for many of them, bedevilled by the madness which vanity, seclusion, and the fumes of an indigestible learning created, gave out in speeches that, in their transmutation of metals, and in their search after the elixir and the philosopher's stone, the assistance of his nether majesty had been politely tendered.
It was out of this credulity that Dr. Faustus, the sorcerer, became so intimate with the devil. Marlowe, one of Shakspeare's contemporaries, first fixed this legend in the drama. But his Faust was a vulgar sorcerer, tempted by a poor devil to sell his soul for the ordinary price of sensual pleasure and earthly glory; and who, when the forfeit comes to be exacted, shrinks with very unheroic whining.
Many German writers have attempted the same legend: they failed. It was reserved for the great leader of the German choir, to inspire, with perpetual life, this thrilling tradition. Goethe seized upon it, not to gratify the curious, but to establish a truce between the ideal of his soul and the actual of his life, which elements had long warred in his bosom with no determinate purpose or goodly end! He travels with his devil along the dusty pathways of life, penetrates into its purlieus of vice, even becomes licentious, blasphemous, and vulgar in holding the mirror up to its changeful scenes, revels in the wine-cups of the Rhine, and runs the whole round of human pleasure and knowledge; but at last, guided by the gentle spirit of Margaret, whose excellence, innocence, Christian faith, and sensitive purity could not bear even the disguised presence of evil, weeks in her an ideal so ethereally pure and consolingly serene, even amid the prisons and tortures of earth, that the seraphs of God welcome her with transporting minstrelsy on the golden lyres, as if she were the very essence of Godhood and grace! This ideal is the object of the devil's hate. Faust would woo her to himself; but Heaven at last divides them; for Faust hath sold himself to the devil, and the sweet presence of Margaret could never dwell, save in unrest, near the dark companion of her love.
The story of Faust is every one's own experience. We burn for more pleasure, knowledge, and power. The fiend promises them if we will sell to him our souls, and then the strife begins.
Solomon has been called the Faust of Scripture. He found the
