hat was unfinished in the animals suggested man, so also
that which is unfinished in us suggests ourselves in higher place and
form. Man's self is not yet Man.

We learn this not only from our own boundless desires for higher life,
and from our sense of imperfection. We learn it also when we look back
on the whole of nature that was before we were. We illustrate and
illuminate all that has been. Nature is humanised, spiritualised by us.
We have imprinted ourselves on all things; and this, as we realise it,
as we give thought and passion to lifeless nature, makes us understand
how great we are, and how much greater we are bound to be. We are the
end of nature but not the end of ourselves. We learn the same truth when
among us the few men of genius appear; stars in the darkness. We do not
say--These stand alone; we never can become as they. On the contrary, we
cry: All are to be what these are, and more. They longed for more, and
we and they shall have it. All shall be perfected; and then, and not
till then, begins the new age and the new life, new progress and new
joy. This is the ultimate truth.

"And as in inferior creatures there were prognostics of man--and here
Browning repeats himself--so in man there are prognostics of the future
and loftier humanity.

August anticipations, symbols, types
Of a dim splendour ever on before
In that eternal cycle life pursues.
For men begin to pass their nature's bound--

ceaselessly outgrowing themselves in history, and in the individual
life--and some, passionately aspiring, run ahead of even the general
tendency, and conceive the very highest, and live to reveal it, and in
revealing it lift and save those who do not conceive it.

"I, Paracelsus," he cries--and now Browning repeats the whole argument
of the poem--"was one of these. To do this I vowed myself, soul and
limb.

"But I mistook my means, I took the wrong path, led away by pride. I
gazed on power alone, and on power won by knowledge alone. This I
thought was the only note and aim of man, and it was to be won, at once
and in the present, without any care for all that man had already done.
I rejected all the past. I despised it as a record of weakness and
disgrace. Man should be all-sufficient now; a single day should bring
him to maturity. He has power to reach the whole of knowledge at one
leap.

"In that, I mistook the conditions of life. I did not see our barriers;
nor that progress is slow; no