in Baudelaire’s own imaginative and emotional life the sense of smell played a highly important part; and that, in his own words, odor was to him what music is to others.  Throughout Zola’s novels—­and perhaps more especially in La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret—­there is an extreme insistence on odors of every kind.  Prof.  Leopold Bernard wrote an elaborate study of this aspect of Zola’s work[44]; he believed that underlying Zola’s interest in odors there was an abnormally keen olfactory sensibility and large development of the olfactory region of the brain.  Such a supposition is, however, unnecessary, and, as a matter of fact, a careful examination of Zola’s olfactory sensibility, conducted by M. Passy, showed that it was somewhat below normal.[45] At the same time it was shown that Zola was really a person of olfactory psychic type, with a special attention to odors and a special memory for them; as is frequently the case with perfumers with less than normal olfactory acuity he possessed a more than normal power of discriminating odors; it is possible that in early life his olfactory acuity may also have been above normal.  In the same way Nietzsche, in his writings, shows a marked sensibility, and especially antipathy, as regards odors, which has by some been regarded as an index to a real physical sensibility of abnormal keenness; according to Moebius, however, there was no reason for supposing this to be the case.[46] Huysmans, who throughout his books reveals a very intense preoccupation with the exact shades of many kinds of sensory impressions, and an apparently abnormally keen sensibility to them, has shown a great interest in odors, more especially in an oft-quoted passage in A Rebours.  The blind Milton of “Paradise Lost” (as the late Mr. Grant Allen once remarked to me), dwells much on scents; in this case it is doubtless to the blindness and not to any special organic predisposition that we must attribute this direction of sensory attention.[47] Among our older English poets, also, Herrick displays a special interest in odors with a definite realization of their sexual attractiveness.[48] Shelley, who was alive to so many of the unusual aesthetic aspects of things, often shows an enthusiastic delight in odors, more especially those of flowers.  It may, indeed, be said that most poets—­though to a less degree than those I have mentioned—­devote a special attention to odors, and, since it has been possible to describe smell as the sense of imagination, this need not surprise us.  That Shakespeare, for instance, ranked this sense very high indeed is shown by various passages in his works and notably by Sonnet LIV:  “O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem?”—­in which he implicitly places the attraction of odor on at least as high a level as that of vision.[49]