I went from clump to clump of the lilacs testing and comparing them with great joy and satisfaction.  They vary noticeably in odour; the white varieties being the most delicate, while those tending to deep purple are the richest.  Some of the newer double varieties seem less fragrant—­and I have tested them now many times—­than the old-fashioned single varieties which are nearer the native stock.  Here I fancy our smooth Jacob has been at work, and in the lucrative process of selection for the eye alone the cunning horticulturist has cheated us of our rightful heritage of fragrance.  I have a mind some time to practise the art of burbankry or other kind of wizardy upon the old lilac stock and select for odour alone, securing ravishing original varieties—­indeed, whole new gamuts of fragrance.

I should devise the most animating names for my creations, such as the Double Delicious, the Air of Arcady, the Sweet Zephyr, and others even more inviting, which I should enjoy inventing.  Though I think surely I could make my fortune out of this interesting idea, I present it freely to a scent-hungry world—­here it is, gratis!—­for I have my time so fully occupied during all of this and my next two or three lives that I cannot attend to it.

I have felt the same defect in the cultivated roses.  While the odours are rich, often of cloying sweetness, or even, as in certain white roses, having a languor as of death, they never for me equal the fragrance of the wild sweet rose that grows all about these hills, in old tangled fence rows, in the lee of meadow boulders, or by some unfrequented roadside.  No other odour I know awakens quite such a feeling—­light like a cloud, suggesting free hills, open country, sunny air; and none surely has, for me, such an after-call.  A whiff of the wild rose will bring back in all the poignancy of sad happiness a train of ancient memories old faces, old scenes, old loves—­and the wild thoughts I had when a boy.  The first week of the wild-rose blooming, beginning here about the twenty-fifth of June, is always to me a memorable time.

I was a long time learning how to take hold of nature, and think now with some sadness of all the life I lost in former years.  The impression the earth gave me was confused:  I was as one only half awake.  A fine morning made me dumbly glad, a cool evening, after the heat of the day, and the work of it, touched my spirit restfully; but I could have explained neither the one nor the other.  Gradually as I looked about me I began to ask myself, “Why is it that the sight of these common hills and fields gives me such exquisite delight?  And if it is beauty, why is it beautiful?  And if I am so richly rewarded by mere glimpses, can I not increase my pleasure with longer looks?”

I tried longer looks both at nature and at the friendly human creatures all about me.  I stopped often in the garden where I was working, or loitered a moment in the fields, or sat down by the roadside, and thought intently what it was that so perfectly and wonderfully surrounded me; and thus I came to have some knowledge of the Great Secret.  It was, after all, a simple matter, as such matters usually are when we penetrate them, and consisted merely in shutting out all other impressions, feelings, thoughts, and concentrating the full energy of the attention upon what it was that I saw or heard at that instant.