[Footnote B:  Old Pictures in Florence.]

It is the sense of endless onward movement, the outlook towards an immortal course, “the life after life in unlimited series,” which is so inspiring in his early poetry.  He conceives that we are here, on this lower earth, just to learn one form, the elementary lesson and alphabet of goodness, namely, “the uses of the flesh”:  in other lives, other achievements.  The separation of the soul from its instrument has very little significance to the poet; for it does not arrest the course of moral development.

  “No work begun shall ever pause for death.”

The spirit pursues its lone way, on other “adventures brave and new,” but ever towards a good which is complete.

  “Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
    Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few: 
  Much is to learn, much to forget
    Ere the time be come for taking you."[A]

[Footnote A:  Evelyn Hope.]

Still the time will come when the awakened need shall be satisfied; for the need was created in order to be satisfied.

  “Wherefore did I contrive for thee that ear
  Hungry for music, and direct thine eye
  To where I hold a seven-stringed instrument,
  Unless I meant thee to beseech me play?"[B]

[Footnote B:  Two Camels.]

The movement onward is thus a movement in knowledge, as well as in every other form of good.  The lover of Evelyn Hope, looking back in imagination on the course he has travelled on earth and after, exclaims—­

  “I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,
    Given up myself so many times,
  Gained me the gains of various men,
    Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes."[C]

[Footnote C:  Evelyn Hope.]

In these earlier poems, there is not, as in the later ones, a maimed, or one-sided, evolution—­a progress towards perfect love on the side of the heart, and towards an illusive ideal on the side of the intellect.  Knowledge, too, has its value, and he who lived to settle “Hoti’s business, properly based Oun,” and who “gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,” was, to the poet,

  “Still loftier than the world suspects,
    Living and dying.

  “Here’s the top-peak; the multitude below
    Live, for they can, there: 
  This man decided not to Live but Know—­
    Bury this man there? 
  Here—­here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
    Lightnings are loosened,
  Stars come and go."[A]

[Footnote A:  A Grammarian’s Funeral.]

No human effort goes to waste, no gift is delusive; but every gift and every effort has its proper place as a stage in the endless process.  The soul bears in it all its conquests.

  “There shall never be one lost good!  What was, shall live as before;
    The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
  What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
    On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round."[B]