The Apple of Mythology. 19 



Many of the best apples shown at the great Congress 

 of 1883 came from trees a full century old, and com- 

 paratively few were from trees less than fifty years of 

 age. 



No wonder that the apple appears so often in myth 

 and fable ; that it serves the poet so well as a symbol at 

 once intelligible and picturesque; and that if in past 

 times there were " apples of discord," to-day we have our 

 " love-apples." In literature, as these phrases show, the 

 word is not to be always taken in the strictly literal sense. 

 In fiction it is apt to appear after the same manner as 

 "rose" and "lily," the figurative image of something 

 delectable, even supreme, not a reality, but abundantly 

 significant to the imagination. Not apples to be eaten 

 were those in the mind of the donor of the famous fable 

 of Hippomenes and Atalanta, where the maiden loses 

 the race through stopping to gather up the too seductive 

 "poma aurea;" nor were they veritable apples in the 

 picture of the golden fruit of the Hesperides, in that 

 beautiful story of the three chaste young ladies, far away 

 in the West, who kept them safe from intrusion and 

 curiosity. The meaning of the fable is easy to discern. 

 Every particular has its purpose ; it would be difficult to 

 find anything in the whole range of story and myth more 

 delicately expressed, or more in harmony with the best 

 principles of nature and virtue. No wonder, again, that 

 painters of the Temptation of Eve, sustained by Paradise 

 Lost, should employ the apple to represent the fruit of 

 the Tree of Knowledge; and that in the A.V. of the 



