Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/16

4 first of all take a stroll down by the Liffey as it flows fermenting and bubbling under its bridges, and then … if he can …

Let me, however, in justice to that grief-stricken country, spray a little perfume over my too pungent observations, T can also recall after many years a warm. and balmy evening in the town of Killarney, the peaceful close to a day of torrential rain. The setting sun, glowing love through its tears, was reddening the sky and the dark green hills around, those hills of Ireland where surely, if anywhere on this earth, heaven is foreshadowed. And linked in memory with that evening’s glory there comes, like the gentle strain of a long-forgotten song, the rich, pungent smell of turf-smoke eddying blue from low chimneys into the soft air of the twilight. Ireland! Ireland ! What an atmosphere of love and grief that name calls up ! Surely the surf that beats upon the strands of Innisfail far away is more salt, more bitter, and perhaps for that very reason more sweet, than the waters of any of the other beaches that ocean bathes !

Thence also comes a memory of heliotrope. It grew by a cottage just beyond a grey granite fishing-harbour in Dublin Bay, and brings also, with its faint, ineffable fragrance, the same inseparable blending of emotions that clings, itself a never-dying odour, to the memory of holidays