aven for? All is silver-grey
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse."[A]

[Footnote A: _Andrea del Sarto_.]

Hardly any conception is more prominent in Browning's writings than
this, of endless progress towards an infinite ideal; although he
occasionally manifests a desire to have done with effort.

"When a soul has seen
By the means of Evil that Good is best,
And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven's serene,--
When our faith in the same has stood the test--
Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod,
The uses of labour are surely done,
There remaineth a rest for the people of God,
And I have had troubles enough, for one."[B]

[Footnote B: _Old Pictures in Florence_.]

It is the sense of endless onward movement, the outlook towards an
immortal course, "the life after life in unlimited series," which is so
inspiring in his early poetry. He conceives that we are here, on this
lower earth, just to learn one form, the elementary lesson and alphabet
of goodness, namely, "the uses of the flesh": in other lives, other
achievements. The separation of the soul from its instrument has very
little significance to the poet; for it does not arrest the course of
moral development.

"No work begun shall ever pause for death."

The spirit pursues its lone way, on other "adventures brave and new,"
but ever towards a good which is complete.

"Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn, much to forget
Ere the time be come for taking you."[A]

[Footnote A: _Evelyn Hope_.]

Still the time will come when the awakened need shall be satisfied; for
the need was created in order to be satisfied.

"Wherefore did I contrive for thee that ear
Hungry for music, and direct thine eye
To where I hold a seven-stringed instrument,
Unless I meant thee to beseech me play?"[B]

[Footnote B: _Two Camels_.]

The movement onward is thus a movement in knowledge, as well as in every
other form of good. The lover of Evelyn Hope, looking back in
imagination on the course he has travelled on earth and after,
exclaims--

"I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,
Given up myself so many times,
Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes."[C]

[Footnote C: _Evelyn Hope_.]

In these earlier poems, there is not, as in the later ones, a maimed, or
one-sided, evolution--a p