Expressions of Spring

Excerpts from Victor Hugo's 'Les Miserables', chapter XVI that beautifully capture and take us back to the joys of gardens in the spring before heat waves... 
                                                                            ...along with gorgeous photos of my spring flowers by my husband on his "fancy camera".

Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed by the rain and wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm freshness. The gardens and meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers, become perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors at once.    Everything smiles, sings and offers itself.    One feels gently intoxicated. 

The springtime is a provisional paradise,                               

                            the sun helps man to have patience.

This abundance of light had something indescribably reassuring about it. Life, sap, heat, odors overflowed; one was conscious, beneath creation, of the enormous size of the source; in all these breaths permeated with love, in this interchange of reverberations 

and reflections, in this marvellous expenditure of rays, in this infinite outpouring of liquid 
                                                                                        gold, one felt the prodigality of the inex-
haustible; and, behind this splendor as behind a curtain of flame, one caught a glimpse of God, that millionaire of stars.                                          

  Thanks to the sand, there was not a speck of mud; thanks to the rain, there was not a grain of ashes. The clumps of blossoms had just been bathed; every sort of velvet, satin, gold and varnish, which springs from the earth in the form of flowers, was irreproachable. This magnificence was cleanly.  

The grand silence of happy nature filled the garden.

A celestial silence that is compatible with a thousand sorts of music, the cooing of nests, the buzzing of swarms, the flutterings of the breeze. 

All the harmony of the season was complete in one gracious whole; the entrances and exits of spring took place in proper order; the lilacs ended; the jasmines began; some flowers were tardy, some insects in advance of their time; the van-guard of the red June butterflies fraternized with the rear-guard of the white butterflies of May. The plantain trees were getting their new skins. The breeze hollowed out undulations in the magnificent enormity of the chestnut-trees. 

It was splendid. 

My thoughts exactly!!