Yesterday

“ Could a day be sweeter?
Life was all a lyric song
Set to tricksy meter.
Ah, to-day is like a dirge,—
Place my arms around you,
Let me feel the same dear joy
As when first I found you.
Let me once retrace my steps,
From these roads unpleasant,
Let my heart and mind and soul
All ignore the present.
Yesterday the iron seared
And to-day means sorrow.
Pause, my soul, arise, arise,
Look where gleams the morrow.
This work was published before January 1, 1928, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. ”

“ The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of To-morrow roll up; but Yesterday and To-morrow both are. ”

“ Our yesterday’s to-morrow now is gone,
And still a new to-morrow does come on;
We by to-morrows draw up all our store,
Till the exhausted well can yield no more. ”

“ Then Tuesday, and not Monday ... and Saturday will be the nearer afterward. I am singularly well to-day—head quite quiet—and yesterday your penholder began its influence and I wrote about half my last act. Writing is nothing, nor praise, nor blame, nor living, nor dying, but you are all my true life ”

“ As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of to-day is present, so some flitting perspectives, and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die. ”

“ He told us that it had been a fine day to-day, and we told him that it had been a fine day yesterday, and then we all told each other that we thought it would be a fine day to-morrow; and George said the crops seemed to be coming up nicely. ”

“ ●⁠●⁠● I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down
a sun dropped in the west. I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of to-morrows, a sky of to-morrows.
I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
at sundown: To-morrow is a day. ”

“ and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon. ”

“ Still it shall be as you like—as you shall chose—and if you are disappointed about Wednesday (if it is not vain in me to talk of disappointments) why do with Wednesday as you think best ... always understanding that there's no risk of infection.
Monday.—All this I had written yesterday—and to-day it all is worse than vain. Do not be angry with me—do not think it my fault—but I do not go to Italy ... ”

“ To-day is the child of all the yesterdays, and the yesterdays and to-day are the parent of tomorrow. The past, our past, has made us what we are in the present, and what we are in the present is making us what we shall be in the future. ”

“ I opened the door of my boat and looked out, but no one was to be seen. [1]
↑ “Alas!” says a commentator, “yesterday was the to-day of yesterday, and to-morrow will be the to-day of to-morrow.” Compare Carlyle (Past and Present) , “To-day becomes yesterday so fast; all to-morrows become to-days.” ”

“ The boy who expects every morning to open into a new world finds that to-day is like yesterday, but he believes to-morrow will be different. ”

“ you ask, "do you think it a great thing to present me with a single day?"—No, but when to-morrow comes, yesterday's morrow will have been already spent; and lo! a fresh morrow will be for ever making away with our years, each just beyond our grasp. ”

“ What was it that thus set so far asunder the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of to-day? ”

“ He understood Helen, for he also had need of being alone to face the tremendous contrast of the hour and to digest in secret the huge joy he was ashamed to show to himself, because it was for the death of a man whose existence had darkened his own. Because Harmon was suddenly dead, the sleeping hope of twenty years had waked with deep life and strength. Time and age were rolled away like a mist before the morning breeze, the world was young again, and the rose of yesterday was once more the lovely flower of to-day. ”

“ Yet to each one just as dear
As yours to you! BRIDGES WE NEVER CROSS
We fall in the habit too often I fear,
Of crossing the bridges we never draw near;
Though they loom up before us—they seem just ahead,
There’s a turn and our feet are in other paths led.
We dread the to-morrow, its toil and its care,
And feel that its burdens we never can bear;
But when the to-morrow blends into to-day,
The yesterday’s burdens have all slipped away!
Too often we hear: “Yes ”

“ Time, who in the glare of a Christmas party or on the shore of a summer sea could run faster than we, seemed to take a spiteful pleasure in lingering in this unattractive place. And although our attitude towards life appeared to have been determined for us by Fate, when the long day ended and we thought over things in bed, we had not even the satisfaction of being proud of our day’s work. ”

