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 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.