The Editor's Word — The First of Spring

... Through the wave of cold that pours down on us from the snow-mantled mountains, and through the falling of the heavy rains, a warm breeze blows upon us from time to time, announcing the return of beautiful spring, which spreads its colors over plain and slope and fills the earth with song and fragrance.

These are the vanguards of spring peeping out here and there: the black almond twigs are studded with white buds, and the dust-gray soil now flaunts itself, proud of its green raiment embroidered with anemones and daisies, and with a thousand colors and one! And here are the goldfinches with their yellow beaks, tempted at last out of their nests, clapping their wings in the air and loosing their throats in the first hymn of praise!

It is spring — the season of release from all that is old and worn, of donning robes of pure, enchanting splendor... It is renewal; it is resurrection!

And this beautiful, majestic resurrection rises before us from all the elements of nature — from water, land, and air alike. Why should it not take in man, body and soul, so that he shakes off the old and threadbare, so that his self is washed clean of its chronic defilements, and his spirit embraces the luminous serenity that reigns over the universe!?

Behold, spring! And in the radiance and joy-cries of this earthly wedding, in its glow and its splendor, man forgets the brooding cares of his soul, and feels his heart bursting open upon a thousand dreams, and feels within his sides mighty powers of energy, and of youth with sinewy arm!

One wonders: in what manner will man burn these powers? How will his selfishness work in consuming this energy? Will the horizon of his disinterested thinking stretch out to the common good, so that he sets it above his own self — or will this self, exalted above every other self, remain what it is, seeing nothing but itself, and itself alone?

It is spring! And the wombs of the earth are big with its bounties. So let man's humanity break loose from its narrow, rusted bonds, to share with nature her beneficent, open-handed horizons, and to learn from her her single lesson: that life is giving... not taking!