Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
Where they are gone, nor yet this year,
Save with thus much for an overword--
But where are the snows of yester-year?

Villon, as we know, has a melancholy fondness for asking these sad,
hopeless questions of snow and wind. He muses not only of the drift of
fair faces, but of the passing of mighty princes and all the arrogant
pride and pomp of the earth--"pursuivants, trumpeters, heralds, hey!"
"Ah! where is the doughty Charlemagne?" They, even as the humblest, "the
wind has carried them all away." They have vanished utterly as the snow,
gone--who knows where?--on the wind. "'Dead and gone'--a sorry burden of
the Ballad of Life," as Thomas Lowell Beddoes has it in his _Death's
Jest Book_. "Dead and gone!" as Andrew Lang re-echoes in a sweetly
mournful ballade:

Through the mad world's scene
We are drifting on,
To this tune, I ween,
"They are dead and gone!"

"Nought so sweet as melancholy," sings an old poet, and, while the
melancholy of the exercise is undoubted, there is at the same time an
undeniable charm attaching to those moods of imaginative retrospect in
which we summon up shapes and happenings of the vanished past, a tragic
charm indeed similar to that we experience in mournful music or elegiac
poetry.

For, it is impossible to turn our eyes on any point of the starlit vista
of human history, without being overwhelmed with a heart-breaking sense
of the immense treasure of radiant human lives that has gone to its
making, the innumerable dramatic careers now shrunk to a mere mention,
the divinely passionate destinies, once all wild dream and dancing
blood, now nought but a name huddled with a thousand such in some dusty
index, seldom turned to even by the scholar, and as unknown to the world
at large as the moss-grown name on some sunken headstone in a country
churchyard. What an appallingly exuberant and spendthrift universe it
seems, pouring out its multitudinous generations of men and women with
the same wasteful hand as it has filled this woodland with millions of
exquisite lives, marvellously devised, patterned with inexhaustible
fancy, mysteriously furnished with subtle organs after their needs,
crowned with fairy blossoms, and ripening with magic seeds,--such a vast
treasure of fragrant sunlit leafage, all produced with such elaborate
care, and long travail, and all so soon to vanish