The Project Gutenberg EBook of Great Possessions, by David Grayson

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Title: Great Possessions

Author: David Grayson

Release Date: January 4, 2004 [EBook #10593]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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GREAT POSSESSIONS

By David Grayson

CHAPTER I

THE WELL-FLAVOURED EARTH

"Sweet as Eden is the air
And Eden-sweet the ray.
No Paradise is lost for them
Who foot by branching root and stem,
And lightly with the woodland share
The change of night and day."

For these many years, since I have lived here in the country, I have had
it in my mind to write something about the odour and taste of this
well-flavoured earth. The fact is, both the sense of smell and the sense
of taste; have been shabbily treated in the amiable rivalry of the
senses. Sight and hearing have been the swift and nimble brothers, and
sight especially, the tricky Jacob of the family, is keen upon the
business of seizing the entire inheritance, while smell, like hairy
Esau, comes late to the blessing, hungry from the hills, and willing to
trade its inheritance for a mess of pottage.

I have always had a kind of errant love for the improvident and
adventurous Esaus of the Earth. I think they smell a wilder fragrance
than I do, and taste sweeter things, and I have thought, therefore, of
beginning a kind of fragrant autobiography, a chronicle of all the good
odours and flavours that ever I have had in my life.

As I grow older, a curious feeling comes often to me in the spring, as
it comes this spring more poignantly than ever before, a sense of the
temporariness of all things, the swiftness of life, the sadness of a
beauty that vanishes so soon, and I long to lay hold upon it as it
passes by all the handles that I can. I would not only see it and hear
it, but I would smell it and taste it and touch it, and all with a new
kind of intensity and eagerness.

Harriet says I get more pleasure out of the smell of my supper than I
get out of the supper itself.

"I never need to ring for you," says she, "but only