The earthly love of his youth is fulfilled in the dream of metaphysical love, in the dream of a divine woman. The genius creates, at the conclusion of his life, the fulfilment of all longing. It may sound paradoxical, but Faust—like Dante and Peer Gynt—unconsciously sought Margaret in the hurly-burly of the world; not the young girl whom he had seduced and deserted, but the Eternal-Feminine, the purely spiritual love, which in his youth he divined, but destroyed, bound by the shackles of desire. To Dante, to whom life and poem were one, as well as to Goethe-Faust, the memory of first love remained typical of all genuine, profound feeling; with Dante love and Beatrice are identical. In the soul of these two men metaphysical love, the longing for the eternal in woman, which they did not find on earth, gradually awoke to life. Both place the glorified mistress by the side of another woman, the Catholic Queen of Heaven. In Dante's, as well as in Goethe's Paradise two women, a personal one and a universal one, are loved and adored. The second woman, too, has her exclusive, ecstatic worshipper. St. Bernard, the Doctor Marianus of Dante, prostrating himself before her, addresses to her the sublime prayer which begins:
Oh, Virgin! Mother! Daughter of thy Son!
and in Faust we meet again the Doctor Marianus burning—as the representative of the totality of her worshippers—with the "sacred joy of love" (Dante says
The Queen of Heaven for whom my soul
Burns with love's rapture)
and pronouncing the most beautiful prayer to the Madonna which the world possesses, and which is almost identical with Dante's:
Virgin, pure from taint of earth,
Mother, we adore thee,
With the Godhead one by birth,
Queen, we bow before thee!