Apple Blossoms [pp. 374-375]

3,74 APPLETONS' JO (JR NAL OF POPULAR [JUNE 19,
partment of psychology, the laws of the influence of circumstances on
character.
The profoundest knowledge of the laws of the formation of character is indispensable to entitle any one to affirm even that there is any
difference, much more what the difference is, between the two sexes
considered as moral and rational beings; and since no one, as yet, has
that knowledge (for there is hardly any subject which, in proportion
to its importance, has been so little studied), no one is thus far entitled
to any positive opinion on the subject. Conjectures are all that can
at present be made; conjectures more or less probable, according as
more or less authorized by such knowledge as we yet have of the laws
of psychology, as applied to the formation of character.
APPLE-BLOSSOMS.
OLOMON must have been blind as well as blase when he
said there is nothing new under the sun. Had he walked
out of his walls of cedar and ebony, and looked at the blossoming
fields, he could not have felt that he was in a stale and wearisome world. A blossom is a new thing. What thought of
age, what suspicion of flat repetition can one have, looking into
its fragrant and dewy heart; what profane and polished sense
dare report it to be insipid and old? Beauty is always new.
Whether in sunset skies, or in the fair faces of fair women, or
in flowers, it never suggests the past: it is fresh and fleeting,
like a foam-wreath from the eternal sea.
Frail, and flesh-pale, the apple-blossoms have burst in soft
bloom in the million orchards of the land. And what bridal
adornments of color and texture they spread over the landscape! What sprays of fragrance! What crumpled loveliness
of petal and bud! What softly-folded blooms! What depths
of white and rose they exhibit to the gladdened and surprised
sense! A miracle pf beauty crowns twisted branches and stiff
twigs. While the grass is greenest, the apple-blossom softly
surprises and exhilarates. Who but a civilized brute can look
at a blossom without a sense of sweetness, delicacy, and
ecstasy? Once more after the first herald-notes of Spring we
witness the magic hour of the flower-bloom of the fruit-trees.
Life in one such season of fragrance and color is simple and
sweet to loitering lovers and dreamers in odorous orchards;
the eye has its festival, and the virginal bloom of the fruit-t'ees
suggests perfection, is perfection, and, surrendered to Nature,
we can say to the passing moment, " Stay, thou art so fair "
The cherry-trees, plumy and foamy, with masses of white
blossoms, the peach with its flower, rose-flesh, seems less than
the apple-blossom, which has a transparent white and rose
tint, the exquisiteness of the color of both peach and cherry
blooms. The clustered profusion of the blossoms on the stem,
the stillness and fragrance and wind-blown openness of their
five petals, or the folded secret of the bud's hidden sweetness,
make pure and voluptuous suggestion of spotless pleasure.
The country may be said to be embroidered, and festooned,
and veiled in bloom; now is the bridal of earth and sun. The
moist warm skies of May no more gently bathe the earth, than
blossoms fill the air and rain upon the grass. The loose clouds
trail over woods and fields white with bloom; the most ineffable tint, that of the pearly flesh of delicate girls, is profusely
massed in fragrant domes and dewy sprays of sweetness in the
orchards and woods.
One's sensations in blossoming orchards are not apart from
the human and domestic, as when we walk by the sea or in the
wilderness. We are not isolated by suggestions of grandeur
and desolation; we are not detached from crowds by solemn
sounds, as in pine-forests, as on beaten beaches, on rocky
coasts that growl responses to the hoarse mutterings of the sea.
The apple-orchard in bloom is a part of our most domestic experience and of our gentlest human sentiments. It is a part of
the best memories of home. Every man in his boyhood has
had his perfect moment under apple-blossoms. A cluster of
flesh-pale blossoms is like a group of lovely girls; they are the
very smile, and visible ecstasy of vegetable life; like a sprinkling of floral foam over green trees, and, like it; a fleeting vision.
Floods of perfume are carried over the fields by the loosening
winds. The butter-cups, golden petalled, shine in the grass,
while apple blooms and buds crowd upon and hide the maze of
branch and twig and leaf. One can plunge the glance into
petals softer than a caress, and scent odors that come to faint
and die on the sense they intoxicate. If any thing could start
the conventional man out of his reserve, and change that insensibility of Nature which he is stupid enough to think one of
the objects of culture-if any thing not passionate, but something simply sweet, could break in upon the self-satisfaction ot
gentlemen who admire nothing and avoid effusion, as other
men shun the mental barrenness in which they install their
minds-it would be an untroubled hour under a May sky, and
amid the blossoming orchards. The abundance of beauty,
the lavishness of sweetness, the exquisiteness of the perfume,
would steal into and fill the sense.
Leigh Hunt, one of the pleasantest poets, celebrates the birth
of floral bloom with his sunny spirit and limpid language, and
notices " apple-trees at noon with bees alive." The blossoming
season suggests the wish that we could, like trees, blossom
every year. Then with that shifting play of sunlight and
shadow, of longing and regret which is characteristic of his
mind, he checks his wish, dreading to change with the seasons,
to fade every fall, and stare ghastly and naked, like leafless trees
in November rains. To express a thought merely to refute it
is profitable enough, if it makes us contented. A tree loaded
with blossoms may certainly suggest something more abundant
and beautiful than most of our fellow-beings have to offer ussomething better than the trite language, the stinted if not barren expression in which their life finds a sluggish issue. If
every mind had its season of flowering, if the flower of its
speech had any thing of the freshness and purity and penetrating charm of apple-blossoms, or the foamy abundance of
the cherry-flower, no doubt an appropriate season of merely
beautiful expression would be recognized; our social intercourse might be graced and festooned with garlands of pleasant
words; we might meet each other sometimes without baskets
and quart measures to buy and sell; we might meet each other
as social artists, and not as drivers and workmen. We know of
no sufficient reason why we should dispense with every thing like
effusion and beauty, and hold so gravely to polished and barren
expression which checks enthusiasm and defrauds the sense of
beauty, in our social intercourse. The grotesque and gnarled
denizens of our fields do better; they break into bloom, they
crest and sprinkle themselves with the most wasteful beauty,
and carelessly spill the most exquisite perfume on every wandering air. They give place to the formation of fruits that
never reach maturity, they crowd every twig with what will
prove only "windfalls;" but then in blossoming-time they
have not the fear of critics; they are not nipped in the bud by
the chilling frost of criticism; they are not forbidden their joyous and maternal abundance of vain but lovely promises.
A literature without its blossoming season-a society formed
to restrict expression, and conventionalize all intercourse; to
start us in grooves and keep us in them, unmindful of our
best and most ancient example, nature, is false and must correct itself. They understand these things better in France.
The frigid and barren type does not give the law, but the natural and abundant. French literature and society have something
of the effusion, something of the bloom, something of the vividness, something of the freshness of Nature. One can pluck
from French books pages which breathe of lilacs and violets;
one can discover words that have no other reason of being than
the expression of enthusiasm and the admiration of beauty.
But in our land such freedom of expression passes unquestioned
only among versifiers and poets; and English prose, so much
less than English poetry, is devoid of those facile and charming
APPLETOXS' JTO URIVAL OF POPULABE
374
[JUNE 1 9,