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upon him, and only wishes that the pang may be short. During this time Margaret has been disconsolate about the absence of her lover; no evil thoughts assail her, though she is alone with her sorrow. The simple duties of the household prevent her from falling a prey to despair, and at her spinning-wheel she utters her grief in a simple song :—

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Ilis noble form,

His bearing high,
His mouth's sweet smile,
His mastering eye;

And the magic flow
Of his talk, the bliss
In the clasp of his hand,
And, oh, his kiss!
My peace is gone,
My heart is sore;
'Tis gone for ever

And evermore.
For him doth my bosom
Cry out and pine;
Oh, if I might clasp him,
And keep him mine!

And kiss him, kiss him,
As fain would I,
I'd faint on his kisses,
Yes, faint and die!'

The simple

The lovers meet again in Martha's Garden. maiden has now learned so much by her sorrow that she knows the cause of Faust's unhappiness to be want of faith. She therefore catechises him, in her simple manner, on his faith. To her all consolation seems naturally to come from a simple belief in the doctrines of the Church. But that is just what Faust has all cast aside. Nevertheless, Margaret feels that she is wholly his. There is an irresistible charm in this scene. The planet of love is on high; there is no cloud, no breath of wind; all is peace and love and happiness. Then, like a thunderbolt from the bright sky, comes the scene of Margaret at the Well. The simple girl is mourning for the loss of her innocence, and this prepares us for her repentance before the image of the Virgin. The scene by the well shows us Margaret in her position towards the world; the Zwinger scene shows us her position towards God. In the Death of Valentine is vividly depicted the position of Faust both towards God and man. Valentine is but a rough soldier, who has no nice ideas about manners; but he knows how to keep his honour, and his dear sister's disgrace

gives him the deepest heart-stab of all. From this scene of horror Margaret takes refuge in the cathedral, to which her naturally pure mind leads her. But here a full consciousness" of her guilt comes upon her. She feels terrified at her own thoughts, and swoons away. Faust, on the other hand, being once sullied by crime, is hurried away to the Walpurgis-night. The May-day Night is clearly divisible into three parts. Ascending the Brocken, we rise from a lower scene of bestiality to a higher one. On entering the enchanted sphere, Faust is at first filled with better feelings by the aspect of nature, but these are soon suppressed by Mephistopheles, who desires nothing but a broomstick. The witch Baubo, as the representative of shamelessness, introduces them into the second circle. Baubo was the nurse of Demeter, who, by her indecent behaviour and conversation, excited the laughter of the goddess when she was mourning for the loss of her children. In the second circle, the General, Minister, and Parvenu are introduced, canting that all is vanity, and clamouring that the world should be fashioned according to their wishes, instead of accommodating themselves to it. Lilith opens the third circle, which is that of the lowest sensual enjoyment. According to the Rabbinical tradition, Lilith was a wife of Adam, whom God created of earth, before Eve. But having quarrelled with Adam, she ran away and became an evil spirit. In her beautiful hair a large number of devils are said to have taken up their abode. Goethe, as the fragments show, intended to carry out this scheme of the Walpurgis-night, and the final scene exists fully written out. In it Satan appears on his throne and receives the homage of his faithful, after which a human sacrifice is offered to the evil spirit. In all this mad confusion and licentiousness of the Walpurgis-night, Faust begins to think of his love, and this one thought prevents him, in all this degradation, from sinking entirely. He is beside himself, when he hears, in the next scene, that Margaret is a wretched prisoner under sentence of death. On magic horses he hastens with Mephistopheles to her rescue. They pass by the Ravenstone:--

Faust. What weave they yonder round the Ravenstone?

Meph. Can't tell what mess they have on hand.

Faust. They wave up, they wave down, they are swaying and stooping.

Meph. A witches' guild.

Faust. They strew and make libation.

Meph. Push on! push on!

This is like a picture by Rembrandt.

And now we come to the concluding scene, where we see Margaret for the last time.

Her reason gone, conscious of guilt

and shame; and through all this, bright as when we first saw her, shines the natural innocence of her heart. She is ready to suffer, determined not to go with the man she loves, trembling to look upon him, whilst that one is with him.

Let us cast a final look upon this picture, which man never looked on without weeping. On the one side a man, who in his pride would know what held the world together in its inmost core, put to shame by the child on the other side, and that child guilty in the eyes of the world. What has become of Faust? Where are his mighty impulses? Mr. Martin has translated all the scenes in the Margaret with unusual truth and feeling. He has been especially felicitous in this last-giving to English readers no imperfect representation, not only of the tenderness and beauty of the original, but also of the power of the genius which can raise a peasant girl condemned for infanticide into a teacher of eternal lessons, and make her cell the scene of conflict between the good and evil influences which have power on the race of man.

We have left out the Intermezzo, which only interrupts the development of the drama. This intermezzo, a mere parenthesis, has become a very paradise for commentators. We only add the commonly received interpretation of some of the personages. The Purist is Johann Campe, of Robinson celebrity; the Weathercock alludes to the Stolbergs; Hennings was a Danish Hofrath, who had written against the Xenien, a puffing periodical which had just ceased to exist; Inquisitive Traveller, Nicolai; Crane, Lavater; Worldling, Goethe himself. The rest of the couplets apply to the various philosophical and political parties mentioned in the headings. It is apparent that each epigram is not spoken by the person indicated in the heading, but that some must be taken as reflections on that person.

