[Footnote B:  Abt Vogler.]

The “apparent failure” of knowledge, like every apparent failure, is “a triumph’s evidence for the fulness of the days.”  The doubts that knowledge brings, instead of implying a defective intelligence doomed to spend itself on phantom phenomena, sting to progress towards the truth.  He bids us “Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe.”

  “Rather I prize the doubt
  Low kinds exist without,
  Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark."[A]

[Footnote A:  Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

Similarly, defects in art, like defects in character, contain the promise of further achievement.

  “Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature? 
    In both, of such lower types are we
  Precisely because of our wider nature;
    For time, their’s—­ours, for eternity.

  “To-day’s brief passion limits their range;
    It seethes with the morrow for us and more. 
  They are perfect—­how else?  They shall never change: 
    We are faulty—­why not?  We have time in store."[B]

[Footnote B:  Old Pictures in Florence.]

Prior to the period when a sceptical philosophy came down like a blight, and destroyed the bloom of his art and faith, he thus recognized that growing knowledge was an essential condition of growing goodness.  Pompilia shone with a glory that mere knowledge could not give (if there were such a thing as mere knowledge).

                “Everywhere
  I see in the world the intellect of man,
  That sword, the energy his subtle spear,
  The knowledge which defends him like a shield—­
  Everywhere; but they make not up, I think,
  The marvel of a soul like thine, earth’s flower
  She holds up to the softened gaze of God."[A]

[Footnote A:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1013-1019.]

But yet she recognized with patient pain the loss she had sustained for want of knowledge.

  “The saints must bear with me, impute the fault
  To a soul i’ the bud, so starved by ignorance,
  Stinted of warmth, it will not blow this year
  Nor recognize the orb which Spring-flowers know."[B]

[Footnote B:  The Ring and the Book—­Pompilia, 1515-1518.]

Further on in the Pope’s soliloquy, the poet shows that, at that time, he fully recognized the risk of entrusting the spiritual interests of man to the enthusiasm of elevated feeling, or to the mere intuitions of a noble heart.  Such intuitions will sometimes guide a man happily, as in the case of Caponsacchi: 

              “Since ourselves allow
  He has danced, in gaiety of heart, i’ the main
  The right step through the maze we bade him foot."[C]

[Footnote C:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1915-1917.]

But, on the other hand, such impulses, not instructed by knowledge of the truth, and made steadfast to the laws of the higher life by a reasoned conviction, lead man rightly only by accident.  In such a career there is no guarantee of constancy; other impulses might lead to other ways of life.