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DEDICATION.^[1]

AGAIN ye come, ye hovering Forms! I find ye,
As early to my clouded sight ye shone!
Shall I attempt, this once, to seize and bind ye?
Still o'er my heart is that illusion thrown?
Ye crowd more near! Then, be the reign assigned ye,
And sway me from your misty, shadowy zone!
My bosom thrills, with youthful passion shaken,
From magic airs that round your march awaken.

Of joyous days ye bring the blissful vision;
The dear, familiar phantoms rise again,
And, like an old and half-extinct tradition,
First Love returns, with Friendship in his train.
Renewed is Pain: with mournful repetition
Life tracks his devious, labyrinthine chain,
And names the Good, whose cheating fortune tore them
From happy hours, and left me to deplore them.

They hear no longer these succeeding measures,
The souls, to whom my earliest songs I sang:
Dispersed the friendly troop, with all its pleasures,
And still, alas! the echoes first that rang!

↑ This first scene has the character of a Prologue to the Second Part of Faust, the action of which commences with the following scene. An indefinite period of time separates the two parts of the drama. Neither in his own life nor in his poetical creations did Goethe ever give space to remorse for an irrevocable deed. When Faust disappears with Mephistopheles, all his later torture of soul has been already suggested to the reader, and nothing of it can properly be introduced here, where the whole plan and scope of the work is changed.

Goethe firmly believed in healthy and final recovery from moral as from physical hurt: his remedial agents were Time and Nature. In Riemer's collection of Brocardica I find the following fragment:—

Nichts taugt Ungeduld,
Noch weniger Reue:
Jene vermehrt die Schuld,
Diese schafft neue.

'Impatience is of no service, still less Remorse. That increases the offence, this creates new offences.) He overcame his own great sorrows by temporarily withdrawing from society and surrendering himself to the influences of Nature; and we are to suppose that Faust repeats this experience. The healing process is symbolized in this opening scene, wherein the elves represent the delicate, mysterious agencies through which Nature operates on the human soul. Ariel—who was Poetry in the Intermezzo of the Walpurgis-Night—here takes the place of Oberon as leader of the elves, possibly because the soul capable of a poetic apprehension of Nature is most open to her subtle consolations..

VOL. I

I

[1] This first scene has the character of a Prologue to the Second Part of Faust, the action of which commences with the following scene. An indefinite period of time separates the two parts of the drama. Neither in his own life nor in his poetical creations did Goethe ever give space to remorse for an irrevocable deed. When Faust disappears with Mephistopheles, all his later torture of soul has been already suggested to the reader, and nothing of it can properly be introduced here, where the whole plan and scope of the work is changed.

Goethe firmly believed in healthy and final recovery from moral as from physical hurt: his remedial agents were Time and Nature. In Riemer's collection of Brocardica I find the following fragment:—

Nichts taugt Ungeduld,
Noch weniger Reue:
Jene vermehrt die Schuld,
Diese schafft neue.

'Impatience is of no service, still less Remorse. That increases the offence, this creates new offences.) He overcame his own great sorrows by temporarily withdrawing from society and surrendering himself to the influences of Nature; and we are to suppose that Faust repeats this experience. The healing process is symbolized in this opening scene, wherein the elves represent the delicate, mysterious agencies through which Nature operates on the human soul. Ariel—who was Poetry in the Intermezzo of the Walpurgis-Night—here takes the place of Oberon as leader of the elves, possibly because the soul capable of a poetic apprehension of Nature is most open to her subtle consolations..

[1]