C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Season

In the journey of the year, the autumn is Venice, spring is Naples, certainly, and the majestic maturity of summer is Rome.

George William Curtis.

The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us, and the winter’s cold turns them into sharp diseases, and the spring brings flowers to strew our hearses, and the summer gives green turf and brambles to bind up our graves.

Jeremy Taylor.

Ah! well away!
Seasons flower and fade.

Tennyson.

How many things by season seasoned are
To their right praise, and true perfection!

Shakespeare.

Perceiv’st them not the process of the year,
How the four seasons in four forms appear,
Resembling human life in ev’ry shape they wear?
Spring first, like infancy, shoots out her head,
With milky juice requiring to be fed:***
Proceeding onward whence the year began,
The Summer grows adult, and ripens into man.***
Autumn succeeds, a sober, tepid age,
Not froze with fear, nor boiling into rage;***
Last, Winter creeps along with tardy pace,
Sour is his front, and furrowed is his face.

Dryden.

O, Winter! Put away thy snowy pride;
O, Spring! Neglect the cowslip and the bell;
O, Summer! Throw thy pears and plums aside;
O, Autumn! Bid the grape with poison swell.

Chatterton.

These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of Thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring
Thy beauty walks, thy tenderness and love.
*****
Then comes Thy glory in the Summer months,
With light and heat refulgent. Then Thy sun
Shoots full perfection through the swelling year;
*****
Thy bounty shines in Autumn unconfined,
And spreads a common feast for all that live.
In Winter awful Thou! with clouds and storms
Around Thee thrown, tempest o’er tempest roll’d,
Majestic darkness! on the whirlwind’s wing,
Riding sublime.

Thomson.

Our seasons have no fixed returns,
Without our will they come and go;
At noon our sudden summer burns,
Ere sunset all is snow.

Lowell.

January grey is here,
Like a sexton by her grave;
February bears the bier,
March with grief doth howl and rave,
And April weeps—but, O ye hours!
Follow with May’s fairest flowers.

Shelley.

Autumn to winter, winter into spring,
Spring into summer, summer into fall,—
So rolls the changing year, and so we change;
Motion so swift, we know not that we move.

D. M. Mulock.

When spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil;
When summer’s balmy showers refresh the mower’s toil;
When winter binds in frosty chains the fallow and the flood,
In God the earth rejoiceth still, and owns his Maker good.

Heber.

The Summer comes and the Summer goes;
Wild-flowers are fringing the dusty lanes,
The shallows go darting through fragrant rains,
Then, all of a sudden—it snows.

T. B. Aldrich.

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