Then, thrilled with this thought, he breaks forth into a most noble description—new in English poetry, new in feeling and in thought, enough of itself to lift Browning on to his lofty peak—first of the joy of God in the Universe he makes incessantly by pouring out of himself his life, and, secondly, of the joy of all things in God. "Where dwells enjoyment there is He." But every realised enjoyment looks forward, even in God, to a new and higher sphere of distant glory, and when that is reached, to another sphere beyond—
thus climbs
Pleasure its heights for ever and for ever.
Creation is God's joyous self-giving. The building of the frame of earth was God's first joy in Earth. That made him conceive a greater joy—the joy of clothing the earth, of making life therein—of the love which in animals, and last in man, multiplies life for ever.
So there is progress of all things to man, and all created things before his coming have—in beauty, in power, in knowledge, in dim shapes of love and trust in the animals—had prophecies of him which man has realised, hints and previsions, dimly picturing the higher race, till man appeared at last, and one stage of being was complete. But the law of progress does not cease now man has come. None of his faculties are perfect. They also by their imperfection suggest a further life, in which as all that 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