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The "flowers that fade," the "airs that die," "the snows of yester-year," have in their very frailty and mortality a haunting lyric value. Don Marquis has written a poem about this exquisite appeal of the transient, calling it "The Paradox": "'T is evanescence that endures; The loveliness that dies the soonest has the longest life."
A football player I believe is out of date at eight-and-twenty. Out of date! What a pathos there is in the words out of date! Suranne, as the French say. How are we to render it in English? By the beautiful but artificial word "yester-year"? Yester-year perhaps, for a sorrow clings about it; it conveys a sense of autumn, of "the long decline of roses."
But the manners of yester-year made it obligatory to make your letters unless they were merely what were called "cards" of invitation, message, etc. to some extent substantive. You gave the news of the day, if your correspondent was not likely to know it; the news of the place, especially if you were living in a University town or a Cathedral city.
Oh, admirable Amedee! ... The breeze was stirring that morning, Fool do you remember? and the dead leaves of yester-year fell about us so!" She plucked a great handful of crimson petals from her breast and cast them above her head. They fell about him, and about her. "And I dipped sugar in my coffee and fed it to you, and you let me read your wife's letter." Again she laughed.
And yet and yet, for all this drift and dishonoured decay of things, that retrospective mood of ours will sometimes take another turn, and, so rare and precious in the memory seem the treasure that it has lost, and yet in imagination still holds, that it will not resign itself to mortal thoughts of such manifest immortalities. The snows of yester-year!
Where was her graciously curved bosom? Ah! "Where are the snows of yester-year?" "Oh, Sir," she said at length, "I have come to you about my son whom you punished today." Kellson now for the first time remembered that the surname she had given him was the same as that of the prisoner whom he had so severely sentenced. He could now decipher the suggestion in the eyes, which had so puzzled him.
How does the consummate realism of the cheap photographer show its babies of yester-year, clothed now in the raiment of mature years and simple honours? The little child in costume performing a cute dance. The coloured beau, a heavy swell, in spats and a van Bibber overcoat. The youthful swains posed beside that indestructible stage property of the popular photographer, the artificial tree stump.
And those splendid old grandees of high rank, so imposing of aspect, so crushing to us poor mortals by mere virtue not of their wealth and title alone, but of their high-bred distinction of feature and bearing to which Leech did such ample justice what has become of them? They are like the snows of yester-year!
Whether we live forever or die tomorrow does not affect righteousness. Many people seem to find the prospect of a final personal death unendurable. This impresses me as egotism. I have no such appetite for a separate immortality. God is my immortality; what, of me, is identified with God, is God; what is not is of no more permanent value than the snows of yester-year. Dunmow, May, 1917.
It was spring, in a way, but not the spring of yester-year, with its songs and laughter and high hopes. Wiley felt the old call to be up and away, but his racer remained in its shed. He paced about restlessly, waiting for something to happen, observing the slightest signs and then he found her tracks in the dust. Virginia had come up the trail in the night and had gone down past the mill.
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