Commonplace Book

'We are all pretty familiar from experience with the limitations of the sense of smell and the fact that agreeable odours please us only fitfully; the sensation comes as a pleasing shock, a surprise, and is quickly gone. If we attempt to keep it for some time by deliberately smelling a fragrant flower or any perfume, we begin to have a sense of failure as if we had exhausted the sense, keen as it was a moment ago. There must be an interval of rest for the nerve before the sensation can be renewed in its first freshness. Now it is the same, though in a less degree, with the more important sense of sight. We look long and steadily at a thing to know it, and the longer and more fixedly we look the better, if it engages the reasoning faculties; but an aesthetic pleasure cannot be increased or retained in that way. We must look, merely glancing as it were, and look again, and then again, with intervals, receiving the image in the brain even as we receive the 'nimble emanations' of a flower, and the image is all the brighter for coming intermittently. In a large prospect we are not conscious of this limitation because of the wideness of the field and the number and variety of objects or points of interest in it; the vision roams hither and thither over it and receives a continuous stream or series of pleasing impressions; but to gaze fixedly at the most beautiful object in nature or art does but diminish the pleasure. Practically it ceases to be beautiful and only recovers the first effect after we have given the mind an interval of rest.'

from Afoot in England by WH Hudson (Chapter XX)