It is interesting to see how the names of famous men are repeated,—even of great poets and philosophers. The poet is not known to-day even by his neighbors to be more than a common man. He is perchance the butt of many. The proud farmer looks down [on] and boorishly ignores him, or regards him as a loafer who treads down his grass, but perchance in course of time the poet will have so succeeded that some of the farmer’s posterity, though equally boorish with their ancestor, will bear the poet’s name. The boor names his boy Homer, and so succumbs unknowingly to the bard’s victorious fame. Anything so fine as poetic genius he cannot more directly recognize. The unpoetic farmer names his child Homer. You have a wild savage in you, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as yours.[173] _May 23. Friday._ And wilder still there grows elsewhere, I hear, a native and aboriginal crab-apple, _Malus_ (as Michaux, or, as Emerson has it, _Pyrus_) _coronaria_ in Southern States, and also _angustifolia_ in the Middle States; whose young leaves “have a bitter and slightly aromatic taste” (Michaux), whose beautiful flowers perfume the air to a great distance. “The apples ... are small, green, intensely acid, and very odoriferous. Some farmers make cider of them, which is said to be excellent: they make very fine sweet-meats also, by the addition of a large quantity of sugar” (Michaux). Celebrated for “the beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume” (Michaux).[174] Michaux says that the wild apple of Europe has yielded to cultivation nearly three hundred species in France alone. Emerson says, referring to Loudon, “In 1836, the catalogue and the gardens of the London Horticultural Society contained upwards of 1400 distinct sorts, and new ones are every year added.” But here are species which they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which the crab might yield to cultivation.[175] This genus, so kind to the human race, the _Malus_ or _Pyrus_; _Rosaceæ_ the family, or others say _Pomaceæ_. Its flowers are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree. I am frequently compelled to turn and linger by some more than usually beautiful two-thirds-expanded blossoms.[176] If such were not so common, its fame would be loud as well as wide. Its most copious and delicious blossoms. But our wild apple is wild perchance like myself, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock,[177]—where the birds, where winged thoughts or agents, have planted or are planting me. Even these at length furnish hardy stocks for the orchard.