ot from grief or self-accusation that Faust is to gain new
inspiration. It is from the healing power of Nature--in which Goethe
believed far more than in remorse.

The scene amidst which Faust is now lying reminds one of some Swiss
valley. The rising sun is pouring a flood of golden light over the
snow-fields of the distant mountains and down from the edge of an
overhanging precipice is falling a splendid cataract, such as the
Reichenbach or the Staub-bach, amidst whose spray gradually forms
itself, as the sunshine touches it, an iridescent bow, brightening and
fading, but hanging there immovable. Through this scene are flitting
elfin forms--Ariel and his fays--singing to the liquid tones of Aeolian
harps and lapping Faust's world-worn senses in the sweet harmonies of
Nature, tenderly effacing the memories of the past and inspiring him
with new hopes and new strength to face once more the battle of life.

He watches the rising sun, but blinded by excess of light he turns away,
unable to gaze upon the flaming source of life, as erst he had turned
from the apparition of the Earth-spirit. He seeks to rest his dazzled
eyes in reflected light (a metaphor used, as you may remember, also by
Socrates in the parable of the Cave)--in the sun-lit mountain slopes,
the pine-woods and the glittering walls of rock, and in the colours of
the foam-bow suspended amidst the spray of the swift down-thundering
cataract. In the ever-changing colours but motionless form of this bow
hanging over the downward rush of the torrent Faust finds a symbol of
human life suspended with its ever-varying hues above the stream of
time.

It is one of the truest and the most beautiful of all similitudes, this
of pure sunlight refracted and broken into colours, symbolizing the One
and the Many, the perfect and the imperfect, the eternal and the
temporal. Doubtless you are already thinking of Shelley's magnificent
lines:

The One remains, the Many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly,
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.

Into such variegated scene of reflected and refracted light Faust is now
entering. He has passed through the 'little world' of personal
feeling--the world of the One, of the heart, and he is entering what
Mephistopheles calls the 'greater world' (for greater it appears to be
from the Mephistophelean standpoint)--the world of the 'many,' of