Marlowe's play. But the old framework is still there. Faust renounces book-learning and betakes himself to magic.

   Disgusted with the useless quest after that science which deals only with phenomena and their material causes, he turns to magic, as he does in the old legend; but it is here no diabolic medieval wizardry which shall enable him to summon the devil, for, as we shall see, Faust does not summon the devil; Mephistopheles comes to him uncalled. Goethe has merely used this motive of magic to intimate attainment of perfect knowledge of Nature through the might of genius—that revelation

   of the inner secrets of the universe which he himself, in what he calls the 'Titanic, heaven-storming' period of his life, believed to be attainable by human genius in communion with Nature.

   'Nature and Genius' was the watchword of the followers of Rousseau and the apostles of the Sturm und Drang gospel—a return to and communion with Nature, such as Wordsworth preached and practised, and such as Byron also preached but did not practise. Only to the human spirit in full communion with the spirit of Nature, of which it is a part, are revealed her mysteries. All other means, as Faust tells us, are useless.

   Faust turns from his dreary little world of books and charts and retorts and skeletons. He opens the window and gazes at the moon floating in her full glory through the heaven. His heart is filled with a yearning to be 'made one with Nature,' and in words which remind one of certain lines of Wordsworth he exclaims:

   Then, turning from Nature, he casts once more a look around his dreary cell:

   He takes up the book of the Mystic astrologer Nostradamus and sees in it the sign, or cipher, of the universe. As he gazes a wondrous vision reveals itself: the mystic lines of the cipher seem to live and move and to form one living whole; and in spirit he beholds the Powers of Nature

   ascending and descending and reaching to each other golden vessels filled with the waters of life and wafting with their wings blessing and harmony through the universe.

   And yet from this vision he turns away dissatisfied:

   And from this cipher of the material universe, this vision of inconceivable immensity and infinite diversity, the human spirit which is not content with the dead bones of science and has entered into communion with Nature cannot but turn 

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