of Dr. Faustus extant, and that poems and plays had already been written on the subject. If, some time hence, a grand philosophical epic should develop itself out of the street burletta of Punch and Judy, it will not be more original, more startling to the world, than the wonderful mystery of Faust, to which the common melo-drama gave birth.

A man devotes himself to magic, and, to accomplish certain ends, sells his soul to the devil. Who is the man? What tempts him to his desperate destiny? To attain what object does he eternally doom himself? What is the bribe by which the fiend secures his prey? Who is Faust? What manner of individual is it, who, that he may accomplish his own ungovernable will, thus sets the powers of heaven and hell at defiance, and courts eternal perdition as if it were a blessing? Is it a lover burning for possession-a merchant mad for gold-a statesman lustful of power- a soldier ambitious of universal empire? Who thus, to satisfy their unconquerable impulses, are willing to "dare damnation" in the life to come? Not one of all these. Goethe's Faust is merely an old schoolmaster-an old, worn out, disgusted schoolmaster; this is the man whom the fiend has but to tempt with a boundless promise of physical and mental gratification, to destroy forever.

Let us look at the character a little more closely. There is nothing vague in the conception - Faust is the eternal type of a mind in which the equilibrium between human ambition and human ability is destroyed; a mind which is disgusted with the insufficiency of all human knowledge; which has mastered successively, (and that not superficially but professionally,) each branch of human science, and has discovered, with despair and disgust, that human progress in every path is limited by its limited intelligence; that the territory of the human intellect forms, in fact, but a fragment of the domain of infinite wisdom; that it is bounded about on all sides as by a wall of adamant, and that by no study, and by no exertion, can a human spirit break the fetter which binds him within this insurmountable barrier. It is a mind which has refused to piece out with faith, the deficiencies of knowledge; in which the silver link, call it hope, faith, trust, or aught else by which alone the finite may be connected with the infinite, has been broken. Faust, in a word, is a man who is disgusted with the insufficiency of man. He is a gray-haired schoolmaster, who has spent his life in the pursnit of all the sciences, and who at last awakes to find not a single doubt resolved, not a single certain and accurate advantage at

tained, not a single victory over the eternal obstacles to human advancement achieved,-while in the life long dream of knowledge and power, in the hopeless chase after the elusive and fleeting form of science, he has neglected the opportunities of happiness he has found no leisure to taste the cup which life and pleasure proffer in vain to the ambitious — and discovers, at last, that he has squandered his life without obtaining a result, and stands without a single scientific longing gratified, not an inch nearer infinite wisdom, while at the same time his pent up passions, long concealed but not extinguished by the ashes and dust of a self-mortifying seclusion, are glowing like a furnace below.

Hear his own words. We take the opening scene. alone in his study :

"Here have I, philosophy,
Jurisprudence, and medicine,
And, alas! theology,

Studied through with eager zeal.
And here I stand-miserable fool-
And am just as wise as I was before-
And am called Doctor, Magister, even.
And now am pulling, for the tenth year,
Up and down, straight and crooked,
My scholars about by the nose-
And see that we can know nothing!

Faust is

This it is which will consume my heart within me.
To be sure I am wiser than all the fools,
Doctors, magisters, scribes, and priests-

I am tormented neither by scruples nor doubts;
Fear neither hell nor the devil.

But, therefore, all joy has been wrested from me,

Cannot even imagine that I know any thing really;
Besides, I have neither lands, nor gold,

Nor honor, nor splendor of the world.

No dog would live longer thus !

Therefore have I devoted myself to magic,

In hope that through spirit's power and mouth,

Many a secret might be revealed to me

That I may discover what the world

In its innermost bosom contains;

Behold all efficient

powers and seeds,

And peddle no longer with words alone."

* We would observe that we have had but one object in our translations, both of Goethe's prose and verse. We have endeavored to give the matter, as nearly as possible, word for word, and as far as may be, in the exact order in which the text is arranged. Of course we have made no attempt at versification or elegance.

By the power of his incantations he invokes a spirit. A moment he is daunted by the awful apparition; but, inspired with enthusiasm by the mysterious and exulting song of the spirit, (which it is idle to attempt to render into English,) he springs forward, exclaiming

"Thou who thus girdest about the broad world, Busy spirit, how near do I feel myself to thee!"

To which the spirit scornfully replies

"Thou equall'st the spirit whom thou comprehendest,
Not me!"

and disappears.

Faust, (in amazement.)

"Not thee!

Whom then?

I, the image of the Divinity!
And not even like to thee!"

The shock throws him back into the despair which possessed him at the commencement of the scene. His thoughts again revert to the "cui bono;" that question which contains so much of the philosophy of the poem-the inferiority of human nature, and the futility of its ambition, force themselves upon his reflection, at the departure of the spirit.

