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; nor that every step of the past is necessary to know and to remember; nor that, in the shade of the past, the present stands forth bright; nor that the future is not to be all at once, but to dawn on us, in zone after zone of quiet progress. I strove to laugh down all the limits of our life, and then the smallest things broke me down—me, who tried to realise the impossible on earth. At last I knew that the power I sought was only God's, and then I prayed to die. All my life was failure.
"At this crisis I met Aprile, and learned my deep mistake. I had left love out; and love and knowledge, and power through knowledge, must go together. And Aprile had also failed, for he had sought love and rejected knowledge. Life can only move when both are hand in hand:
love preceding
Power, and with much power, always much more love:
Love still too straitened in its present means,