Faust contains the great idea of his life, as indeed there is but one great poetic idea possible to man—the progress of a soul through the various forms of existence.

All his other works, whatever their miraculous beauty of execution, are mere chapters to this poem, illustrative of particular points. Faust, had it been completed in the spirit in which it was begun, would have been the Divina Commedia of its age.

But nothing can better show the difference of result between a stern and earnest life, and one of partial accommodation, than a comparison between the Paridiso and that of the second part of Faust. In both a soul, gradually educated and led back to God, is received at last not through merit, but grace. But O the difference between the grandly humble reliance of old Catholicism, and the loophole redemption of modern sagacity! Dante was a man, of vehement passions, many prejudices, bitter as much as sweet. His knowledge was scanty, his sphere of observation narrow, the objects of his active life petty, compared with those of Gœthe. But, constantly retiring to his deepest self, clearsighted to the limitations of man, but no less so to the illimitable energy of the soul, the sharpest details in his work convey a largest sense, as his strongest and steadiest flights only direct the eye to heavens yet beyond.

Yet perhaps he had not so hard a battle to wage, as this other great poet. The fiercest passions are not so dangerous foes to the soul as the cold scepticism of the understanding. The Jewish demon assailed the man of Uz with physical ills, the Lucifer of the middle ages tempted his passions; but the Mephistopheles of the eighteenth century bade the finite strive to compass the infinite, and the intellect attempt to solve all the problems of the soul.

This path Faust had taken: it is that of modern necromancy. Not willing to grow into God by the steady worship of a life, men would enforce his presence by a spell; not willing to learn his existence by the slow processes of their own, they strive to bind it in a word, that they may wear it about the neck as a talisman.

Faust, bent upon reaching the centre of the universe through the intellect alone, naturally, after a length of trial, which has prevented the harmonious unfolding of his nature, falls into despair. He has striven for one object, and that object eludes him. Returning upon himself, he finds large tracts of his nature lying waste and cheerless. He is too noble for apathy, too wise for vulgar content with the animal enjoyments of life. Yet the thirst he 

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