“In that, I mistook the conditions of life.  I did not see our barriers; nor that progress is slow; nor that every step of the past is necessary to know and to remember; nor that, in the shade of the past, the present stands forth bright; nor that the future is not to be all at once, but to dawn on us, in zone after zone of quiet progress.  I strove to laugh down all the limits of our life, and then the smallest things broke me down—­me, who tried to realise the impossible on earth.  At last I knew that the power I sought was only God’s, and then I prayed to die.  All my life was failure.

“At this crisis I met Aprile, and learned my deep mistake.  I had left love out; and love and knowledge, and power through knowledge, must go together.  And Aprile had also failed, for he had sought love and rejected knowledge.  Life can only move when both are hand in hand: 

                love preceding
    Power, and with much power, always much more love: 
    Love still too straitened in its present means,
    And earnest for new power to set love free. 
    I learned this, and supposed the whole was learned.

“But to learn it, and to fulfil it, are two different things.  I taught the simple truth, but men would not have it.  They sought the complex, the sensational, the knowledge which amazed them.  And for this knowledge they praised me.  I loathed and despised their praise; and when I would not give them more of the signs and wonders I first gave them, they avenged themselves by casting shame on my real knowledge.  Then I was tempted, and became the charlatan; and yet despised myself for seeking man’s praise for that which was most contemptible in me.  Then I sought for wild pleasure in the senses, and I hated myself still more.  And hating myself I came to hate men; and then all that Aprile taught to me was lost.

“But now I know that I did not love enough to trace beneath the hate of men their love.  I did not love enough to see in their follies the grain of divine wisdom.

    To see a good in evil, and a hope
    In ill-success; to sympathise, be proud
    Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim
    Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
    Their prejudice and fears and cares and doubts;
    All with a touch of nobleness, despite
    Their error, upward tending all though weak.

“I did not see this, I did not love enough to see this, and I failed.

“Therefore let men regard me, who rashly longed to know all for power’s sake; and regard Aprile, the poet, who rashly longed for the whole of love for beauty’s sake—­and regarding both, shape forth a third and better-tempered spirit, in whom beauty and knowledge, love and power, shall mingle into one, and lead Man up to God, in whom all these four are One.  In God alone is the goal.

“Meanwhile I die in peace, secure of attainment.  What I have failed in here I shall attain there.  I have never, in my basest hours, ceased to aspire; God will fulfil my aspiration: