Meph. Well, henceforth your amusement is the task
To which my powers and talents I must bring-
Only, since life is an uncertain thing,

Two lines in writing I'll be bold to ask.

Faust. What, Pedant, must thou have a writing too.
Unused with honest men to have to do,
Let it suffice thee that my spoken word

Shall bind my soul like a recorded vow;
Though in this reckless world it seems absurd
That forms of promise should appal me now.
Yet such a weakness still the heart retains,

So unresolv'd, enslav'd, our feeble minds.
Ah, happier those where stedfast Truth remains,
And late repentance no admission finds;
But a sealed bond, in vulgar eyes, maintains

Its rank with bugbears and portentous signs.
Well, pens must supersede the word,
Which wax and parchment can record.
Come, demon, bring thy tablets on,
Thy paper, parchment, ore, or stone;
With chisel, pencil, or, with quill
I'll write, to me 'tis all the same.

Meph. Nay, thus your dazzling rhetoric still
Shoots far beyond its mark and aim-
Come, any scrap you please is good,
Just sign it with a drop of blood.

Faust. Well, well, I'm in the yielding mood,
So pray play out your silly game.
Meph. 'Tis a strange juice this ink of ours.
Faust. Well, fear not but I hold my vow.
The earnest aim of all my powers,
Is that which I have promis'd now.
Once I aspired, but now despair

To loftier rank than thine to rise-
The loftier spirit mock'd my prayer,

And nature's secrets mock my eyes.
My thread of thought is snapp'd in twain--
My sicken'd heart finds knowledge vain-

And now, let passion sound and try

The very inmost depths of feeling,
From mystery's secret veil revealing,

The wonders that beneath it lie.

Adown the stream, now rushing by,

Of time and change, our bark shall fly

And so let joy and care,

And fortune and despair,

Succeed, and arrive, and depart as they can,

But action and change are existence for man.

Meph. No bounds nor limits you shall have,
But sip and nibble where you will,

Give each caprice in turn its fill,
And help yourself to what you crave,

Only, set to at once, I want employment

Faust. Listen, I do not ask thee for enjoyment;
I ask for agitation, I would know

Pain, hate, and love, the stimulus of wo.
My love of science cured hath left a void,
Where every passion is a welcome guest,
And all man ever suffered or enjoyed,

I would embrace within my single breast.
His spirits heights and depths attain and sound
His joys concentrate, all his anguish bear,
Expand my soul to his extremest bound,

And wreck'd at last, his endless ruin share.
Meph. Oh, trust to me, for ages year by year

I've fed to fulness on these fruits unblest.
No man between the cradle and the bier
This ancient leaven ever can digest.
Believe me, friend, for God alone

Was this great universe design'd

Eternal light surrounds his throne,

But we in darkness are confined,
Senseless of day and night and blind.

This

It is worthy of remark, that the character of Mephistopheles is in general represented as absolutely passionless, and this exclamation, "oh trust to me," &c. is the only instance in which he shows any thing like pathos or gentle feeling. was the moment, perhaps, when goodness might have taken the evil one at advantage-might have breathed with a warm and kindly breath on his frozen sympathies, and favored the incipient thaw, by whispering in his ear those well known words of Nature's sweetest spokesman.

Old Nickie Ben

Oh wad ye tak a thot an men',
Ye aiblins might, I dinna ken,
Still hae a stake.

I'm wae to think upon yon den
Even for your sake.

These ideas may be erroneous, but it is not amiss to indulge them, for with such grains of allowance should evil always be represented, and we ought not to admit into our minds even its abstract idea undiluted. Satan, in his own right, may be entitled to no indulgence; but for humanity's sake we ought to show him some; and if we must paint him, we should as much as possible flatter the resemblance. Southey's painter in this respect was decidedly wrong, who set him off for the multitude,

With his teeth and his grin, with his fangs and his scale,
And that, the identical curl of his tail,

Till he had the old wicked one quite.

One other instance occurs toward the end of the work, where Mephistopheles is thrown a little off his guard, or af fects to be so, and appears to be in a passion, and even goes so far as to regret that he is deprived of the usual resource of angry people, of venting their spite by giving themselves to the Devil, by the circumstance of being the Devil himself. But to pursue

Faust. I heed you not.

Meph.

"Tis brave and plain.
But life is short, and art is long,

And chiefly there your views are wrong.
But would you some instruction gain,
Call in a poet, let the wings

Of fancy for his thoughts be spread,
To scan the powers of living things,

And heap the choicest on your head-
The Lion's heart and hardihood-

The Chamois' swiftness in the course-
The Italian's fiery flowing blood-

The Northmen's more enduring force.
The art of joining in one mind
Greatness and cunning, let him find-
And how a young romantic man
May fall in love by rule and plan.

Why such an one I too were fain to see,
Whom I should call a World's Epitome.
Faust. What am I then, if thus debarr'd

From seizing on the crown and prize,
That hang in sight and mock my eyes.
Meph. Why thou art-even what thou art-
Put on perukes of million locks,
Or prop thyself with ell-high socks,
Still art thou-even what thou art.

