Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Spring
As quickly as the ice vanishes when the Father unlooses the frost fetters and unwounds the icy ropes of the torrent.
Beowulf. VII.
Now Spring returns; but not to me returns
The vernal joy my better years have known;
Dim in my breast life’s dying taper burns,
And all the joys of life with health have flown.
Michael Bruce—Elegy, written in Spring.
Now Nature hangs her mantle green
On every blooming tree,
And spreads her sheets o’ daisies white
Out o’er the grassy lea.
Burns—Lament of Mary Queen of Scots.
And the spring comes slowly up this way.
Coleridge—Christabel. Pt. I.
Spring hangs her infant blossoms on the trees,
Rock’d in the cradle of the western breeze.
Cowper—Tirocinium. L. 43.
If there comes a little thaw,
Still the air is chill and raw,
Here and there a patch of snow,
Dirtier than the ground below,
Dribbles down a marshy flood;
Ankle-deep you stick in mud
In the meadows while you sing,
“This is Spring.”
C. P. Cranch—A Spring Growl.
Starred forget-me-nots smile sweetly,
Ring, blue-bells, ring!
Winning eye and heart completely,
Sing, robin, sing!
All among the reeds and rushes,
Where the brook its music hushes,
Bright the caloposon blushes.—
Laugh, O murmuring Spring!
Sarah F. Davis—Summer Song.
Daughter of heaven and earth, coy Spring,
With sudden passion languishing,
Teaching barren moors to smile,
Painting pictures mile on mile,
Holds a cup of cowslip wreaths
Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
Emerson—May Day. St. 1.
Eternal Spring, with smiling Verdure here
Warms the mild Air, and crowns the youthful Year.
******
The Rose still blushes, and the vi’lets blow.
Sir Sam’l Garth—The Dispensary. Canto IV. L. 298.
Lo! where the rosy bosom’d Hours
Fair Venus’ train appear,
Disclose the long-expecting flowers,
And wake the purple year.
Gray—Ode on Spring. Compare Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. (Hymn E.)
When Spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil.
Bishop Heber—Hymn for Seventh Sunday after Trinity.
The spring’s already at the gate
With looks my care beguiling;
The country round appeareth straight
A flower-garden smiling.
Heine—Book of Songs. Catherine. No. 6.
The beauteous eyes of the spring’s fair night
With comfort are downward gazing.
Heine—Book of Songs. New Spring. No. 3.
I come, I come! ye have called me long,
I come o’er the mountain with light and song:
Ye may trace my step o’er the wakening earth,
By the winds which tell of the violet’s birth,
By the primrose-stars in the shadowy grass,
By the green leaves, opening as I pass.
Felicia D. Hemans—Voice of Spring.
Sweet Spring, full of sweet dayes and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
Herbert—The Church. Vertue. St. 3.
For surely in the blind deep-buried roots
Of all men’s souls to-day
A secret quiver shoots.
Richard Hovet—Spring.
They know who keep a broken tryst,
Till something from the Spring be missed
We have not truly known the Spring.
Robert Underwood Johnson—The Wistful Days.
All flowers of Spring are not May’s own;
The crocus cannot often kiss her;
The snow-drop, ere she comes, has flown:—
The earliest violets always miss her.
Lucy Larcom—The Sister Months.
And softly came the fair young queen
O’er mountain, dale, and dell;
And where her golden light was seen
An emerald shadow fell.
The good-wife oped the window wide,
The good-man spanned his plough;
’Tis time to run, ’tis time to ride,
For Spring is with us now.
Leland—Spring.
The lovely town was white with apple-blooms,
And the great elms o’erhead
Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms,
Shot through with golden thread.
Longfellow—Hawthorne. St. 2.
Came the Spring with all its splendor,
All its birds and all its blossoms,
All its flowers, and leaves, and grasses.
Longfellow—Hiawatha. Pt. XXI. L. 109.
Thus came the lovely spring with a rush of blossoms and music,
Flooding the earth with flowers, and the air with melodies vernal.
Longfellow—Tales of a Wayside Inn. Pt. III. The Theologian’s Tale. Elizabeth.
The holy spirit of the Spring
Is working silently.
George MacDonald—Songs of the Spring Days. Pt. II.
Awake! the morning shines, and the fresh field
Calls us; we lose the prime, to mark how spring
Our tended plants, how blows the citron grove,
What drops the myrrh, and what the balmy reed,
How nature paints her colours, how the bee
Sits on the bloom, extracting liquid sweet.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. V. L. 20.
On many a green branch swinging,
Little birdlets singing
Warble sweet notes in the air.
Flowers fair
There I found.
Green spread the meadow all around.
