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