Faust. I feel it-vainly hath my soul amass'd

Of human thought each richest store and gem;
For when array'd in all, I pause at last,

No spirit or refreshment springs from them.
I am not raised in stature nor in thought,
Nor to Infinity the nearer brought.

Mcph. Mine honest friend, your views of things
With other thinkers' views may suit;
But practice yet some comfort brings,
And life is not so bare of fruit.

Why what the devil, this head, these hands,
And feet and limbs at least are thine,

And is not all which ready stands

To serve my ends, as good as mine.

If I've six horses ready here,

I count as mine their speed and
And make as well my swift career,

power,

As if my legs were twenty-four.
But come, lay all these thoughts aside,

Let's seek the open world and wide.

And note this well, the man of thought and doubt,

Is like a beast, on barren heaths and dry,

By some infernal spirit nosed about,

While all around him verdant meadows lie.

In these lines, the irregularities of the rhyme follow the order of the original exactly, and those of the metre very nearly, which is a slavish and mechanical fashion of translating, but on the whole the safest. It is the Chinese tailor's principle, of copying into the new coat the rents and patches of the old one, the poor fellow could not trust himself to judge where it had been slashed for ornament, and where it had suffered from carelessness or ill usage. One course or the other must be adopted, either to make a free translation, as it is called, in which case the result will be a new poem, which must depend for its merits on those of the soi-disant translator but actual author; or to adhere faithfully, through good and evil report, to the actual original letter and text: in this case the copy is like the print of a man in the snow, tolerably accurate as far as it goes, and giving you the general ideas of length and breadth nearly enough, but not remarkable for grace, expression, warmth, coloring, or perspective.

The above dialogue results in Faust's acquiescence in Mephistopheles' proposals, and they resolve to depart and see the world together; but just at this moment a youth presents himself to be enrolled among the doctor's scholars, and to make his personal acquaintance. Mephistopheles, while Faust is preparing for his journey in his dressing room, takes his gown and personates him, and amuses himself with astonishing the boy with some unintelligible rhapsodies about the choice of a profession, talking very learnedly, but so as to make the point in question the darker for every sentence. Yet there is a vein of sincerity through the whole, because he has no objection to truth when it serves his purpose, and here in some respects it does so. His leading principle seems to be a realizing sense of the close union, and hand in hand connection, that wisdom maintains with sorrow, and of the ultimate inanity and insufficiency of human science. In urging the boy to study, therefore, he argues con amore; he bids him improve his time; reminds him that it flies fast, and he must take no holidays, but increase and store up knowledge. He seems to trust to future occasion to improve this knowledge for his own evil purposes, by misdirection, and to make its sweet fountains pour out bitter waters; in the meantime he talks for all the world like the unexceptionable chairman of an education society, and finishes by writing in the scholar's common-place book an old quotation from himself-Ye shall be as gods, knowing both good and evil.

Their adventures now begin. The first is a tavern scene, with which Faust is forthwith disgusted; the next is a visit to a witch, where he drinks the liquor of rejuvenescence, and falls in love with a magic figure in a mirror, and shortly upon this follows his introduction to Margaret. Her character is beautiful beyond comparison, far beyond imitation or any attempts at translating. Her devoted love for Faust-her instinctive horror of his companion-her misfortunes, madness, crimes, and imprisonment, from which she refuses to be released by the instrumentality of the fiend, and the supernatural voice which proclaims to the baffled lover and tempter, as they retire, that she is saved, though we are left to infer that she dies upon the scaffold, all these make a moving and mighty picture; but bold indeed must be the hand that would copy it. In the action of the piece few other characters are introduced, and those that are, besides these three principal ones, though original certainly and masterly, do not belong to that characteristic order of thought which pervades those of Faust and Mephistopheles, and which distinguishes this poem from all the other productions of men. The scene on the Blocksberg has nothing to do with the main action of the piece, it is a sort of independent interlude, and besides it has been translated by Shelley. The present article, therefore, will be dismissed with a few extracts from the second number of the Foreign Review, where the general scope of the poem and these two principal characters are admirably touched on, by a writer whose Germanized tastes and habits of thought, give a peculiar zest and interest to his eloquent contributions to that able, but now extinct periodical, and to the Foreign Quarterly in which it is merged.

"Faust is emphatically a work of Art; a work matured in the mysterious depths of a vast and wonderful mind: and bodied forth with that truth and curious felicity of composition, in which this man is generally admitted to have no living rival. To reconstruct such a work in another language; to show it in its hard yet graceful strength; with those slight witching traits of pathos or of sarcasm, those glimpses of solemnity or terror, and so many reflexes and evanescent echoes of meaning, which connect it in strange union with the whole Infinite of Thought, -were business for a man of different powers than has yet attempted German translation among us. In fact, Faust is to be read not once but many times, if we would understand it: every line, every word has its purport; and only in such minute