plan and its fulfilment. Goethe was fifty-nine years old when the First Part was published, and the years passed by in other labors until he was seventy-five, before the impulse to complete the Second Part returned to him.
In 1824 he gave to Eckermann a programme which he had prepared for the completion of Wahrheit und Dichtung. It contained a prose outline of the continuation of Faust, and Eckermann wrote in reply: “Whether this plan of Faust should be communicated or held in reserve, is a doubt which can only be solved after the fragments already in existence have been carefully examined, and it is clear whether the hope of completing the work must be given up or not.” This hint seems to have aroused Goethe: the plan was withheld, and the work was commenced, certainly in the following year. The Helena, to which he felt most strongly attracted, received a new interest for him through the idea of representing Byron in the child Euphorion, and the Act was finished in 1826. It was published in 1827, in the fourth volume of “Goethe's Works, with the Author’s Final Revisions,” under the title of “Helena: a Classico-Romantic Phantasmagoria,” and at once excited the greatest interest and curiosity. From Edinburgh to Moscow the European critics seem to have been both delighted and puzzled by it. Carlyle wrote an admirable paper upon it, in which he shows great shrewdness in unriddling its symbolism. The encouragement which such a reception of the single act gave to Goethe, stimulated him anew to complete the work, and for four years longer it became the leading motive of his life.
In the beginning of 1828 the first three scenes of the First Act—Faust’s Awakening, the Emperor’s Court, and the Carnival Masquerade—were published in the twelfth volume of his works, and were received with an enthusiasm equal to that which the Helena called forth. Goethe, now nearly eighty years old, worked slowly and with a laggard power of invention; but he held to his conceptions with the same tenacity as in his earliest literary youth, and suffered no favorable mood of body or mind to pass without adding some lines. The portions already completed were fastened
