AUST._)
Heinrich, I shrink from thee in horror.

MEPH. She is judged.

VOICE FROM ABOVE. She is saved.

MEPH. _to_ FAUST. Here! to me!

[_Disappears with FAUST._

[_A VOICE FROM WITHIN--the voice of GRETCHEN--calls on the
name of him she once loved--of him who has robbed her of
happiness and life itself. Fainter and fainter it calls,
then dies away into silence._

III

GOETHE'S 'FAUST'

PART II

The picture which Goethe has given us in _Faust_ is in its main outlines
the picture of Goethe's own life. The Faust of Part I is the Goethe of
early days--of the Sturm und Drang period--the Goethe of _Werther's
Leiden_, of _Goetz_, of _Prometheus_, of Gretchen, Lotte, Annette,
Friederike and Lili; the Faust of the earlier scenes of Part II is
Goethe at the ducal court of Weimar; the Faust of the _Helena_ is Goethe
in Italy, Goethe at Bologna, standing in ecstatic veneration before what
was then believed to be Raphael's picture of St. Agatha, or wandering
through the Colosseum at Rome, or writing his _Iphigenie_ on the shores
of the Lago di Garda; and the Faust of the last act of all is Goethe
reconciled to life and finding a certain measure of peace and happiness
in his home, in the sympathy of his good-natured but unrefined wife and
of others whom he loved, as well as in his scientific and philosophical
studies--until he seals up the MS. of his great poem and (to use his own
words) 'regards his life-work as ended and rests in the contemplation of
the past,' and then, a few months later, passes away from earth,
murmuring as he dies 'More light!'

It will be remembered that at the end of Part I Faust is dragged away by
Mephistopheles and leaves poor Gretchen to her doom. The fatal axe has
now fallen. Gretchen is dead.

In the opening scene of Part II we find him 'lying on a grassy bank,
worn out and attempting to sleep.' A considerable time has evidently
elapsed--a time doubtless of bitter grief and of the fiercest accusation
against his evil counsellor, that part of his human nature which is
represented by Mephistopheles and from which even in the last hour of
his life (as we shall see) he confesses it to be impossible wholly to
free himself:

Daemonen, weiss ich, wird man schwerlich los.
Das geistig-strenge Band is nicht zu trennen.

'From demons it is, I know, scarce possible to free oneself. The
spiritual bond is too strong to break.'

But it is n