第22章

Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed.Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words.Fourthly, I have often felt that the duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual.Lastly, I have had the same convictions in my dreams.

How do I account for it? - Why, there are several ways that I can mention, and you may take your choice.The first is that which the young lady hinted at; - that these flashes are sudden recollections of a previous existence.I don't believe that; for I remember a poor student I used to know told me he had such a conviction one day when he was blacking his boots, and I can't think he had ever lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.

Some think that Dr.Wigan's doctrine of the brain's being a double organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts for it.One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old.

But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the time, nor any analogy that bears it out.It seems to me most likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we occasionally do resemblances of persons.A momentary posture of circumstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it as exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally, mistaking him for a friend.The apparent similarity may be owing perhaps, quite as much to the mental state at the time, as to the outward circumstances.

- Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks.I have said it, and heard it many times, and occasionally met with something like it in books, - somewhere in Bulwer's novels, Ithink, and in one of the works of Mr.Olmsted, I know.

MEMORY, IMAGINATION, OLD SENTIMENTS AND ASSOCIATIONS, ARE MOREREADILY REACHED THROUGH THE SENSE OF SMELL THAN BY ALMOST ANY OTHERCHANNEL.

Of course the particular odors which act upon each person's susceptibilities differ.- O, yes! I will tell you some of mine.

The smell of PHOSPHORUS is one of them.During a year or two of adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as about that time I had my little aspirations and passions like another, some of these things got mixed up with each other:

orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and transient; reddening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks; - EHEU!

"Soles occidere et redire possunt,"

but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of eighteen hundred and - spare them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapors with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance;it comes to me in a double sense "trailing clouds of glory." Only the confounded Vienna matches, OHNE PHOSPHOR-GERUCH, have worn my sensibilities a little.

Then there is the MARIGOLD.When I was of smallest dimensions, and wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop opposite a low, brown, "gambrel-roofed" cottage.Out of it would come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a "posy," as she called it, for the little boy.Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen-crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years.Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions, -stateliest of vegetables, - all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them all back to me.

Perhaps the herb EVERLASTING, the fragrant IMMORTELLE of our autumn fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me dreaming.I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers.A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh.Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals.Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.

- I should not have talked so much about these personal susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them which Ibelieve is a new one.It is this.There may be a physical reason for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind.

The olfactory nerve - so my friend, the Professor, tells me - is the only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the intellectual processes are performed.To speak more truly the olfactory "nerve" is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes.Whether this anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have mentioned, I will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth remembering.Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of suggestive impressions, with that of smell.Now the Professor assures me that you will find the nerve of taste has no immediate connection with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation of the spinal cord.