The circle of the Earth is known to me,
What's on the other side we can not see.
As Dame Care leaves him she breathes on his eyelids and makes him blind. But the inner light is not quenched. His hunger for life still unabated, he summons up all his energy and orders out an army of workmen to complete a great undertaking on which he has set his heart. On the edge of his domain, running along the distant foot-hills, is a miasmatic swamp which poisons the air and renders the land uninhabitable. He proposes to drain the swamp and thus create a home for millions yet to come.
His imagination ranges forward, picturing a free, industrious, self-reliant people swarming on the land that he has won from the sea and made fit for human uses. In the ecstasy of altruistic emotion he exclaims: "Such a throng I would fain see, standing with a free people on a free soil; I might say to the passing moment, 'Pray tarry, thou art so fair.' The traces of my earthly life can not pass away in eons." That same instant he sinks back to earth—dying.
Is there in all literature anything finer, grander, more nobly conceived? What follows—the conflict of the angels and devils for the final possession of Faust's soul—need not detain us long. We know how that will turn out. Indeed, the shrewd old Devil, while he goes through the form of making a stiff fight for what he pretends to think his rights, knows from the first that his is a losing battle. While he is watching the body of Faust to see where the soul is going to escape, the angels appear in a glory, bearing roses as their only weapon. With these they put the Devil and his minions to rout and bear away the dead man's soul to the Holy Mountain, singing their triumphal chant—
Wer immer strebend sich bemüht,
Den können wir erlösen.
THE TRAGEDY OF FAUST
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
Characters in the Prologue for the Theatre.
THE MANAGER. THE DRAMATIC POET. MERRYMAN.
Characters in the Prologue in Heaven.