onntagsputz; the pert student and the demure Buergermaedchen with her
new Easter hat and her voluminous-waisted Frau Mama; the sedate
school-master or shopkeeper, leading his toddling child; sour-faced
officials; grey-locked and spectacled professors and 'town-fathers'
discussing the world's news or some local grievance--all flocking
countryward, with some Waldhaus or Forsthaus Restaurant as their
ultimate goal. And those who know Frankfurt will recognize the scene at
once: up there above Sachsenhausen, on the road to the pine-woods and
the Jaegerhaus, from which one sees the whole city lying below one, with
its great Dom and its medieval gates--the river Main gliding through its
midst and glittering away westward toward the Rhine; and in the far
background the Taunus range and the dark Feldberg.

Amidst this scene, externally still the more than middle-aged German
professor (he must be fifty-seven or so) but with a heart full of newly
wakened yearnings for human life with all its joys and passions, Faust
wanders, trying to feel sympathy with all these multitudinous human
beings, attracted perhaps here and there, but evidently for the most
part repelled and discouraged. He has yet to learn that a love for and a
knowledge of humanity, such as he finally reaches, must begin with love
for and knowledge of _one_ human heart.

As he and Wagner return toward the city Faust gives vent to his pent-up
feelings--pours contempt on his own book-learning and wasted life and
expresses his yearnings for Nature, and the longing of his spirit for
wings to fly away into the infinite:

For in each soul is born the rapture
Of yearning upward, and away,
When o'er our heads, lost in the azure,
The lark sends down her thrilling lay,
When over crags and pine-clad highlands
The poising eagle slowly soars,
And over plains and lakes and islands
The crane sails by to other shores.

Whereat Wagner exclaims:

I've had myself at times an odd caprice,
But never yet such impulses as these.
The woods and fields soon get intensely flat,
And as for flight--I never longed for that!

Poor dear Wagner, how well one seems to know thee, with thy purblind
spectacled eyes peering into fusty books and parchments, or bending over
thy crucibles and retorts! Truly a novel and interesting sight it would
be to see _thee_ assuming wings. In thy philosophy there is naught but
dreams of elixirs of life or homuncul