Spring song

Greetings to you, you green expanses

Of glorious forests, bright with spring,

Where the dull heart may awaken

Happily from all troubles.

Greetings to you, you rocky crags

That stretch up into the clouds

And upon your giant nape

Carry beeches, slender as columns.

Mossy gorges, rocky chasms

Are covered by the red foliage

That the autumn breezes stormily

Flung down into the dust;

Like a carpet brown and golden

They are lying layer upon layer,

Those, which with its rare blooming spikes

Hardly a green plant interrupts.

That which unfurled so full of hope

Once in May in its youthful vigour,

Quickly grown old, is in autumn

Swept away to the dead;

But inexhaustibly surges forth again

New growth upon new growth,

And the strong branches entwine

To form a high, vaulted ceiling.

Child of man, and you wish to complain

When in the stormy turmoil of the world

Your hopes are dashed and

Fall to the ground like the leaves?

Arise! From your undaunted marrow

Create new hopes a thousandfold,

And thus watch, thus grow strong

Like the storm-tried forest.

Greetings to you, you green expanses

Of glorious forests, bright with spring,

Through the treetops I hear it moving

In a hundred voices, loudly and gently;

Sprouting forth, budding, bestirring itself mightily,

It rushes onward like a flight of spirits;

Spring, I perceive, full of the power of life,

Your renewed breath.