It is rather curious that A. W. von Schlegel should have pretended, in conversation with Mr. Hayward, not to recollect all the allusions in the intermezzo. He knew them well enough, and it seems more likely that his pretended ignorance was an instance of that petty spite which he indulged in against the great poet, who had called him a jackanapes (Maulaffe).

Whether the second part of Faust be an elaborate mistake, as Mr. Lewes has called it, or not, the fact remains that Goethe did write a second part. We do not think that this second part is unworthy of the great poet, and in fact we think quite otherwise, and trust that Mr. Martin will yet give us a translation of the whole poem, the first part of which he has rendered in such an admirable manner.

ART. V.-Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. Macmillan & Co., 1866.

It is not too much to say that the great conflict, even of distinctively Christian faith in the present day, must be more and more, not with Theism or Deism, but Atheism itself, and Atheism of no common order,--not an Atheism that revolts cultivated men by its coarseness and alienates earnest men by its levity, but Atheism allied with manly and courageous science; Atheism contending for its right to a warm glow of spiritual feeling; Atheism speaking humbly of Nature as the great teacher; Atheism courting poetry as the fountain of all pure delight. And when we speak of Atheism, we do not mean, of course, the positive denial of a God, for all the intellectual scepticism of the day is learning true modesty, and asserting its own ignorance, rather than denying anything. Nay, many of the most learned and eminent men, whose teaching is morally and spiritually, as we believe, though not intellectually indistinguishable from Atheism-because they take the utmost pains to extinguish trust in the love of a personal Father,--earnestly deny the imputation of intellectual Atheism, which they feel to be an absurdity. Thus a distinguished man of science, to whom the world has much reason to be grateful, and by the side of whom the most eminent men may feel their inferiority, Professor Huxley, has recently been teaching working men that there is but one kind of knowledge, and but one method of acquiring it;' that that kind of knowledge makes' scepticism the highest of duties, blind faith the one unpardonable sin,'—all faith being described as 'blind' which accepts anything on any kind of authority but that of scientific experience. He describes the true religion as worship, "for the most part of the silent sort," at the altar of the Unknown and Unknowable,' and proclaims 'justification, not by faith, but by verification," as the gospel of modern science. But Professor Huxley warmly repudiates Atheism as being at least as absurd as Polytheism, though it is clear that he does so on the intellectual ground of the marvellous unity and order of nature; for all his teaching is expressly directed to extinguish the spiritual instinct of trust, regarding the spiritual world from which Christ took the veil as a vacuum, and the kingdom of God within us, which He came to rule, as a kingdom of dreams. We should be very sorry to ignore a distinction to which the persons most concerned attach any importance, and

1 See the remarkable Lay Sermon,' first read by Professor Huxley to a working class meeting, on Sunday evening, at St. Martin's Hall, and published in the Fortnightly Review for the 15th January.

it is obviously unfair to use a term supposed to convey moral opprobrium, of any one who rejects it for himself. But as regards the only aspects in which we care to discuss the matter at all, an absolute rejection of the principle of spiritual trust is a denial, not indeed of the God of the universe, but of the God of the human soul, and will work therefore as a total eclipse of God in all moral and spiritual concerns. Again, we find in the present day a school, as we fear we must call it, growing up, of refined, discriminating, and at least, for the purpose of intellectual and poetic nuances, very delicate criticism, the most modern tendencies of which we may take as represented by the writer, said, we believe truly, to be a young man just starting on his intellectual career, who criticised Coleridge in the last number of the Westminster Review. This school of thought, taking its departure from a spirit and purpose as different as possible from that of the men of pure science, indeed, expressing an almost supercilious contempt for the mob, expresses also a joy unspeakable, which its members pet in themselves, in gazing on the delicate colouring and beauty of those spiritual petals which the natures of the gifted few, who are favoured by fine soil and finer culture, put forth here and there, to distinguish themselves from the dim common populations.' Yet they too describe the Christian faith as an enthusiasm which is evidence only of rare moral possibilities in man, not of any God of unfathomable love. If this school is to gain ground, we shall have even the wonder and bloom of the world' turning against God, and preferring to trace their descent downwards to a root of clay, instead of upwards to the eternal glory of the heavens. Now, when high-minded scientific men set up their altar at Charing Cross to a not only Unknown but Unknowable' God, and the democratic secularists of the Westminister Review sacrifice their radicalism for the sake of an alliance with an intellectual aristocrat almost an intellectual exquisite-only because he has disburdened himself of God, it is time for Christians to reflect somewhat seriously how they have managed to combine against them-first, the aristocracy of science, most worthily represented by Professor Huxley-explaining, as we have seen it said, between the bursts of music selected from Haydn's Creation, that, in the beginning, the Spirit of the Unknown and Unknowable' brooded on the face of the waters, saying, 'Let light be, and light was ;'-next, the men of the working class secularists themselves, who went in numbers to hear Professor Huxley's eloquent and thoughtful scepticism;-finally, the aristocracy of poetic feeling, as represented by the intellectual critic, who, for this purpose only, was permitted to recommend, in an able democratic Quarterly, a higher appreciation of those 'remote, refined, in

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