Fragrant Quote for March 28th, 2012-In God's out-of-doors By William Alfred Quayle

By William Alfred Quayle

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 overwearied 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 comradeship. And winds blowing across a field where haycocks exhale fragrance, who can escape their witchery? Such winds know how to spoil waters and fields and forests of spikenards and balsams. I have inhaled fragrance from winds blown fresh from the sea through moors of purple heather, and can I forget the poetry of it even in heaven? I 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 starlight 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 fragrance of leaf-distilled perfumes fairly drug the senses of the spirit till perforce the winds make us poets against our will and reason.
In God's out-of-doors
By William Alfred Quayle