The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's, so
copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. The walker is frequently
tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually handsome one, whose
blossoms are two thirds expanded. How superior it is in these respects to
the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored nor fragrant!
By the middle of July, green apples are so large as to remind us of
coddling, and of the autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with little
ones which fall still-born, as it were,--Nature thus thinning them for us.
The Roman writer Palladius said,--"If apples are inclined to fall before
their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them." Some such
notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones which we see
placed to be overgrown in the forks of trees. They have a saying in
Suffolk, England,--
"At Michaelmas time, or a little before,
Half an apple goes to the core."
Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think that
none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth more to
scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell in the
shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with
that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the road reminds me
by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona,--carrying me forward to
those days when they will be collected in golden and ruddy heaps in the
orchards and about the cider-mills.
A week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens, especially
in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed by the
fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price, and without
robbing anybody.
There is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and ethereal
quality which represents their highest value, and which cannot be
vulgarized, or bought and sold. No mortal has ever enjoyed the perfect
flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin to taste its
ambrosial qualities. For nectar and ambrosia are only those fine flavors
of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates fail to perceive,--just as
we occupy the heaven of the gods without knowing it. When I see a
particularly mean man carrying a load of fair and fragrant early apples to
market, I seem to see a contest going on between him and his horse, on the
one side, and the apples on the other, and, to my mind, the apples always
gain it. Pliny says that apples are the heaviest of all things, and that
the oxen begin to sweat at the mere sight of a load of them. Our driver
begins to lose his load the moment he tries to transport them to where
they do not belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful. Though he gets
out from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, I
see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to heaven
from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going to market.
They are not apples, but pomace. Are not these still Iduna's apples, the
taste of which keeps the gods forever young? and think you that they will
let Loki or Thjassi carry them off to Joetunheim, while they grow wrinkled
and gray? No, for Ragnaroek, or the destruction of the gods, is not yet.
