has lain so long upon my
_panoia_.' 'Yes, just so,' I replied; 'whenever I kiss it, thus
and thus, it will bring you back to me.' Sometimes I tie it round
my naked waist before I go to bed. The smell of it is enough to
cause a powerful erection, and the contact of its fringes with my
testicles and phallus has once or twice produced an involuntary
emission."

I may here reproduce a communication which has reached me
concerning the attractiveness of the odor of peasants: "One
predominant attraction of these men is that they are pure and
clean; their bodies in a state of healthy normal function. Then
they possess, if they are temperate, what the Greek poet Straton
called the phydike chrotos (a quality which, according to this
authority, is never found in women). This 'natural fair perfume
of the flesh' is a peculiar attribute of young men who live in
the open air and deal with natural objects. Even their
perspiration has an odor very different from that of girls in
ball-rooms: more refined, ethereal, pervasive, delicate, and
difficult to seize. When they have handled hay--in the time of
hay-harvest, or in winter, when they bring hay down from mountain
huts--the youthful peasants carry about with them the smell of 'a
field the Lord hath blessed.' Their bodies and their clothes
exhale an indefinable fragrance of purity and sex combined. Every
gland of the robust frame seems to have accumulated scent from
herbs and grasses, which slowly exudes from the cool, fresh skin
of the lad. You do not perceive it in a room. You must take the
young man's hands and bury your face in them, or be covered with
him under the same blanket in one bed, to feel this aroma. No
sensual impression on the nerves of smell is more poignantly
impregnated with spiritual poetry--the poetry of adolescence, and
early hours upon the hills, and labor cheerfully accomplished,
and the harvest of God's gifts to man brought home by human
industry. It is worth mentioning that Aristophanes, in his
description of the perfect Athenian Ephebus, dwells upon his
being redolent of natural perfumes."

In a passage in the second part of _Faust_ Goethe (who appears to
have felt considerable interest in the psychology of smell) makes
three women speak concerning the ambrosiacal odor of young men.

In this connection, al