Thither I sent the great looks which compel
Light from its fount: all that I do and am
Comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised,
Remembered or divined, as mere man may."[B]

[Footnote B: _The Ring and the Book_--_The Pope_, 1285-1289.]

The last words indicate a suspicion of a certain defect in knowledge,
which is not recognized in human love; nevertheless, in these earlier
poems, the poet does not analyze human nature into a finite and
infinite, or seek to dispose of his difficulties by the deceptive
solvent of a dualistic agnosticism. He treats spirit as a unity, and
refuses to set love and reason against each other. Man's _life_, for the
poet, and not merely man's love, begins with God, and returns back to
God in the rapt recognition of God's perfect being by reason, and in the
identification of man's purposes with His by means of will and love.

"What is left for us, save, in growth
Of soul, to rise up, far past both,
From the gift looking to the giver,
And from the cistern to the river,
And from the finite to infinity
And from man's dust to God's divinity?"[C]

[Footnote C: _Christmas-Eve_.]

It is this movement of the absolute in man, this aspiration towards the
full knowledge and perfect goodness which can never be completely
attained, that constitutes man.