All partial beauty was a pledge
    Of beauty in its plenitude: 
    But since the pledge sufficed thy mood,
    Retain it! plenitude be theirs
    Who looked above!

“O sharp despair! but since the joys of earth fail me, I take art.  Art gives worth to nature; it stamps it with man.  I’ll take the Greek sculpture, the perfect painting of Italy—­that world is mine!”

“Then obtain it,” said the voice:  “the one abstract form, the one face with its one look—­all they could manage.  Shall I, the illimitable beauty, be judged by these single forms?  What of that perfection in their souls these artists were conscious of, inconceivably exceeding all they did?  What of their failure which told them an illimitable beauty was before them?  What of Michael Angelo now, who did not choose the world’s success or earth’s perfection, and who now is on the breast of the Divine?  All the beauty of art is but furniture for life’s first stage.  Take it then.  But there are those, my saints, who were not content, like thee, with earth’s scrap of beauty, but desired the whole.  They are now filled with it.  Take thy one jewel of beauty on the beach; lose all I had for thee in the boundless ocean.”

“Then I take mind; earth’s knowledge carries me beyond the finite.  Through circling sciences, philosophies and histories I will spin with rapture; and if these fail to inspire, I will fly to verse, and in its dew and fire break the chain which binds me to the earth;—­Nay, answer me not, I know what Thou wilt say:  What is highest in knowledge, even those fine intuitions which lead the finite into the infinite, and which are best put in noble verse, are but gleams of a light beyond them, sparks from the sum of the whole.  I give that world up also, and I take Love.  All I ask is leave to love.”

“Ah,” said the voice, “is this thy final choice?  Love is the best; ’tis somewhat late.  Yet all the power and beauty, nature and art and knowledge of this earth were only worth because of love.  Through them infinite love called to thee; and even now thou clingest to earth’s love as all.  It is precious, but it exists to bear thee beyond the love of earth into the boundless love of God in me.”  At last, beaten to his last fortress, all broken down, he cries: 

    Thou Love of God!  Or let me die,
    Or grant what shall seem heaven almost. 
    Let me not know that all is lost,
    Though lost it be—­leave me not tied
    To this despair—­this corpse-like bride! 
    Let that old life seem mine—­no more—­
    With limitation as before,
    With darkness, hunger, toil, distress: 
    Be all the earth a wilderness! 
    Only let me go on, go on,
    Still hoping ever and anon
    To reach one eve the Better Land!