The chariest maid is prodigal enough,

If she unmask her beauty to the moon:

Virtue itself'scapes not calumnious strokes:

The canker galls the infants of the spring

Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,

And in the morn and liquid dew of youth

Contagious blastments are most imminent.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Hamlet. Act i. Sc. 3.

Come, gentle Spring! ethereal Mildness! come.

James Thomson (1700-1748): The Seasons. Spring. Line 1.

And the spring comes slowly up this way.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): Christabel. Part i.

Oh could I fly, I 'd fly with thee!

We 'd make with joyful wing

Our annual visit o'er the globe,

Companions of the spring.

John Logan (1748-1788): To the Cuckoo.

From haunted spring and dale

Edg'd with poplar pale

The parting genius is with sighing sent.

John Milton (1608-1674): Hymn on Christ's Nativity. Line 184.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie.

George Herbert (1593-1632): Virtue.

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.

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892): Locksley Hall. Line 19.

O, how this spring of love resembleth

The uncertain glory of an April day!

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Act i. Sc. 3.

A spring of love gush'd from my heart,

And I bless'd them unaware.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): The Ancient Mariner. Part iv.

I tell thee Love is Nature's second sun,

Causing a spring of virtues where he shines.

George Chapman (1557-1634): All Fools. Act i. Sc. 1.

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring

Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): The Iliad of Homer. Book i. Line 1.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): Essay on Criticism. Part ii. Line 15.

The intelligible forms of ancient poets,

The fair humanities of old religion,

The power, the beauty, and the majesty

That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,

Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,

Or chasms and watery depths,—all these have vanished;

They live no longer in the faith of reason.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): Wallenstein. Part i. Act ii. Sc. 4. (Translated from Schiller.)

Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,—

Now green in youth, now withering on the ground;

Another race the following spring supplies:

They fall successive, and successive rise.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744): The Iliad of Homer. Book vi. Line 181.

Oh thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): Ode to the West Wind.

When Spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil.

Reginald Heber (1783-1826): Seventh Sunday after Trinity.

But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn?

Oh when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?

James Beattie (1735-1803): The Hermit.