"The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's, so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent" (203), Thoreau points out to his last Concord Lyceum listeners and to all his future readers. 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. 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.
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