s to all
this beauty that was hidden to us, shown us beauty, indeed, where we
could see but evil before, we miss something from our delight in these
faces. We can appreciate more beauty, but do we appreciate any quite as
much as in those old days when we were such passionate monotheists of
the beautiful? Alas! We are priests no more, are we even lovers? But we
are wonderful connoisseurs.

It is our souls.

IX

THE SNOWS OF YESTER-YEAR

_Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?_ As I transcribe once more that
ancient sigh, perhaps the most real sigh in all literature, it is high
mid-summer, and the woodland surrounding the little cabin in which I am
writing lies in a trance of green and gold, hot and fragrant and dizzy
with the whirring of cicadas, under the might of the July sun. Bees buzz
in and out through my door, and sometimes a butterfly flits in, flutters
a while about my bookshelves, and presently is gone again, in search of
sweets more to his taste than those of the muses, though Catullus is
there, with

Songs sweeter than wild honey dripping down,
Which once in Rome to Lesbia he sang.

As I am caught by the dream-drowsy spell of the hot murmuring afternoon,
and my eyes rest on the thick vines clustering over the rocks, and the
lush grasses and innumerable underbrush, so spendthrift in their
crowding luxuriance, I try to imagine the ground as it was but four
months ago still in the grasp of winter, when the tiniest blade of
grass, or smallest speck of creeping green leaf, seemed like a miracle,
and it was impossible to realize that under the broad snowdrifts a
million seeds, like hidden treasure, were waiting to reveal their
painted jewels to the April winds. Snow was plentiful then, to be had by
the ton--but now, the thought suddenly strikes me, and brings home with
new illuminating force Villon's old refrain, that though I sought the
woodland from end to end, ransacked its most secret places, not one
vestige of that snow, so lately here in such plenty, would it be
possible to find. Though you were to offer me a million dollars for as
much as would fill the cup of a wild rose, say even a hundred million, I
should have to see all that money pass me by. I can think of hardly
anything that it couldn't buy--but such a simple thing as last year's
snow!

Could there be a more poignant symbol of irreclaimable vanished things
than that so happily hit on by the old ballade-maker: