proceeding from a single source. Tourists may pick out a
picturesque fragment of its wanderings, and this is well; but perhaps it
is better to find the poetry of its entire career, from its cloudy
cradle to the flats where it loses itself in the ocean.

The first part of 'Faust' is itself the work of more periods than one.
The original conception may belong to Goethe's student days at
Strassburg. He had grown weary of the four Faculties,--alas, even of
theology; he had known a maiden as fair and sweet and simple as
Gretchen, and he had left her widowed of her first love; and there in
Strassburg was the presence of that old Cathedral, which inspired so
terrible a scene in the 'Faust.' From Strassburg he returned to
Frankfort, and no moments of his career of authorship were more fruitful
than these which preceded the first Weimar years. It was in the heart of
the Storm and Stress; it was the time of 'Goetz' and 'Mahomet' and the
'Wandering Jew' and 'Werther' and 'Prometheus.' Here in Faust was
another and a nobler Werther seeking the infinite; here was another
Prometheus, a Titan shackled yet unsubduable. By Goethe's twenty-sixth
year the chief portions of the 'Faust, a Fragment,' published when he
was forty-one, had been written. But two scenes were added in Rome,--one
of these strange in its fantasy, the Witches' Kitchen,--as if to show
that the poet of the North was not quite enslaved by the beauty of
classic art. It was in the last decade of the eighteenth century that
Schiller succeeded in persuading Goethe to open his Faust papers, and
try to recover the threads of his design. Not until 1808, Goethe's
fifty-ninth year, was the First Part published as we now possess it. It
is therefore incorrect to speak of this Part as the work of the author's
youth; even here a series of strata belonging to different periods can
be distinguished, and critics have contended that even in this Part may
be discovered two schemes or plans not wholly in harmony each with the
other.

The first Fragment was written, as has been said, in the spirit of the
Storm and Stress. Goethe was weary of the four Faculties. The magic work
of the time which was to restore vigor and joy to men was _Nature_. This
is the theme of the opening scene of 'Faust.' Among old instruments and
dusty folios and ancestral lumber and brute skeletons, away from Nature
and her living founts of inspiration, the old scholar has found neither
joy nor true knowledge. He op