Goose-Quill Papers

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Goose-Quill Papers, by Louise Imogen Guiney
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.
BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1885.
Copyright, 1885 , By Louise Imogen Guiney. University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
THE LOVING HOMAGE
This Book.

FOR the sake of an apple Atalanta lost her nigh-won victory; and that other apple, thrown for the fairest, moved all Olympus into discord. Bragi, the north-god, and his peers renewed their youth with one touch of its cool juices. Dragons circled it in the enchanted garden; the daughters three stood about it in a sacred ring, and none but Hercules was its captor. The renascent marbles of the Greeks are dug out of earth,— Praxitelean shapes! —with its rounded beauty yet in their outstretched hands. What a superb mythologic pedigree! What noble mention (each worth an immortality) from old poets, romancers, historians! All heterodoxy lauded thee, apple of mine eye. It was reserved for true-church traditions to belie thee.
Thou who art full of virtue, what is this rumor of thy defection in Eden, thy remote causing of all contemporaneous woe? Thou who art fair without as a cherub's cheek, how couldst thou be abettor to the treacherous spirit? Shall the fault of our frail ancestress rest upon thy rosy head? That the forbidden fruit of Paradise was an apple, saith a grave and learned author, is commonly believed, confirmed by tradition, perpetuated by writings, verses, pictures; and some are so bad prosodians as thence to derive the Latin word malum , because that fruit was the first occasion of evil: wherein, notwithstanding determinations are presumptuous, many, I perceive, are of another belief. Let the personal argument stand, in default of a bolder plea. Mephisto, who hath had no chance of reformation, and who may be supposed to keep his early leanings, is in modern times no frequenter of orchards. Not by farmer, nor wayside knight, nor loitering sweethearts at dusk, hath he ever been detected prowling about an innocent apple-tree.