sand-hill near his palace, the residence of an old couple who have charge of a little chapel on the downs. Mephistopheles endeavors to implicate him in the guilty seizure of this Naboth’s vineyard, but is again baffled. Faust, become blind, finds a clearer light dawning upon his spirit: while the workmen are employed upon the canal which completes his great work, he perceives that he has created free and happy homes for the coming generations of men, and the fore-feeling of satisfied achievement impels him to say to the passing Moment: “Ah, still delay,—thou art so fair!” When the words are uttered, he sinks upon the earth, dead.
The struggle of Mephistopheles with the angels for the possession of Faust’s soul, and a scene in Heaven, where Margaret appears, like Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso, as the spiritual guide of her redeemed lover, close the drama. Although the condition of the compact has been fulfilled, Mephistopheles loses his wager. In willing the Bad, he has worked the Good: the “obscure aspiration” in Faust’s nature has lifted itself, through Love, Experience, the refining power of the Beautiful, and beneficent activity, to more than an instinct, to a knowledge of “the one true way.” The Epilogue in Heaven carries us back to the Prologue, and indicates to us, through a wondrous, mystic symbolism, the victorious vitality of Good and the omnipotence of the Divine Love.
Briefly, then, Act I. represents Society and Gov-
