You say, my dear Anushka, that you have nothing but your dreams; you are
full of dreams; drunk every day with ideals. And you speak of this as if
it were a weakness, something to be ashamed of.
You are young. All your years slant upward. Before you life stretches
out as a vast untried adventure. Love is yet to come, and success, and a
career. Let me, who am over the hillcrest and on the westering slope,
talk to you a bit.
And looking back on all that I have had and felt and lived, let me say
to you that the best of all was the dream. Not what I got but what I
longed for, not what I attained unto but what I aimed at, these are my
harvest, my treasures.
I fished in the sea, but the biggest fish got away. I hunted in the
wood, but the brightest birds, the fleetest deer, were those I glimpsed
and saw as they vanished.
The things I have seen, gazed at with full vision, were cheap and tawdry
compared to those that flashed by and were caught only by the tail of my
eye.
What I have done is a poor compromise. What I dreamed of doing was
wonderful. I have composed music such as the angels might covet to sing.
I have painted pictures, carved statues, built palaces, such as no hands
of flesh could accomplish.
I have said words that broke hearts with their infinite tragedy, and
healed them again with their divine accent of consolation. I have
written books that swayed the world’s heart as the summer wind bends the
wheat-field.
But it was all in the realm of might-have-been, beyond the mountains of
the possible.
This real self I am afraid for you to know. It is so commonplace. I am
just a man, and the worse for wear. I am not a bit splendid nor
dazzling, but by way of being shop-worn.
It is only my beautiful secret that comforts me to take of what I
dreamed; it is only this that encourages me to take my journey hopefully
among the stars when my release comes; perhaps there, in some cozy
planet among the Pleiades, or dwelling as a pure flame among the
fire-spirits that play about the petals of Dante’s Rose of Heaven,
perhaps there I shall find a pot of gold at the end of my rainbow.
But as far as this earthly career is concerned, Anushka, the rainbow has
been more worth than the gold. Yet I am not sad nor disillusioned, for,
listen, I still have my dreams, my skies of may-be still overarch with
infinitude my earth that is.
What I have is pitiful enough. Ah, but what I thought I was getting! I
am as one who gathers shells and sea-beauties and takes them home, and
finds them withered, yet remembers the day on the shore. You recall what
the poet said?
“I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea—born treasures home,
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.”
So hold your dreams, Anushka, and never let them go, for when you are
old they will be the best residue of life.