It is interesting to see how the names of famous men are repeated,—even of great poets and philosophers. The poet is not known to-day even by his neighbors to be more than a common man. He is perchance the butt of many. The proud farmer looks down [on] and boorishly ignores him, or regards him as a loafer who treads down his grass, but perchance in course of time the poet will have so succeeded that some of the farmer’s posterity, though equally boorish with their ancestor, will bear the poet’s name. The boor names his boy Homer, and so succumbs unknowingly to the bard’s victorious fame. Anything so fine as poetic genius he cannot more directly recognize. The unpoetic farmer names his child Homer.
You have a wild savage in you, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as yours.[173]
May 23. Friday. And wilder still there grows elsewhere, I hear, a native and aboriginal crab-apple, Malus (as Michaux, or, as Emerson has it, Pyrus) coronaria in Southern States, and also angustifolia in the Middle States; whose young leaves “have a bitter and slightly aromatic taste” (Michaux), whose beautiful flowers perfume the air to a great distance. “The apples ... are small, green, intensely acid, and very odoriferous. Some farmers make cider of them, which is said to be excellent: they make very fine sweet-meats also, by the addition of a large quantity of sugar” (Michaux). Celebrated for “the beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume” (Michaux).[174]
Michaux says that the wild apple of Europe has yielded to cultivation nearly three hundred species in France alone. Emerson says, referring to Loudon, “In 1836, the catalogue and the gardens of the London Horticultural Society contained upwards of 1400 distinct sorts, and new ones are every year added.”
But here are species which they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which the crab might yield to cultivation.[175]
This genus, so kind to the human race, the Malus or Pyrus; Rosaceæ the family, or others say Pomaceæ. Its flowers are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree. I am frequently compelled to turn and linger by some more than usually beautiful two-thirds-expanded blossoms.[176] If such were not so common, its fame would be loud as well as wide. Its most copious and delicious blossoms.
But our wild apple is wild perchance like myself, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock,[177]—where the birds, where winged thoughts or agents, have planted or are planting me. Even these at length furnish hardy stocks for the orchard.
You might call one Malus oculata; another M. Iridis; M. cum parvuli dæmonis oculis, or Imp-eyed; Blue-Jay Apple, or M. corvi cristati; Wood-Dell Apple (M. silvestri-vallis); Field-Dell Apple (M. campestri-vallis); Meadow Apple (M. pratensis); Rock Meadow Apple (saxopratensis); Partridge or Grouse Apple or bud [sic]; Apple of the Hesperides (Malus Hesperidum); Woodside Apple; Wood Apple (M. silvatica); the Truant’s Apple (M. cessatoris); Saunterer’s Apple (M. erronis vel vagabundi); the Wayside Apple (M. trivialis); Beauty of the Air (decus aëris); December-eating; Frozen-thawed (gelato-soluta or gelata regelata); the Concord Apple (M. Concordiensis); the Brindled Apple; Wine of New England (M. vinosa); the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (M. viridis); the Dysentery or Cholera-morbus Apple.[178]
Distinctly related things are strangely near in fact, brush one another with their jackets. Perchance this window-seat in which we sit discoursing Transcendentalism, with only Germany and Greece stretching behind our minds, was made so deep because this was a few years ago a garrison-house, with thick log walls, bullet-proof, behind which men sat to escape the wild red man’s bullet and the arrow and the tomahawk, and bullets fired by Indians are now buried in its walls. Pythagoras seems near compared with them.
May 24. Saturday. Our most glorious experiences are a kind of regret. Our regret is so sublime that we may mistake it for triumph. It is the painful, plaintively sad surprise of our Genius remembering our past lives and contemplating what is possible. It is remarkable that men commonly never refer to, never hint at, any crowning experiences when the common laws of their being were unsettled and the divine and eternal laws prevailed in them. Their lives are not revolutionary; they never recognize any other than the local and temporal authorities. It is a regret so divine and inspiring, so genuine, based on so true and distinct a contrast, that it surpasses our proudest boasts and the fairest expectations.