Apple Blossoms and a Lost Village

The apple has not come to its perfection this season until the middle
of May; even here, in this west country, the very home of the spirit of
the apple tree! Now it is, or seems, all the more beautiful because of
its lateness, and of an April of snow and sleet and east winds, the
bitter feeling of which is hardly yet out of our blood. If I could
recover the images of all the flowering apple trees I have ever looked
delightedly at, adding those pictured by poets and painters, including
that one beneath which Fiammetta is standing, forever, with that fresh
glad face almost too beautiful for earth, looking out as from pink and
white clouds of the multitudinous blossoms--if I could see all that, I
could not find a match for one of the trees of to-day. It is like
nothing in earth, unless we say that, indescribable in its loveliness,
it is like all other sights in nature which wake in us a sense of the
supernatural.

Undoubtedly the apple trees seem more beautiful to us than all other
blossoming trees, in all lands we have visited, just because it is so
common, so universal--I mean in this west country--so familiar a sight
to everyone from infancy, on which account it has more associations of
a tender and beautiful kind than the others. For however beautiful it
may be intrinsically, the greatest share of the charm is due to the
memories that have come to be part of and one with it--the forgotten
memories they may be called. For they mostly refer to a far period in
our lives, to our early years, to days and events that were happy and
sad. The events themselves have faded from the mind, but they
registered an emotion, cumulative in its effect, which endures and
revives from time to time and is that indefinable feeling, that tender
melancholy and "divine despair," and those idle tears of which the poet
says, "I know not what they mean," which gather to the eyes at the
sight of happy autumn fields and of all lovely natural sights familiar
from of old.

To-day, however, looking at the apple blooms, I find the most
beautifying associations and memories not in a far-off past, but in
visionary apple trees seen no longer ago than last autumn!

And this is how it comes about. In this red and green country of Devon
I am apt to meet with adventures quite unlike those experienced in
other counties, only they are mostly adventures of the spirit.

Lying awake at six o'clock last October, in Exeter, and seeing it was a
grey misty morning, my inclination was to sleep again. I only dozed and
was in the twilight condition when the mind is occupied with idle
images and is now in the waking world, now in dreamland. A thought of
the rivers in the red and green country floated through my brain--of