Then I said to it, "Continue. Go and serve whom you will, my little
Sabine Farm. You were not mine because you would not be, and you are not
mine at all to-day. You will regret it perhaps, and perhaps you will
not. There was verse in you, perhaps, or prose, or--infinitely
more!--contentment for a man (for all I know). But you refused. You lost
your chance. Goodbye." And with that I went on into the wood and beyond
the gap, and saw the sight no more.
It was ten years since I had seen it last. It may be ten years before I
see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I went through the woods
saying to myself:
"You lost your chance, my little Sabine Farm, you lost your chance!"
another part of me at once replied:
"Ah! And so did _you_!"
Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind:
"Not at all, for the chance I never had, but what I lost was my desire."
"No, not your desire," said the voice to me within, "but the fulfilment
of it, in which you would have lost your desire." And when that reply
came I naturally turned as all men do on hearing such interior replies,
to a general consideration of regret, and was prepared, if any honest
publisher should have come whistling through that wood, with an offer
proper to the occasion, namely, to produce no less than five volumes on
the Nature of Regret, its mortal sting, its bitter-sweetness, its power
to keep alive in man the pure passions of the soul, its hints at
immortality, its memory of Heaven.
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