"The Gods I equal not! too deeply do I feel it;
The worm I equal, who writhes through the dust;
Who, as in dust self nourishing, he lives,
The wanderer's foot annihilates and buries
Is it not dust from which this lofty wall
From all its hundred shelves is narrowed;
The trash, which, with its thousand fripperies,
Confines me closely in this mothy world?
Shall I find here that which I lack?

Shall I perhaps read in a thousand books,
(That men have evermore distress'd themselves,)
That here and there has been a happy one?
What dost thou grin to me,* thou hollow skull,
But that thy brain, like mine, was ever erring,
Sought the bright day, and in the twilight dark,
With hopes for truth, most miserably blundered."

In despair, Faust clutches a vial of poison, with which he is about to end his sufferings, and resolve his doubts; when a strain of holy music breaks upon his ear; the chorus in the

NO. IX.

* i. e. "What do you express to me by your grinning."

5

street on Easter morning. Recollections of his childhood and early devotion, throng upon him; for the moment, religious and humble feelings get the better of him, and the scene closes with the beautiful Easter hymn.

We shall endeavor to quote as little as we possibly can. Every page of the whole poem, seems to us like a revelation; and moreover every line is perfect as a piece of versification. As to our translations, we have no pretension or ambition about them-wishing merely to present the extracts which we must unavoidably give, as nearly as possible, word for word-to take up the original. No translation, however, can give more than a faint idea of the original; for besides the strong nationality which hinders its naturalization in a foreign tongue, one of its minor excellencies, (and splendid must the poem be, in which this excellence is but a minor one,) is that from first to last, it is perhaps the most perfect model of versification, and of every kind of versification, which exists in any language. This excellence, however, it is evident, must vanish like a subtle vapor in the crucible of translation. To strip poetry of its form, and to give its substance transmuted into another tongue, is indeed a hopeless and a thankless task.

We wish to examine the two characters of Faust and Mephistopheles to note the compact between the two, and the struggle between the two opposite principles of human nature, which it embodies; and to observe the objects of Faust in making the compact, and the manner in which Mephistopheles fulfilled his part of it. With the dramatic action of the piece, with the order and succession of the scenes, we have nothing to do.

The

The great subject of wonder, in Faust that which makes the poem seem more like a leaf torn from an apocalypse than the production of a human being—is the portraiture of these two main personages, Faust and Mephistopheles. They are the separate embodiments of the two principles which exist, mixed in every human nature; the bestial and the angelic. buman existence has been analyzed into its two grand components, and under the wizard hands of the poet, these two great elements assume the semblance and the voice of human beings. The one is a man in reality; a wise, proud, ambitious, discontented man, and is called Faust. The other is a fiend in human shape, a sneering, denying, despising, and perfectly placid fiend, and is called Mephistopheles.

We have already introduced Faust. The reader has seen that he embodies the angelic principle of humanity—the aspiring.

He has seen, too, that his ambition has been checked in its career, by the inferiority of its human intelligence. The spirit has been neutralized by the clay, and the consequence has been, disappointment and disgust. The pendulum swings back to the farthest extreme-the angel vanishes, and behold Mephistopheles !

How many and what attempts have been made to delineate a devil, we know not. We know only that Goethe's is an unexampled and unrivalled creation. Mephistopheles, in one word, we consider the greatest conception in poetry, since Shakspeare. Shakspeare could have done any thing. He never happened, however, to draw a devil, although Iago comes pretty near one; and we sincerely believe the task to have been above the calibre of every other poet that ever lived. Mephistopheles, as far as we know, is the only portrait of the devil which mortal ever drew. Milton's Satan has nothing to do with the question. A glorious, a sublime creation certainly, but not the devil. Satan is the incarnation of pride, of ambition, of disappointed pride, of reckless ambition-but he is still "naught less than archangel ruined." He is a fallen spirit, a melancholy, desperate, energetic, ambitious, daring angel-a "lost cherub." Mephistopheles, on the contrary, is the real, original devil-the quintessence of the bestial, the vile, the little, the loathsome in human nature, extracted, condensed, and embodied. There is nothing of the cherub about him. "Pride and worse ambition," constitute not the elements of his existence. Now let any one strip off the double and treble robes of vanity in which we are evermore masked even to ourselves, descend resolutely to the very bottom of his own nature, and see whether there be not some principle there more degrading, more anti-angelic, more bestial, than pride or ambition, and out of which the devil should be more properly compounded. Who is there, if he descend deep enough, and look resolutely enough about the dark recesses of his own inferior nature, that will not find them overflowing with little feelings, filthy vices-dark caverns, in short swarming with bats, and toads, and foul things, that shun the light of day; and who, when by such self examination he does become aware of the envy, uncharitableness, sensuality, vanity, and above all, contempt, which are such strong ingredients of his nature, will not acknowledge that Mephistopheles, the spirit who ever denies and despises the embodiment of the human bestial, is not a bolder, a truer, and a sublimer impersonation of the arch-enemy, than the fallen archangel of Paradise Lost. But it is unneces