Put up thy sword again; I pray thee, do! Faust. The past is past-there leave it then; Margaret. No, thou must longer tarry! I'll tell thee how each thou shalt bury; The places of sorrow Make ready to-morrow; Must give the best place to my mother, The very next to my brother, Me a little aside, But make not the space too wide! And on my right breast let the little one lie. No one else will be sleeping by me. But I shall have it no more-no, never! Make haste! make haste! No time to waste! Save thy poor child! Quick! follow the edge Of the rushing rill, Over the bridge And by the mill, Then into the woods beyond On the left where lies the plank Over the pond. Seize hold of it quick! To rise 'tis trying, It struggles still! Faust. Bethink thyself, pray! A single step amd thou art free! Margaret. Would we were by the mountains! See! There sits my mother on a stone, And her head is constantly swaying; She beckons not, nods not, her head falls o'er; She slept that we might take pleasure. O that was bliss without measure! Faust. Since neither reason nor prayer thou hearest, Margaret. Let go! No violence will I bear! Take not such a murderous hold of me! I once did all I could to gratify thee. Faust. The day is breaking! Dearest! dearest! Margaret. Day! Ay, it is day! the last great day breaks in! Tell no one thou hast been with Margery! Alas for my garland! The hour's advancing! Meph. [appears without]. Up! or thou'rt lost! The morn flushes the sky. Idle delaying! Praying and playing! My horses are neighing, They shudder and snort for the bound. Margaret. What's that comes up from the ground? He! He! Avaunt! that face! What will he in the sacred place? He seeks me ! Faust. Thou shalt live! Margaret. Great God in heaven! Unto thy judgment my soul have I given! Meph. [to Faust]. Come! come! or in the lurch I leave both her and Voice [from within, dying away]. Henry! Henry! So ends the Faust-the Faust, that is to say, as it stands without that afterthought of the author, the Second Part. What we have given, certainly is conceived and written with power. How-not simply by imagination born in the soul of the poet, but through experience acquired by the man of the world-Goethe was qualified to write it, one does not like to conjecture. There it is, however produced; it is far from pleasing poetry, but that it has a degree of passion in it is, we think, beyond gainsaying. The very end of it all, however, seems to us weak and unsatisfactory. The first part so ending did leave a kind of demand for a second part—to supply a completion that was lacking. But the completion that was lacking, the second part actually added does not supply; the sense of want remains. Faust, in the second part, becomes still more obviously Goethe--and still more obviously an irredeemable egotist. He marries Helen, her of Troy, revived! This strange phantasmagoric contrivance of the author's seems to have been intended as an allegory vaguely shadowing forth the idea that Goethe united in himself the romanticism of the middle ages with the classicism of antiquity. We have expressed and implied a low æsthetic and ethical estimate of the Faust. Some readers may naturally question with themselves: "Has not our author been unduly influenced by Philistine or Puritan narrowness? Has he capacity enough of liberal comprehension to judge justly the masterpiece of a genius like Goethe?" We may properly, therefore, support ourselves by citing two authorities not to be suspected of Hebraistic perverseness. Coleridge, under the immediate imminency of Goethe's living renown, spoke severely as follows (he had been urged to translate the Faust): "I debated with myself whether it became my moral character to render into English-and so far, certainly, lend my countenance to-language, much of which I thought vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous. I need not tell you that I never put pen to paper as a translator to Faust." Emerson, while living, was reported in the newspapers as expressing distaste for the Faust on the ground of its moral offensiveness. Is the Faust, then, not a great poem? To pronounce it, as we do, the unworthy work of a great poet, honors Goethe more. A great poet, then, Goethe was? One who might have been a great poet, let us, correcting ourselves, rather say. Goethe needed only to be a great man; and it was goodness that chiefly lacked to greatness in Goethe. He loved not wisely but too well-HIMself. His life was a reduction to absurdity of the idea of self-culture as a proper supreme aim of human endeavor. The "Pyramid of his Being" was a stately structure, but it was founded on sand. Faust had been overreached by Mephistopheles. X. SCHILLER. 1759-1805. FEW men probably ever have had a hungrier "avidity of fame" than that which all his life long stung the soul of Friedrich Schiller. Few, again, are the men whose posthumous satisfaction of desire has been as ample as his. To be permanently the favorite poet of a great historic nation, a nation constantly growing greater, is surely an overflowing reward of endeavor; and this reward is Schiller's. But his reward, large as it is, is not larger than was his endeavor. He died prematurely at forty-five, almost literally self-consumed with the ardors of his own inextinguishable spirit. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was born the son of a gardener. His father was the highly loyal servant of a German duke, the Duke of Würtemberg. This duke patronized the elder Schiller, together with the hopeful boy, Friedrich-in a manner much to the distaste and discomfort of the latter. He had founded a military academy; and in this he graciously offered gratuitous education for the lad. Such an offer from such a source was equivalent to a mandate, and it had to be accepted. Young Schiller was, therefore, duly immured in the ducal military school, and there subjected to the cast-iron regimen which then usually prevailed in establishments of the sort. The eager bird beat hard against the bars of his cage-in vain. Some eight dreary years were thus passed, and the boy became a man of twenty-one, when, having previously tried and abandoned the study of law for a profession, he took unwilling degree as army surgeon. But he had meantime cultivated literature in secret. It was pitiful, the starvation diet of books on which the poor young student was fain to feed his hungry mind. Out of these, and out of his own soul, with experience of life and observation of life so narrow and so small, he had excogitated a work which was to set all Germany in a blaze. His first draft of this, written as it were in blood and fire, he finished when he was nineteen years of age. It was not till two years after that the drama referred to, The Robbers, was published. Two years again elapsed, and this play was put upon the stage at Mannheim. The youthful author went clandestinely to see it, and, being detected, was placed under military arrest for a fortnight in consequence. That duke's government was watchfully paternal. All German conservatism was shocked by The Robbers. One functionary solemnly declared that had he been the Supreme Being, and had he foreknown that the world, if created, would have The Robbers written in it, he should never have created the world! But young Germany gave a great leap of the heart in response to The Robbers. From so much painstaking patronage on the part of his ducal lord, Schiller was ungrateful enough to abscond. Taking refuge, under a feigned name, in a neighboring principality, he went on producing plays in somewhat the same line of literary art with The Robbers. The fugitive young author soon got back to Mannheim. Here he found employment somewhat to his taste, in connec |