Unlike "Walking" with its grand scale celebration of wildness and the nation's manifest destiny, "Wild Apples" finds its cosy niche in Thoreau's thinking of the very last years of his life when he was already following his ecocentric, preservationist ways along with a newly developed capability of overcoming the poignancy of existence through humor and extensive, 'wild' narration as in Cape Cod, or through making an art of the most refined poetic elegance as in the late essays. Maelon (Melon), in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general.In February 1860, in the crowded lecture hall of the Concord Lyceum, Henry Thoreau delivered what turned out to have been his final speech there, "Wild Apples." Intensely poetic, overflowing with awe for nature's beauty, this speech (published posthumously in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1862) took up anew the praise of the West and the Wild from "Walking," but was already filled with the gloomy awareness of times soon to be past.
The apple was early so important, and so generally distributed, that its name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general. Niebuhr observes that "the words for a house, a field, a plough, ploughing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to agriculture and the gentler ways of life, agree in Latin and Greek, while the Latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase are utterly alien from the Greek." Thus the apple-tree may be considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive. Tacitus says of the ancient Germans that they satisfied their hunger with wild apples, among other things. An entire black and shrivelled Crab-Apple has been recovered from their stores. It appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of the Swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of Rome, so old that they had no metallic implements.
The geologist tells us that the order of the Rosaceae, which includes the Apple, also the true Grasses, and the Labiatae, or Mints, were introduced only a short time previous to the appearance of man on the globe. It is remarkable how closely the history of the Apple-tree is connected with that of man.
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