The season of spring has inspired a great deal in men of letters, and especially in the poets, who composed in its honor their most delicate verses and entrusted to it their gentlest feelings and most beautiful expressions; and so spring, in their verse, stands fresh and radiant across the ages, its echo resounding from the folds of their works, so that we are refreshed by it and live.

Nor was spring's portion from the world of the art of painting and the power of the brush any less than its portion of poetry — each is an echo of the other. And how could the masters of art fail to be moved by spring, its blossoms, its perfume, and its colors? Artists are the first to live in constant touch with nature, sharing with

her her winter and her summer, her autumn and her spring!...

Spring, in their eyes, is color, and the artist is enamored of color, bewitched by its gentleness, its harmony, and the gradations of its shades. And spring is inspiration and fragrance; it is a poem that bountiful nature recites to us to renew our love for her and our attachment to her.

The artists of old did not leave spring out of their art. Botticelli immortalized it in a great painting in which he mingled flowers with fair maidens dancing amid the blossoms of spring upon a carpet colored with every kind of plant; by the maidens he symbolized the breeze, the flowers, the fragrance, love, and youth, all of them surrounding 'Spring' and caressing

him, letting their hair stream out behind them, so that the scene grows all the more joyous and genial. It is one of the most beautiful and most famous paintings on this theme. Likewise Fra Angelico, that ascetic monk, devoted his art to it, and his flowers, in their fineness, delicacy, and color, have been a source of astonishment to the botanists of our own age.

So too the artist Giorgione glorified spring and nature in his canvases and lavished upon it much of the splendor of his art; and like him Filippo Lippi and many others among the artists of the Renaissance, who painted numerous canvases representing 'Spring' with consummate artistry in depicting its marvels and freshness. Nor let us forget the