“We are born pilgrims and strangers. The birds of the air have nests, and the foxes have holes, but man has not where to lay his head. He is the gypsy of the universe. He is the bird of passage of the world.”
“But I have been happy,” protested Anushka.
“Possibly,” I said. “But what keys you up to live, what stimulates and inspires you, is not the happiness you have had, but the happiness you expect to have.
“The surest, stablest thing in life is heaven. It rests upon the enduring stones of hope. Its pillars are all of the alabaster of anticipation. It is a city of eternity, not of time. Therefore it is that its gates are never shut, night nor day.”
THE BEST OF LIFE
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.