Spring (season)

“ This season is suggestive of thoughts and feelings which are not called forth by any other; standing, as it were, a pause between life and death; holding in its lap the consummate fruits of the earth, which are culled by the hand of prudence and judgment, some to be garnered in the treasury of useful things, while others are allowed to return to their primitive elements. When spring comes smiling o'er the earth, she breathes on the ice-bound waters, and they flow anew. Frost and snow retreat before her advancing footsteps. ”

“ Spring has been represented as the youth of the years—the season of pleasing hope, lively energy, and rapid increase. Summer has keen resembled to perfect manhood—the season of steady warmth, confirmed strength, and unremitting vigour. Autumn, which while it bestows the rich products of full maturity, is yet ever hastening to decline, has been aptly compared to that period, when the man, mellowed by age, yields the most valuable fruits of experience and wisdom, but daily exhibits increasing symptoms of decay. ”

“ THOUGHTS ON SPRING Spring is the most joyful season of the year. The little brooklets are released from their icy fetters and go laughing and rippling along their winding way. The birds begin to sing in the budding branches, and the soft South wind calls forth the green grass. ”

“ However we may prefer the green and living beauty of spring, when everything is so full of vitality, so buoyant and free, yet the autumn scenery is the most magnificent of any in the year."
"Every season has its charms," said Spalding, "Even the winter, with its cold, its dead and cheerless desolation, has its robe of chaste and peerless white, which, as well as that of the spring-time, the summer, and the autumn, has been the theme of song. I agree with you, that in gorgeousness of beauty, there is no season so rich as the autumn. ”

“ And as winter over and gone sets in brighter relief the warmth and resurrection of springtime, so does the shadow of its approach lend a real if somewhat indefinable attractiveness to the fall months. The blooming of the late flowers, the ripening of leaf and fruit, the frosty air, the flocking of birds, all the thousand signs of the autumnal season take on a kind of pathetic and solemn interest, as being but prelusive to the whiteness and deadness so soon to cover the earth. Indeed, if there were no winter, there could be neither spring nor autumn ”

“ But Spring in the country,—O season rightly named!—a goddess-queen glides through the heavens and the earth, and all that is therein springs up to meet her and do obeisance. We, gross and heavy, blind and deaf, are slow to catch the flutter of her robes, the music of her footfall, the odor of her breath; the shine of her far-off coming. We call it cold and Winter still. We huddle about the fires and wonder if the Spring will never come ”

“ It was just that particular time in spring when the season exercises the strongest influence upon the human soul--when clear sunlight illuminates everything, yet sheds no warmth, when rivulets run trickling under one`s feet, when the air is charged with an odorous freshness, and when the bright blue sky is streaked with long, transparent clouds.
For some reason or another the influence of this early stage in the birth of spring always seems to me more perceptible and more impressive in a great town than in the country. One sees less, but one feels more. ”

“ Leigh Hunt discourses of this beautiful season with his usual grace. He says—
“The spring is now complete. The winds have done their work. The shaken air, well tempered and equalized, has subsided; the genial rains, however thickly they may come, do not saturate the ground, beyond the power of the sun to dry it up again. There are clear crystal mornings; noons of blue sky and white cloud; nights, in which the growing moon seems to lie looking at the stars, like a young shepherdess at her flock. ”

“ Who does not love spring, the most joyful season of the year? It is then that the spring bonnet of the workaday world crosses the earth's orbit and makes the bank account of the husband and father look fatigued. ”

“ To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season—delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits. ”

“ And people passing through the square who have forgotten all about the Spring look up suddenly and smile, and say: “Look at the Almond tree. Spring is here.” Those who know the country turn their minds inwards and remember that the brown owls have begun to hoot, that the gossamer is floating, that, here and there yellow and white butterflies are flitting, looking strangely out of season, that the raven is building, and the rooks too, and that all sorts of birds they had forgotten are seen in the land. ”

“ For the Spring season is so changeable, there are often some soft mild days, and then a cruel frost comes again, and perhaps snow as well; and people who have boasted about fine weather and put off their winter clothes, look very foolish. ”

“ The extreme heat has left us at last, and the autumn has set in—a most charming season in this climate. It is a regular second spring—not such a spring as we are used to in England, which is a struggle for mastery between hot sun and chilling east winds, but a season in which the burnt-up vegetation literally springs into life again under the influence of quickening rain and warmth—the trees put forth shoots and tender green leaves, and the plain is one rich field of millet twelve feet high, through which one rides feeling like Gulliver in the farms of Brobdingnag. ”

“ We know, indeed, that spring visits that region of the world—as far, at least, as the British boundary line. We could be made, upon reflection, to presume that the grass grows, and the sun shines there—the farmers are warm in haying-time, and the flowers come to maturity in season for the bees to provide against winter ”

“ To me there is no season so lovely as the autumn. There is a gaiety about the spring with which I have no sympathy: its perpetual revival of leaf and bloom is too great a contrast to the inner world, where so many feelings lie barren, and so many hopes withered. There is an activity about it, from which the wearied spirits shrink; and a joyousness, which but makes you turn more sadly upon yourself; but about autumn there is a tender melancholy inexpressibly soothing; decay is around, but such is in your own heart. ”

“ Our ancestors varied their clothing according to the season. Strutt has given the spring dress of a man in the fourteenth century, from an illumination in a manuscript of that age: this is a copy of it.
In “Sylvan Sketches,” a new and charming volume by the lady who wrote the “Flora Domestica,” it is delightfully observed, that, “the young and joyous spirit of spring sheds its sweet influence upon every thing: the streams sparkle and ripple in the noon-day sun, and the birds carol tipseyly their merriest ditties. It is surely the loveliest season of the year.” ”

