An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry. Robert Browning

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      And again:—

      “Man knows partly but conceives beside,

       Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,

       And in this striving, this converting air

       Into a solid he may grasp and use,

       Finds progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,

       Not God’s, and not the beasts’: God is, they are,

       Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.

       Such progress could no more attend his soul

       Were all it struggles after found at first

       And guesses changed to knowledge absolute,

       Than motion wait his body, were all else

       Than it the solid earth on every side,

       Where now through space he moves from rest to rest.

       Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect

       He could not, what he knows now, know at first;

       What he considers that he knows to-day,

       Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown;

       Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns

       Because he lives, which is to be a man,

       Set to instruct himself by his past self:

       First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,

       Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,

       Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.

       God’s gift was that man should conceive of truth

       And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,

       As midway help till he reach fact indeed.

       The statuary ere he mould a shape

       Boasts a like gift, the shape’s idea, and next

       The aspiration to produce the same;

       So, taking clay, he calls his shape thereout,

       Cries ever, ‘Now I have the thing I see’:

       Yet all the while goes changing what was wrought,

       From falsehood like the truth, to truth itself.

       How were it had he cried, ‘I see no face,

       No breast, no feet i’ the ineffectual clay’?

       Rather commend him that he clapped his hands,

       And laughed, ‘It is my shape and lives again!’

       Enjoyed the falsehood touched it on to truth,

       Until yourselves applaud the flesh indeed

       In what is still flesh-imitating clay.

       Right in you, right in him, such way be man’s!

       God only makes the live shape at a jet.

       Will ye renounce this fact of creatureship?

       The pattern on the Mount subsists no more,

       Seemed awhile, then returned to nothingness,

       But copies, Moses strove to make thereby

       Serve still and are replaced as time requires:

       By these make newest vessels, reach the type!

       If ye demur, this judgment on your head,

       Never to reach the ultimate, angels’ law,

       Indulging every instinct of the soul

       There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing.”