The Sioux County Journal

The Easter Season.

The two great festivals of the year,
Christmas and Easter, are natural, as
well as ecclesiastical; and while, in each
case, the minds of young and old are engrossed with the great events which all
Christendom celebrates, it is not improper to think also of the change in
the season which each festival marks.
At Christmas-time our great and good
friend, the Sun, after growing cold toward us for six months, as if departing
from our system, just as he seems about
to turn his back upon us forever, pauses,
relents, and looks smilingly toward us
once more. As far back as history goes
men have taken this season for rest and
good cheer, using the fruits of the completed harvest to welcome the promise
of the next.

Christmas is no "movable feast." It
grows out of the nature of things. The
changeless Sun suggests, invites, and
sanctions it.

Easter is still more obviously natural,
for then the Sun has recovered a large
part of its power to benefit us, and the
fields are tinged with the hues of spring.
Winter is death; Spring is resurrection.
The word Easter speaks to us of the
time when the ancient Germans styled
their fancied goddess of the spring Ostara, or Eostra, to whom the month of
April was dedicated. From her the
month was called, as near as our letters
will form the word Easter-month. Her
festival coincided very nearly with the
Christian Easter, and finally was merged
in it.

The lovely feast needs no effort of the
imagination to justify it. The grateful
warmth, the brilliant sunshine, the singing of the birds, the hum of the insects,
the emerald-green of the grass, the
swelling of the buds, the opening flowers,
the labors of the farm and garden are
resumed, all that we see and all that we
hear attune the heart to joy. The time
has never been when this glorious and
universal resurrection of natural life
has not brought rapture to the long
suffering sons and daughters of men.
All the records of our race attest it: all
the organized religions have sanctioned
it.

Gentle spring has a journey to perform every year that requires more than
the three months allotted to her in the
calendar. She has to move on from the
equator to the pole, and climb every
mountain in her pathway. At the present moment, when we are at the opening of our spring, the beautiful season
is over in Florida. Strawberries and
roses have passed, and the men in the
sugar-fields do not doubt that summer
has come.

The spring is sweeping on northward,
but Arctic navigators wintering where
General Greely and his men spent two
years, are recording zero temperature all
this month. They found April very
cold. Yet the snow-birds and the owls
returned to them, sure sign of advancing spring, and, though during the
whole month of May the mercury only
once rose above the freezing point, and
the ice about them was fifty-four inches
thick, yet on the 2d of June the first
flower bloomed, and two days later
came flocks of ducks and geese.

Even at the equator, though Spring
comes in such guise that strangers do
not know her, still the native heart is
gladdened by her approach. The rains
diminish; the sky is clearer, the all-
suffusing moisture is less oppressive.
"We roast six months," said Macaulay
in Calcutta, "and then we stew six
months." After stewing for half a year,
the people of India find relief and
delight in a heat that is dry, and in a
sky that is brilliant though burning.
Thus, whatever mortals live and strive,
spring is the season of gladness.—Youth's
Companion.