“ One hears a great deal about the sudden outburst of spring in America, but in this part of the country, the earlier stages of the season are assuredly very slow, and for many weeks its progress is gradual. ”

“ Snow is vital to mountain flowers. It provides most of the moisture for their growth and governs the length of the growing season. Spring flowers appear earliest where the snow melts first. Where snow piles up deeply, it may not melt completely till midsummer or may melt too late for plants to complete a season’s growth. On northern slopes the snow may remain all summer, and there can be no growing season. ”

“ In the spring, when the dry season set in and no rain for seven months, and fields dried up with a dusty brown, he fled to the tops of the mountains to browse on the leaves of the trees to support life until the next rainy season commenced. ”

“ The fountain niches of the Seasons in the Court of the Four Seasons are graced by Milton Herbert Bancroft's appropriate panels. Two of these, one on each wall of the fountain niche, are devoted to each season. One represents the pleasures that that period of the year brings forth for man; the other shows the duties it demands of him. In "Spring," we have the poet's conception of the time of blossoms and garlands, of young loves, piping shepherds and dancing maidens, while the goddess of the season dreams of coming glories. ”

“ In spring, however, when the first thaws begin to take place, and commence that delightful process of disruption which introduces this charming season of the year, the relative position of wolf and man is reversed. ”

“ He says:—"Our winters are much milder than those of the continent, but our summers are colder." "In this country it cannot be said that we enjoy the season of spring until the portion of the year so denominated has passed. ”

“ "We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth. ”

“ But the best season for planting is generally in the spring, and the best time for coming is in the dry season, from October to May, when the new-comer may live in tents, put his seed in the ground, and have time to build and get his family comfortably housed before the rainy season sets in. ”

“ Every season has its own peculiar rains. What can be more refreshing or invigorating than the showers of spring? When the snows of February have disappeared, and the blustering winds of March have performed their office of drying up the excess of moisture, and preparing the earth for fruitfulness, and when the young buds and blossoms of April are peeping forth beneath the influence of the sun, and the trees and hedges are attired in their new robes of tender green, how soon would p. ”

“ 'Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come. ”

“ Thou blessed season of our spring,
When hopes are angels on the wing;
Bound upwards to their heavenly shore,
Alas! to visit earth no more. ”

“ As we look over the lively tossing blue waves for a mile or more eastward and westward, our eyes fall on these shining russet hills. Ball's Hill appears in the strong light, at the verge of this undulating blue plain, like some glorious newly-created island of the spring, just sprung up from the bottom in the midst of the blue waters. The fawn-colored oak leaves, with a few pines intermixed, thickly covering the bill, look not like a withered vegetation, but an ethereal kind just expanded and peculiarly adapted to the season and the sky. ”

“ Winter is staid and dignified and grand with its stark trees and mantle of brown earth, and summer is glowing and glorious; but very young spring is so sappy and curly and yellow and green and lavender that you take it to heart and let it nestle there to suck its pink apple-blow thumb, and curl up its young sprout toes sheltered away from the cold that sets it back and the sun that forces it to break bud. ”

“ Those who know the country only in summer, know it scarcely at all. From the first November snowstorm to the last drift melting before the winds of late March on the northern side of a pasture wall, the winter season is a perpetual revelation of subtle colour harmonies, of exquisite compositions, of dramas on the trodden snow, of sweet, close-companioned hours before wood fires that crackle, shut into “a tumultuous privacy of storm.” ”

“ So said George Eliot, and with all due reverence for her opinion, my soul would fly in the opposite direction, seeking the spring. If the autumn led straight on to spring I could love it more, but through its stillness I hear the winter blast; its gorgeous colouring scarce hides the baring boughs; day by day death lays a withering hand on flower and tree; day by day the sun runs quicker to its golden resting-place. Have you ever noticed how great a difference there is between the sun's summer and winter march across the heavens? ”

“ THE GARDEN IN SPRING The dividing line between the seasons is, of course, quite arbitrary, for Nature progresses evenly, gradually, unceasingly, and not in the jerky way which our clumsy divisions of time imply. Still it is convenient, almost necessary indeed, to adopt some such broad classification of the periods of the year as that into the four seasons which has done duty for so many centuries. One may take the flowering of the snowdrop to indicate the onset of spring, though itself belonging more especially to winter. ”

“ I said if you want springtime ahead of time you must have it in your heart. Of course you must. If your heart is warm and your eye is keen, you can go forth in the dead of winter and gather buds, seeds, cocoons, and living things enough to make a little spring. For the fires of summer are never wholly out. They are only banked in the winter, smouldering always under the snow, and quick to brighten and burst into blaze. There comes a warm day in January, and across your thawing path crawls a woolly-bear caterpillar ”

“ But soon the frost is creeping down through the stones and earth overhead, the rains are filling the outer doorways and shutting off the supply of fresh air; and one day, though not sound sleepers, the family cuddle down and forget to wake entirely until the frost has begun to creep back toward the surface, and in through the softened soil is felt the thrill of the waking spring. ”

“ Lovely flowers are opening eagerly to the sun and wind of Spring—in mid-August, with September's snows just at hand, a whole year's work of blossom and seed to be accomplished before the ten months' winter sleep begins. ”

“ In greenness will array,
Its boughs will give us leafage
To make our garlands gay.
Then shout for joy, my country,
On fields the sun will play.
The Spring is coming, coming,
Once more we shall have May. ”