“ I said my prayers and lay down to sleep. In the evening I pray better than in the morning; I understand better what I am saying and feeling. In the evening I do not fear myself, in the morning I do-there is much before me. ”

“ The dear, artificial things that had made the winter lovely were gone, and the pastoral delights of the summer were still to come, yet Nature called us forth to a muddy, unfinished world. Then was the season of the official walk, a dreary traffic on nice, clean pavements, that placed everything in the world worth walking to out of bounds. ”

“ It came, that last morning, a fine morning flushed with the new life of the world that trembles hesitatingly in the spring of the year, and steeps the hearts of men and women with stronger hope and wider ambition; such a morning as draws a veil over past failures and disappointments, and floods the future with success and achievement. It seemed a pity to have to die on such a morning, and for one moment there was regret in the highwayman's soul as he took his place in the cart. ”

“ But, for reasons which I have set forth elsewhere,3 I believe that the nomenclature which I had originally suggested4—Aday, Bday, and so on to Jday—would be really the simplest way out of the difficulty. Any fanciful way of naming the days would be bad, as too sharply differentiating one day from another. What we must strive for in the Dawn is that every day shall be as nearly as possible like every other day. We must help the human units—these little pink slobbering creatures of the Future whose cradle we are rocking—to progress not in harsh jerks, but with a beautiful unconscious rhythm.... ”

“ When we speak of Friday as an unlucky day, or touch wood after saying that we have had good luck for a long time, or take the trouble to look at the new moon over the right shoulder, or avoid crossing the street while a funeral is passing, we are recalling old superstitions or beliefs, a vanished world in which our remote forefathers lived. ”

“ The morning star slid down towards the east, paling by degrees in the young day's increasing light, and the earth lay silent like a slumbering, unpeopled world, as if it were still the morning hour of paradise, before the time of Adam and Eve, and their restless children! ”

“ Come, lest you lose, adorning, the beauty of the morning.
⁠‘A moment, Time, a moment, till I eat.’
Come, maiden, come! ripe fruits are on the branches,
⁠The evening star is glowing in the blue;
The breeze's breath grows colder. Come ere the day is older! ”

“ This craving for perpetual change is the curse of the country. Friday's a very nice day.
MER. So it is, but a Friday six months long — It gets monotonous.
JUP., AP., MARS. (rising) It's perfectly ridiculous.
THES. (calling them) Cymon.
CYM. (as Time, with the usual attributes) Sir.
THES. (Introducing him to the three gods) Allow me – Father Time – rather young at present, but even Time must have a beginning. In course of time, Time will grow older. Now then, Father Time, what's this about a wet Friday in November for the last six months?
CYM. Well, the fact is, I've been trying an experiment. ”

“ Though every day be a New Year's Day, still the alteration in our dates and our calendars should set us all thinking of that continual lapse of the mysterious thing—the creature of our own minds—which we call time, and which is bearing us all so steadily and silently onwards. ”

“ Sometimes we would stay there till we grew sleepy, and the fear passed away, so that we could tiptoe back to bed, wondering a little at ourselves; sometimes the Olympians would discover us, and comfort our timid hearts with rough words and sweet biscuits. In the morning we would pretend that the whole business had been only an adventure, and we were not above bragging of our courage in daring the ire of the grown-up people. ”

“ And shrieking wake, and clamour for new-day.
Only Man's bygone days are truly sweet:
This day is darkened by To-morrow's threat,
To-morrow by the menace of To-day;
From out the Past is fled away for aye
The grinding doubt of possible defeat.
Ah, were we wise, our lives 'tis thus we'd spend:
Because the Past glides onward without end,
Engulfing our To-day and our Hereafter,
We'd greet This Day, or Next, with careless
laughter
As 'twere the Past, and so our fortunes mend. ”

“ And so the time lapses without epoch or era, and we know some half-score of mornings and evenings by tradition only. Almost the night is grieved and leaves her tears on the forelock of day, that men will not rush to her embrace, and fulfil at length the pledge so forwardly given in the youth of time. ”