Nithart—Spring-Song. Trans. in The Minnesinger of Germany.
Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose,
That Youth’s sweet-scented manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the branches sang
Ah whence and whither flown again, who knows?
Omar Khayyam—Rubaiyat. FitzGerald’s Trans. St. 96.
Gentle Spring!—in sunshine clad,
Well dost thou thy power display!
For Winter maketh the light heart sad,
And thou,—thou makest the sad heart gay.
Charles d’Orléans—Spring. Longfellow’s trans.
Hark! the hours are softly calling
Bidding Spring arise,
To listen to the rain-drops falling
From the cloudy skies,
To listen to Earth’s weary voices,
Louder every day,
Bidding her no longer linger
On her charm’d way;
But hasten to her task of beauty
Scarcely yet begun.
Adelaide A. Procter—Spring.
I wonder if the sap is stirring yet,
If wintry birds are dreaming of a mate,
If frozen snowdrops feel as yet the sun,
And crocus fires are kindling one by one.
Christina G. Rossetti—The First Spring Day. St. 1.
There is no time like Spring,
When life’s alive in everything,
Before new nestlings sing,
Before cleft swallows speed their journey back
Along the trackless track.
Christina G. Rossetti—Spring. St. 3.
Spring flies, and with it all the train it leads:
And flowers, in fading, leave us but their seeds.
Schiller—Farewell to the Reader.
I sing the first green leaf upon the bough,
The tiny kindling flame of emerald fire,
The stir amid the roots of reeds, and how
The sap will flush the briar.
Clinton Scollard—Song in March.
For, lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
The Song of Solomon. II. 11, 12.
So forth issew’d the Seasons of the yeare:
First, lusty Spring, all dight in leaves of flowres
That freshly budded and new bloomes did beare,
In which a thousand birds had built their bowres
That sweetly sung to call forth paramours;
And in his hand a javelin he did beare,
And on his head (as fit for warlike stoures)
A guilt, engraven morion he did weare:
That, as some did him love, so others did him feare.
Spenser—Faerie Queene. Bk. VII. Canto VII. Legend of Constancie. St. 28.
Now the hedged meads renew
Rustic odor, smiling hue,
And the clean air shines and twinkles as the world goes wheeling through;
And my heart springs up anew,
Bright and confident and true,
And my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew.
Stevenson—Poem written in 1876.
It is the season now to go
About the country high and low,
Among the lilacs hand in hand,
And two by two in fairyland.
Stevenson—Underwoods. It is the Season Now to Go.
O tender time that love thinks long to see,
Sweet foot of Spring that with her footfall sows
Late snow-like flowery leavings of the snows,
Be not too long irresolute to be;
O mother-month, where have they hidden thee?
Swinburne—A Vision of Spring in Winter.
Once more the Heavenly Power
Makes all things new,
And domes the red-plough’d hills
With loving blue;
The blackbirds have their wills,
The throstles too.
Tennyson—Early Spring.
The bee buzz’d up in the heat,
“I am faint for your honey, my sweet.”
The flower said, “Take it, my dear,
For now is the Spring of the year.
So come, come!”
“Hum!”
And the bee buzz’d down from the heat.
Tennyson—The Forester. Act IV. Sc. 1.
Dip down upon the northern shore,
O sweet new year, delaying long;
Thou doest expectant nature wrong,
Delaying long; delay no more.
Tennyson—In Memoriam, 82.
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
Tennyson—Locksley Hall. St. 9.
The boyhood of the year.
Tennyson—Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere. St. 3.
Come, gentle Spring; ethereal Mildness, come!
Thomson—Seasons. Spring. L. 1.
The Clouds consign their treasures to the fields,
And, softly shaking on the dimpled pool,
Prelusive drops, let all their moisture flow
In large effusion, o’er the freshen’d world.
Thomson—Seasons. Spring. L. 173.
Fair-handed Spring unbosoms every grace:
Throws out the snowdrop and the crocus first.
Thomson—Seasons. Spring. L. 527.
’Tis spring-tune on the eastern hills!
Like torrents gush the summer rills;
Through winter’s moss and dry dead leaves
The bladed grass revives and lives,
Pushes the mouldering waste away,
And glimpses to the April day.
Whittier—Mogg Megone. Pt. III.
And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of spring,
And the rosebud breaks into pink on the climbing briar,
And the crocus bed is a quivering moon of fire
Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring.
Oscar Wilde—Magdalen Walks.
The Spring is here—the delicate footed May,
With its slight fingers full of leaves and flowers,
And with it comes a thirst to be away,
In lovelier scenes to pass these sweeter hours.
N. P. Willis—Spring.