Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.
God's gift was that man shall conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help till he reach fact indeed?"A
A: A Death in the Desert.
"Progress," the poet says, is "man's distinctive mark alone." The endlessness of the progress, the fact that every truth known to-day seems misknown to-morrow, that every ideal once achieved only points to another and becomes itself a stepping stone, does not, as in his later days, bring despair to him. For the consciousness of failure is possible in knowledge, as in morality, only because there has come a fuller light. Browning does not, as yet, dwell exclusively on the negative element in progress, or forget that it is possible only through a deeper positive. He does not think that, because we turn our backs on what we have gained, we are therefore not going forward; nay, he asserts the contrary. Failure, even the failure of knowledge, is triumph's evidence in these earlier days; and complete failure, the unchecked rule of evil in any form, is therefore impossible. We deny
"Recognized truths, obedient to some truth
Unrecognized yet, but perceptible,—
Correct the portrait by the living face,
Man's God, by God's God in the mind of man."A