“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
* * * * *
Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena:
* * * * *
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”
No such verses had ever been heard on the English stage before, and this was one of the great debts our language owes to Marlowe. He first taught it what passion and fire were in its veins. The last scene of the play, in which the bond with Lucifer becomes payable, is nobly conceived. Here the verse rises to the true dramatic sympathy of which I spoke. It is swept into the vortex of Faust’s eddying thought, and seems to writhe and gasp in that agony of hopeless despair:—