upon my page. Fortunately, however, the path my story assumes is of such
a nature, that in order to effect this object, I shall never have to
desert, and scarcely again even to linger by, the way.

Every one knows the magnificent moral of Goethe's "Faust!" Every one
knows that sublime discontent--that chafing at the bounds of human
knowledge--that yearning for the intellectual Paradise beyond, which
"the sworded angel" forbids us to approach--that daring, yet sorrowful
state of mind--that sense of defeat, even in conquest, which Goethe has
embodied,--a picture of the loftiest grief of which the soul is capable,
and which may remind us of the profound and august melancholy which the
Great Sculptor breathed into the repose of the noblest of mythological
heroes, when he represented the God resting after his labours, as if
more convinced of their vanity than elated with their extent!

In this portrait, the grandeur of which the wild scenes that follow in
the drama we refer to, do not (strangely wonderful as they are) perhaps
altogether sustain, Goethe has bequeathed to the gaze of a calmer and
more practical posterity, the burning and restless spirit--the feverish
desire for knowledge more vague than useful, which characterised the
exact epoch in the intellectual history of Germany, in which the poem
was inspired and produced.

At these bitter waters, the Marah of the streams of Wisdom, the soul
of the man whom we have made the hero of these pages, had also, and not
lightly, quaffed. The properties of a mind, more calm and stern than
belonged to the visionaries of the Hartz and the Danube, might indeed
have preserved him from that thirst after the impossibilities of
knowledge, which gives so peculiar a romance, not only to the poetry,
but the philosophy of the German people. But if he rejected the
superstitions, he did not also reject the bewilderments of the mind. He
loved to plunge into the dark and metaphysical subtleties which human
genius has called daringly forth from the realities of things:--

"To spin

A shroud of thought, to hide him from the sun

Of this familiar life, which seems to be,

But is not--or is but quaint mockery

Of all we would believe;--or sadly blame

The jarring and inexplicable frame

Of this wrong world: and then anatomize

The purposes and thoughts of man, whose eyes

Were closed in distant years; or widely g