Spring in History

Who was the first to make a festival of spring and sing its praises? What has spring inspired in artists and poets? Where is the longest spring on earth? And where the shortest?

The first to make a festival of spring were the Egyptians... On the wall of one of the temples in the city of Luxor in Egypt you may see a great picture representing the celebration of the spring festival... In the picture are two girls, each smelling a flower and transported by its fragrance... a third beauty eating some delicious fruits... and a youth playing upon his lyre.

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The first to sing of spring was Solomon the Wise, as I believe... If the Torah is reckoned the oldest book in the world, then the poet of poets, Solomon the Wise, was the first to sing of spring... He spoke of the green bower shaded over by grasses, and went on to say: “For the winter is past... the rain is over and gone... the flowers appear on the earth... the time of pruning is come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree has put forth its green figs... and the blossoms of the vines give out their fragrance”...

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The most gifted singer of spring was the English poet Milton... The poor man was blind, yet he felt spring creeping through his veins, and he described its flowers in words threaded with sorrow... like that flower which filled its cup with tears... not with dew.

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Spring has inspired every true artist of delicate feeling... In the museums of art today hang oil paintings by the painters Botticelli... Fra Angelico... Constable... Corot and others — canvases such as Love in Spring... The Dance of Spring... Spring in the Morning... The Joy of Spring... The Springtime of Life, and more.

For men of letters spring is like the legends of the Greeks, telling of the Greek goddesses making merry in the springtime... or Beware of Love in Spring, by Guy de Maupassant... And it inspired the poets... Browning, Shakespeare, and Tennyson in the West; Safi al-Din al-Hilli, al-Baha Zuhayr, Omar Khayyam, Abu Nuwas, and others in the East... And Iliya Abu Madi steals in among the folds of spring to draw out a picture of the immortality of the human soul, saying:

And when the earth folds us away from its flowers,
and the dark is empty of us though full moons shine in it,
you will come back, a perfumed grove
in whose heights I am a spellbound nightingale,
singing to it and flying about its reaches,
and it brightens when he appears — and when he takes wing.

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A spring that people delight in is in the Hawaiian islands, called the land of eternal spring... The weather there is cool in summer and warm in winter, and so it remains spring the whole year round... Honolulu swims forever in ravishing natural beauty... its trees always green, never shedding their leaves in winter... the ocean waters around it blue and clear... its skies forever flushed with red... its flowers varied, strange in their beauty, always in bloom... the peaks of its mountains purple shading into blue... All of it together composes one of the loveliest pictures the Creator ever painted.

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A spring that people delight in is the spring that runs along the equator... The inhabitants there live in a perpetual summer... but the dense trees, with their green leaves and their interlacing branches, temper the heat of the air... As for the flowers, they bewilder the mind with their beauty... their petals large... their colors marvelous... a beauty that ravishes the eye — as though nature there were repaying the people something of what they lose in coolness of climate and gentleness of breeze.