“ Thank God for beginnings! New years, new months, new weeks—after every twenty-four hours, a new day, with the sun rising over a new world! Last week is dead. All the grieving in the world cannot revive it into life. ”

“ If Time should suddenly drop a week from the due order of days, it is easy to imagine that those bath-chairs, those unfragrant shelters, those much-labelled houses would startle the dreaming tourists with vacant faces of dead men. But when in late March the day has squandered its gold, and the earth is saddened with the gentle greyness of the dusk, when, moreover, the cheerful sea has deserted the shore, creeping far out to leave dull acres of untrodden sand, waste and bitter with salt, a p. ”

“ On the eve of the great event he retires to rest early, and on the morning of the most momentous day in his life he rises with the first streak of dawn in the east, and paces to and fro on Constitution Hill, to collect his thoughts and prepare his speech. ”

“ It seemed to me that morning that the world was never before so high, so airy, so golden, All filled to the brim with the essence of sunshine and spring morning—so that one's spirit dissolved in it, became a part of it. ”

“ There are days in a lifetime which decide all the rest, and sometimes explain all that has gone before, happy days, or days of tears, as the case may be. Perhaps they are the most interesting days to describe, after all, for they are the ones which generally terminate a period in existence. ”

“ The day has been considered as an image of the year, and the year as the representation of life. The morning answers to the spring, and the spring to childhood and youth; the noon corresponds to the summer, and the summer to the strength of manhood. ”

“ Why do we divide time into weeks of seven days, and call the days Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and why are these names of special planets, or of the special gods associated with them, identical, and occur in the same order among so many different nations? ”

“ The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. ”

“ And I am delighted to hear from you to-day just so, though I reproach you in turn just so ... because you were not 'depressed' in writing all this and this and this which has made me laugh—you were not, dearest—and you call yourself better, 'much better,' which means a very little perhaps, but is a golden word, let me take it as I may. May God bless you. Wednesday seems too near (now that this is Monday and you are better) to be our day ... perhaps it does,—and Thursday is close beside it at the worst. ”

“ Thursday I regard as one who ploughs steadily on his way, lacking enthusiasm but comfortably conscious of a second wind; Friday is a debilitated but hopeful toiler, whose sole joy in his work lies in anticipating its speedy conclusion ”

“ Was it therefore to be wondered that with subdued and chastened feelings we all met the next day, the elder ones steeling their hearts, and recovering their minds to enter into a regular discussion and investigation of the fate destined for them; the younger ones meek and sorrowful but most loving and engaging in their simple reliance on our words, and their quiet, but watchful anticipations of our looks and wishes, and this day happened to be a Sunday. ”

“ A DULL SUNDAY
(After Debussy)
IT has been a long day,
A long, long day;
And now in floods of twilight,
In long green waves of sunset softly flowing,
Evening.
It is evening over the great towns,
It is evening in our hearts. ”

“ I'm wiser now, I do not ask what Father Time will bring to-morrow; for each day has its play and task; its joy and e'en its sorrow. And each awakening has this thrill: I wonder what To-day will bring? ”

“ It is now one hour past midnight—the new year of 1908 is here, and this is the third day thereof, and having at last finished the record of my strange travels and adventures I wish given to the world, I am ready, and even longing, for the peaceful rest which I am sure will follow life's trials and vicissitudes. ”

“ One of the principal accepted means for its attainment is the diary and Franklin journal. Every day I confess in my diary everything that I have done badly. I have my weaknesses written out in columns in the journal-laziness, mendacity, gluttony, indecision, the desire to show off, sensuality, lack of jiertk, etc.,- all such petty addictions. I post my transgressions from the diary to the journal by placing little crosses in the columns. ”

“ Thus it appears that the same identical part of time, which composes our days, compose their nights, and while we are keeping Sunday, they are in their midnight dreams; nor is it possible in nature, that the same identical part of time, which makes the first day of the week with us, should make the first day of the week with the inhabitants on the opposite side of the globe. ”