And there I stood, a man grown, shaking in the sunshine with that old boyish emotion brought back to me by an odour!  Often and often have I known this strange rekindling of dead fires.  And I have thought how, if our senses were really perfect, we might lose nothing, out of our lives:  neither sights, nor sounds, nor emotions:  a sort of mortal immortality.  Was not Shakespeare great because he lost less of the savings of his senses than other men?  What a wonderful seer, hearer, smeller, taster, feeler, he must have been—­and how, all the time, his mind must have played upon the gatherings of his senses!  All scenes, all men, the very turn of a head, the exact sound of a voice, the taste of food, the feel of the world—­all the emotions of his life must he have had there before him as he wrote, his great mind playing upon them, reconstructing, re-creating and putting them down hot upon his pages.  There is nothing strange about great men; they are like us, only deeper, higher, broader:  they think as we do, but with more intensity:  they suffer as we do, more keenly:  they love as we do, more tenderly.

I may be over-glorifying the sense of smell, but it is only because I walked this morning in a world of odours.  The greatest of the senses, of course, is not smell or hearing, but sight.  What would not any man exchange for that:  for the faces one loves, for the scenes one holds most dear, for all that is beautiful and changeable and beyond description?  The Scotch Preacher says that the saddest lines in all literature are those of Milton, writing of his blindness.

“Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom or Summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine.”

—­I have wandered a long way from ditch-digging, but not wholly without intention.  Sooner or later I try to get back into the main road.  I throw down my spade in the wet trampled grass at the edge of the ditch.  I take off my coat and hang it over a limb of the little hawthorn tree.  I put my bag near it.  I roll up the sleeves of my flannel shirt:  I give my hat a twirl; I’m ready for work.

—­The senses are the tools by which we lay hold upon the world:  they are the implements of consciousness and growth.  So long as they are used upon the good earth—­used to wholesome weariness—­they remain healthy, they yield enjoyment, they nourish growth; but let them once be removed from their natural employment and they turn and feed upon themselves, they seek the stimulation of luxury, they wallow in their own corruption, and finally, worn out, perish from off the earth which they have not appreciated.  Vice is ever the senses gone astray.