e in their Art. Goethe laughs with the riotous
revellers, and rejoices with the summer of the vines, and loves the glad
abandonment of woman's soft embraces, and with his last words prays for
Light. But the profound sadness of the great and many-sided master-mind
thrills through and breaks out in the intense humanity, the passionate
despair of Faust; the melancholy and the yearning of the soul are there.

With Tricotrin they were uttered in his music.

* * *

"Let me be but amused! Let me only laugh if I die!" cries the world in
every age. It has so much of grief and tragedy in its own realities, it
has so many bitter tears to shed in its solitude, it has such weariness
of labour without end, it has such infinitude of woe to regard in its
prisons, in its homes, in its battlefields, in its harlotries, in its
avarices, in its famines; it is so heart-sick of them all, that it would
fain be lulled to forgetfulness of its own terrors; it asks only to
laugh for awhile, even if it laugh but at shadows.

"The world is vain, frivolous, reckless of that which is earnest; it is
a courtesan who thinks only of pleasure, of adornment, of gewgaws, of
the toys of the hour!" is the reproach which its satirists in every age
hoot at it.

Alas! it is a courtesan who, having sold herself to evil, strives to
forget her vile bargain; who, having washed her cheeks white with
saltest tears, strives to believe that the paint calls the true colour
back; who, having been face to face for so long with blackest guilt,
keenest hunger, dreadest woe, strives to lose their ghosts, that
incessantly follow her, in the tumult of her own thoughtless laughter.

"Let me be but amused!"--the cry is the aching cry of a world that is
overborne with pain, and with longing for the golden years of its youth;
that cry is never louder than when the world is most conscious of its
own infamy.

In the Roman Empire, in the Byzantine Empire, in the Second Empire of
Napoleonic France, the world, reeking with corruption, staggering under
the burden of tyrannies, and delivered over to the dominion of lust, has
shrieked loudest in its blindness of suffering, "Let me only laugh if I
die!"

* * *

Not as others! Why, my Waif? Is your foot less swift, your limb less
strong, your face less fair than theirs? Does the sun shine less often,
have the flowers less fragrance, does sleep come less sweetly to you
than to them? Nature has b