“Spring on Campus”

“No place required or made better use of the season than Princeton University. After the harshness and cold of winter, amidst the massive, stony pile of the campus, and into the sterile analytical atmosphere of intellectual work, the subtle, redolent, tender, tinctured, silken, wantonly gorgeous bloom of spring, Persephone redivivus, pranced, jumped, and spun about like a carefree child in the company of curmudgeons. Cascades of yellow forsythias splashed down the grim walls of Holder Hall like bright boas around the neck of a Calvinist Minister. Heavy blue-violet clusters of hydrangea, shaped like flowering cabbages or balls of settled confetti floated on pedestals of ovate foliage outside Lockhart Hall. White and purple wisteria blossoms, pensile racemes like falls of lace, spilled down walls of gray, brown, and reddish stone across the campus. Magnolia blossoms littered pathways in such profusion that one could not see the pavers; they made the pedestrian forced to walk over them feel like a profaning philistine trampling delicate beauty underfoot.”