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.