and very full of meaning. In an elect moment, Whittier made music 
for the winds to make their meaning clear: 
“Yet on my cheek I feel the western wind, 
And hear it telling to the orchard trees, 
And to the faint and flower-forsaken bees, 
Tales of fair meadows green with constant streams, 
And mountains rising blue and cold behind 
Where in moist dells the purple orchis gleams, 
And starred with white the virgin’s bower is twined. 
So the o'’erwearied pilgrim as he fares 
Along life's summer waste, at times is fanned 
Even at noontide by the cool, sweet airs 
Of a serener and a holier land.” 
And winds laded with odors—you can not escape their sweet com- 
radeship. And winds blowing across a field where haycocks exhale fra- 
grance, who can escape their witchery? Such winds know how to spoil 
waters and fields and forests of spikenards and balsams. I have in- 
haled fragrance from winds blown fresh from the sea through moors of 
purple heather, and can I forget the poetry of it even in heaven? | 
pray I may not. 
Winds of spring, apple-scented and with earth-smell in them! And 
walking through woods at night when dew drips from the leaves and 
the score or more of odors saturate the air, and the frog’s song sings 
up from marshes and ravines as if that were audible odor, and star- 
light plays hide-and-seek with you through the foliage, when there puffs 
in your face the musk of many odors mixed, then you could catch the 
Wind and kiss her on the cheek like a girl, for sheer delight. Then 
when lilacs blow, and spring hastens on to June and white clover chokes 
the air with heavy perfumes, and roses tell in the dark where they are 
blooming by the fragrance they lent the breeze as it strayed indolently 
through their dear delights, or later, when harvests spill their essences to 
the languorous winds, and later still, when winds bear their sad freightage 
of autumn leaves falling, or fallen, and faded. O the wind is the poet 
laureate of autumn; and the lonely, tearful music and autumnal fra- 
grance of leaf-distilled perfumes fairly drug the senses of the spirit till 
perforce the winds make us poets against our will and reason. 
In one of Hosea Biglow’s pastoral preludes (bless him who wrote 
them and gave us Hosea!) is a touch of genius in discriminating 
odors. ‘Mr. Wilbur sez to Hosea, ‘Wut’s the sweetest smell on 
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