years.” At the close of the Second Part, he makes the aged Faust say:—
31. On earth's fair sun I turn my back.
Here, again, Goethe recalls a phase of his own psychologi- cal experience, which he describes at some length in Wahrheit und Dichtung (Book XIII.). Even before Jerusalem’s suicide at Wetzlar had furnished him with the leading idea of Werther, he had been drawn, by what he calls the gloomy element in English literature,—especially by Hamlet, Young’s Night Thoughts, and the melancholy rhapsodies of Ossian,—to study the phenomena of self-murder and apply them, in imagination, to himself. Among all the instances with which he was acquainted, none seemed to him nobler than that of the Emperor Otho, who, after a cheerful banquet with his friends, thrust a dagger into his heart. “This was the only deed,” he says (and in what follows, I suspect, there is as much Dichtung as Wahrheit), “which seemed to me worthy of imitation, and I was convinced that one who could not act like Otho had no right to go voluntarily out of the world. Through this conviction I rescued myself both from the intention and the morbid fancy of suicide, which haunted an idle youth in those fair times of peace. I possessed a tolerable collection of weapons, wherein there was a valuable, keen-edged dagger. This I placed constantly beside my bed, and, before putting out the light, endeavored to try whether it was possible to pierce my breast, an inch or two deep, with the sharp point. Since, however, the experiment never succeeded, I finally laughed at myself, discarded all hypochondric distortions of fancy, and determined to live.”
32. Chorus of Angels.
In this first chorus I have been forced, by the prime necessity of preserving the meaning, to leave the second line un-
