have 

 nothing in them particularly 

 idiomatic. The truth is per- 

 haps that England is sweeter 

 than other countries, and 

 the new-mown hay is more 

 odorous of the season than 

 hay in other lands, where the 

 air is quite robbed by torrid 

 suns of the dampness that is 

 the medium of all sweet 

 scents. And the hay-fields 

 smell sweeter even than the 



' Cottage gardens smelling every- 

 where, 

 Confused with smell of orchards,' 



which Mrs. Browning selected 

 as the final beauty of Eng- 

 land's 'ripple of land.' When 

 the grass has lain a day and 

 is becoming hay it is as if all 

 its sweets, which had been in some degree, as Bacon says, 

 'fast of their smells,' had found expression in a harmony of 

 scent that might be called orchestral. The lawn, sharply 

 contrasted in most ways with the hay-field, also yields its 

 scent, as Matthew Arnold whose sense of smell was supreme 



K 



