and carried off with the original dialect. He takes a freedom quite as unwarrantable in the next scene, of which he leaves out an important part, without a word of apology or hint at its existence in the German. It is a prelude, in Heaven. The angels are introduced singing anthems of praise; after which Mephistopheles enters and the conversation which Lord L. G. omits, follows between him and the Creator. It has too direct a bearing on the action of the piece to be thus passed over in dead silence, though it may not be very possible or desirable to render it in English—its familiarity is too decidedly profane and it must get new faults in any version. The only attempt I know of is by Shelley, which can be referred to for proof of what I am saying. With these exceptions, however, it is much to the purpose of that in Job, on which it is evidently modelled. Permission is granted to Mephistopheles to try the strength of his temptations upon Faust, and the scene closes with the extraordinary stage direction, "Heaven shuts and the archangels separate," and Mephistopheles left alone, soliloquizes on the kindness of the Deity in being so affable even with the devil.
I shall attempt the anthem of the angels—it has some indestructible essence in it, and although it has been treated first and last even worse than poor John Barleycorn, ploughed down, tossed to and fro and mangled, no translator I have met with has succeeded in quite extinguishing it.
With kindred spheres in joyous sound.
And brings his first appointed way
In paths of thunder always round.
Angelic powers his sight inspires,
Though none his secret mystery knows,
And rolling spheres and glorious fires
Are glorious as at first they rose.
GABRIEL. . . . .Swift-inconceivably—away—
The earth pursues her rolling flight,
And alternates celestial day
With deep, and chill, and shudd'ring night.
It foams—the ocean—broad and free—
On rocks and shallows far and near—
While hurries an with rocks and sea,
The ever swift revolving sphere.
RAPHAEL. . . .Contending storms through ether sweep,
And sea and land by turns invade,
Yet chained in nature's systems deep,
And still to them subservient made.
