the acorn from the oak. I have imagine my presumption-translated several scenes from both, as the basis of a paper for our journal. I am well content with those from Calderon, which in fact gave me very little trouble; but those from Faust-I feel how imperfect a representation, even with all the license I assume to figure to myself how Goethe would have written in English, my words convey. No one but Coleridge is capable of this work.

'We have seen here a translation of some scenes, and indeed the most remarkable ones, accompanying those astonishing etchings which have been published in England from a German master. It is not bad -- and faithful enough

but how weak! how incompetent to represent Faust! I have only attempted the scenes omitted in this translation, and would send you that of the Walpurgisnacht, if I thought Ollier would place the postage to my account. What etchings those are! I am never satiated with looking at them; and, I fear, it is the only sort of translation of which Faust is susceptible. I never perfectly understood the Hartz Mountain scene, until I saw the etching; and then, Margaret in the summer-house with Faust! The artist makes one envy his happiness that he can sketch such things with calmness, which I only dared look upon once, and which made my brain swim round only to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which I knew that it was figured. Whether it is that the artist has surpassed Faust, or that the pencil surpasses language in some subjects, I know not, or that I am more affected by a visible image, but the etching certainly excited me far more than the poem it illustrated. Do you remember the fifty-fourth letter of the first part of the Nouvelle Héloïse? Goethe, in a subsequent scene, evidently had that letter in his mind, and this etching is an idealism of it. So much for the world of shadows!'

SCENE I. - PROLOGUE IN HEAVEN.

GABRIEL

And swift and swift, with rapid lightness, The adorned Earth spins silently, Alternating Elysian brightness

With deep and dreadful night; the sea Foams in broad billows from the deep

Up to the rocks, and rocks and ocean, Onward, with spheres which never sleep, Are hurried in eternal motion.

MICHAEL

And tempests in contention roar

From land to sea, from sea to land; And, raging, weave a chain of power, Which girds the earth, as with a band. A flashing desolation there

Flames before the thunder's way;
But thy servants, Lord, revere
The gentle changes of thy day.

CHORUS OF THE THREE

The Angels draw strength from thy glance,
Though no one comprehend thee may;
Thy world's unwithered countenance
Is bright as on creation's day.

Enter MEPHISTOPHELES

MEPHISTOPHELES

As thou, O Lord, once more art kind enough

6

To interest thyself in our affairs,
And ask, How goes it with you there be-
low?'

And as indulgently at other times
Thou tookest not my visits in ill part,
Thou seest me here once more among thy
household.

Though I should scandalize this company,
You will excuse me if I do not talk

In the high style which they think fashionable;

You ought not to be too exact with him.

FAUST, MEPHISTOPHELES, and IGNIS-FATUUS, in alternate Chorus

The limits of the sphere of dream,

The bounds of true and false, are
passed.

Lead us on, thou wandering Gleam,
Lead us onward, far and fast,
To the wide, the desert waste.

But see, how swift advance and shift
Trees behind trees, row by row;
How, clift by clift, rocks bend and lift
Their frowning foreheads as we go.
The giant-snouted crags, ho! ho!
How they snort, and how they blow!

Through the mossy sods and stones,
Stream and streamlet hurry down -

A rushing throng! A sound of song Beneath the vault of Heaven is blown!

.

Sweet notes of love, the speaking tones
Of this bright day, sent down to say

That Paradise on Earth is known,
Resound around, beneath, above.
All we hope and all we love
Finds a voice in this blithe strain,

Which wakens hill and wood and rill,

And vibrates far o'er field and vale, And which Echo, like the tale Of old times, repeats again.

To-whoo! to-whoo! near, nearer now

The sound of song, the rushing throng!

Are the screech, the lapwing, and the jay,

All awake as if 't were day?

See, with long legs and belly wide,
A salamander in the brake!
Every root is like a snake,
And along the loose hillside,
With strange contortions through the
night,

Curls, to seize or to affright;
And, animated, strong, and many,
They dart forth polypus-antennæ,
To blister with their poison spume
The wanderer. Through the dazzling
gloom

The many-colored mice, that thread
The dewy turf beneath our tread,
In troops each other's motions cross,
Through the heath and through the moss;
And, in legions intertangled,

The fireflies flit, and swarm, and throng, Till all the mountain depths are spangled.

Tell me, shall we go or stay? Shall we onward? Come along! Everything around is swept

Forward, onward, far away

!

Trees and masses intercept
The sight, and wisps on every side
Are puffed up and multiplied.

Cling tightly to the old ribs of the crag. Beware! for if with them thou warrest In their fierce flight towards the wilderness,

Their breath will sweep thee into dust, and drag

Thy body to a grave in the abyss.

A cloud thickens the night. Hark! how the tempest crashes through the forest!

The owls fly out in strange affright; The columns of the evergreen palaces

Are split and shattered;

The roots creak, and stretch, and groan;

And ruinously overthrown,

The trunks are crushed and shattered By the fierce blast's unconquerable stress. Over each other crack and crash they all In terrible and intertangled fall;

And through the ruins of the shaken mountain

The airs hiss and howl.

It is not the voice of the fountain,
Nor the wolf in his midnight prowl.
Dost thou not hear?

Strange accents are ringing
Aloft, afar, anear;

The witches are singing!
The torrent of a raging wizard song
Streams the whole mountain along.

With what joy would we fly through the upper sky!

We are washed, we are 'nointed, stark naked are we;

But our toil and our pain are forever in vain.

BOTH CHORUSES

The wind is still, the stars are fled,
The melancholy moon is dead;
The magic notes, like spark on spark,
Drizzle, whistling through the dark.
Come away!

VOICES BELOW

Stay, oh, stay!

VOICES ABOVE

Out of the crannies of the rocks, Who calls?