“Life and the Seasons,” by Z. (from The Pearl and Literary Gazette [also, The Boston Pearl], March 1, 1834; p. 121)

Life, like the budding Spring, opens with beauty. The blooming flowers, and green, and verdant fields powerfully impress us with the reflection that life, also, has its Spring-time. The youth, in gaiety commences his course. His path opens amid budding enjoyments, and his heart is filled with delights. He plucks its flowers, and the thorn often reminds him of the pains of too much pleasure; or the cloud that gathers over him admonishes him that all is not sunshine—that pleasure has satiety.

The Summer of Life succeeds the Spring. Its former pleasantness is thrown off, and we begin to grow tired, and sigh for changes. We are satiated with its enjoyments and pleasures, and are inclined to prepare for the Autumn.

Autumn approaches, and its arrival is discovered by its frosts, and winds, and ‘sober livery.’ The leaves are decaying, and fall from the trees—all things bear the hectic-flush of consumption. Man’s faculties, even so begin to fail. He prepares to meet his dissolution.

Winter comes—the last and aged Season of the year.—So, also, man finds his Winter. He sinks and falls beneath the bleak and cheerless winds of time—his fall speaking only of departed grandeur. The energies of man’s Spring-time have ushered him into the Summer, which has failed him, almost at its entrance; and Time has opened in the Autumn of his life the pathway to the grave, while the prostrating Winter shuts him in the tomb.

But the dull days of Winter are succeeded by the dawning of a perennial and glorious Spring. Man only sleeps in the tomb, like the decayed flowers, to be awakened into a glorious and immortal life—to enjoy a new Spring, unchanging, yet never tiring, and perpetual.