rogress towards perfect love on the side of the
heart, and towards an illusive ideal on the side of the intellect.
Knowledge, too, has its value, and he who lived to settle "_Hoti's_
business, properly based _Oun_," and who "gave us the doctrine of the
enclitic _De_," was, to the poet,

"Still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.

"Here's the top-peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there:
This man decided not to Live but Know--
Bury this man there?
Here--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go."[A]

[Footnote A: _A Grammarian's Funeral_.]

No human effort goes to waste, no gift is delusive; but every gift and
every effort has its proper place as a stage in the endless process. The
soul bears in it _all_ its conquests.

"There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, _so_ much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round."[B]

[Footnote B: _Abt Vogler_.]

The "apparent failure" of knowledge, like every apparent failure, is "a
triumph's evidence for the fulness of the days." The doubts that
knowledge brings, instead of implying a defective intelligence doomed to
spend itself on phantom phenomena, sting to progress towards the truth.
He bids us "Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe."

"Rather I prize the doubt
Low kinds exist without,
Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark."[A]

[Footnote A: _Rabbi Ben Ezra_.]

Similarly, defects in art, like defects in character, contain the
promise of further achievement.

"Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature?
In both, of such lower types are we
Precisely because of our wider nature;
For time, their's--ours, for eternity.

"To-day's brief passion limits their range;
It seethes with the morrow for us and more.
They are perfect--how else? They shall never change:
We are faulty--why not? We have time in store."[B]

[Footnote B: _Old Pictures in Florence_.]

Prior to the period when a sceptical philosophy came down like a blight,
and destroyed the bloom of his art and faith, he thus recognized that
growing knowledge was an essential condition of growing goodness.
Pompilia shone with a glory that mere knowledge could not give (if ther