It’s Spring Again

We’ve been hibernating for a few weeks, but now it truly is Spring – and time to reappear! Indeed, Chapel Hill is covered in a dusting of yellow pollen. And at the Rare Book Collection, we’ve turned to our shelves of James Thomson’s Seasons. We have shelves and shelves of editions, so enormously popular was the poetical work on nature’s cyclical changes. Our excerpt of the first lines of the poem Spring comes from the first separate edition of 1728. The complete work with poems for all four seasons was published in its first version in 1730.

PR3732 .S66 1728 / William A. Whitaker Fund

Come, gentle SPRING, Aetherial Mildness, come,

And from the Bosom of yon dropping Cloud,

While Music wakes around, veil’d in a Shower

Of shadowing Roses, on our Plains descend.

.   .   .

 

Best wishes to our followers in the new season!