“Take all in a word:  the truth in God’s breast
  Lies trace for trace upon ours impressed: 
  Though He is so bright and we so dim,
  We are made in His image to witness Him."[A]

[Footnote A:  Christmas-Eve.]

The Pope recognizes clearly the inadequacy of human knowledge; but he also recognizes that it has a Divine source.

  “Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun;
  Thither I sent the great looks which compel
  Light from its fount:  all that I do and am
  Comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised,
  Remembered or divined, as mere man may."[B]

[Footnote B:  The Ring and the Book—­The Pope, 1285-1289.]

The last words indicate a suspicion of a certain defect in knowledge, which is not recognized in human love; nevertheless, in these earlier poems, the poet does not analyze human nature into a finite and infinite, or seek to dispose of his difficulties by the deceptive solvent of a dualistic agnosticism.  He treats spirit as a unity, and refuses to set love and reason against each other.  Man’s life, for the poet, and not merely man’s love, begins with God, and returns back to God in the rapt recognition of God’s perfect being by reason, and in the identification of man’s purposes with His by means of will and love.

  “What is left for us, save, in growth
  Of soul, to rise up, far past both,
  From the gift looking to the giver,
  And from the cistern to the river,
  And from the finite to infinity
  And from man’s dust to God’s divinity?"[C]

[Footnote C:  Christmas-Eve.]

It is this movement of the absolute in man, this aspiration towards the full knowledge and perfect goodness which can never be completely attained, that constitutes man.

  “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 mis-known;
  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 shall conceive of truth
  And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
  As midway help till he reach fact indeed?"[A]

[Footnote A:  A Death in the Desert.]

“Progress,” the poet says, is “man’s distinctive mark alone.”  The endlessness of the progress, the fact that every truth known to-day seems misknown to-morrow, that every ideal once achieved only points to another and becomes itself a stepping stone, does not, as in his later days, bring despair to him.  For the consciousness of failure is possible in knowledge, as in morality, only because there has