was not necessary to select words which, while they are intended to suggest one signification, are such as not to exclude a different and sometimes even an opposed meaning -nay, which latter meaning, if I have been skilful enough in conveying what I believe my author to have meant, will, when attention is directed to it, but not till then, appear to have been from the beginning such as ought to have awakened suspicion to more being meant than at first met the ear. In the temptation scene, for instance :

Sights shalt thou see, that man hath never seen.'

It is clear that words might be easily selected which would better express the thought which Mephistopheles wishes Faustus to receive from this very ambiguous promise; yet I think such a translation would exclude somewhat of the half-aside meaning of the passage, from which we seem to learn that the promise was from the first intentionally deceptive that from something either in the nature of the gifts themselves, or else in the nature or character of the being to whom they are offered, the result will be a mockery of the hopes excited. I have chosen an instance that does not very perfectly illustrate what I mean; but I cannot, without destroying the effect of the passages to which I more particularly allude, distinctly point them out. I

would only say, that I have observed in the disquisitions of those writers who have endeavoured to exhibit the infinite matter of Faust *," something

*"The various attempts to continue the infinite matter of Faust where Goethe drops it, although in themselves fruitless and unsuccessful, at least show in what manifold ways this great poem may be conceived, and how it presents a different side to every individuality. As the sunbeam breaks itself differently in every eye, and the starred heaven and nature are different for every soul-mirror, so it is with this immeasurable and exhaustless poem. We have seen illustrators and continuers of Faust, who, captivated by the practical wisdom which pervades it, considered the whole poem as one great collection of maxims of life: we have met with others who saw nothing else in it but a pantheistical solution of the enigma of existence; others, again, more alive to the genius of poetry, admired only the poetical clothing of the ideas, which otherwise seemed to them to have little significance; and others, again, saw nothing peculiar but the felicitous exposition of a philosophical theory, and the specification of certain errors of practical life. All these are right; for from all these points of view Faust is great and significant: but whilst it appears to follow these several directions as radiations from a focus, at the same time it contains (but for the most part concealed) its peculiar, truly great, and principal direction; and this is the reconcilement of the great contradiction of the world, the establishment of peace between the Real and the Ideal. No one who loses sight of this, the great foundation of Faust, will find himself in a condition we do not say to explain or continue, but even to read and comprehend the poem. This principal basis underlies all its particular tendencies the religious, the philosophical, the scientific, the practical; and for this very reason is it, that the theologian, the scholar, the man of the world, and the student of philosophy, to what

of an unreasonable desire to exact from the translator, in each particular passage, more than what a due consideration of the relation of those passages to the entire drama would warrant. Something of this fault pervades the whole of a very able article on the subject of Faust, by a native of Germany, in Curry's Dublin University Magazine. In the manifold varieties of purpose more or less obscurely manifested in Faust, this writer sees but one; and that which he every where sees and demands a translator to exhibit, is yet, like the Achilles of the Iliad, allowed to be absent even from the reader's thoughts through the greater part of the work, and is so imperfectly suggested, that I am not sure in what way the solution of the problem, the reconcilement of the Ideal with the Real for such we are told is the object of the poet, -is at last effected. I would not willingly be supposed to undervalue the paper of which I speak on the contrary, I have derived much instruction from it; and the conductors of the publication in which it appeared will be doing some service to the students of Goethe's works, if they are enabled to procure

ever school he may belong, are all sure of finding something to interest them in this all-embracing production.”*. - HAYWARD, pp. vi. —viii.

*From a German Review.

the promised continuation of Mr. Zander's commentary on Faustus.

The true and only difficulty of Faust is the subject itself. The author, building on the old nursery story, has made use of the legend to exhibit the position of Man in a world, which, if considered by itself, is insufficient for his happiness. The problem to be solved is the same that forms the subject of every one of Southey's great moral poems, where freedom and happiness, broken and interrupted by surrounding circumstances, is at last secured. "The last best friend is Death." In Southey, the triumph is every where anticipated; of the life, which is to be for immortality, the birth has already commenced; the poet expresses his own faith not alone in the ultimate predominance of Good for this who can disbelieve? - but in its present predominance; so that the disturbing mysteries of sin and pain, and all that haunts and disquiets us in the contemplation and the experience of life, while they still remain unexplained, seem as if their very existence was but some strange delusion - a something to pass away. The witchcraft of Thalaba is a dream. the faith of the hero is an enduring thing; the thrones of penal fire in Kehama, firm as their foundations are fixed in Padalon, are felt to be but unsubstantial pageant

--

ry; but is there not a life, permanent, endurable, eternal, for the constancy of Ladurlad and the love of Kailyal? But in all there is the same struggle for life in an element felt not to be the natural one: in all Death comes as the reconciling angel — to every one of his heroes is the same support given in every one of his poems is the same lesson taught.

In the parts of Goethe's drama published during his life, the same problem was presented, but no solution was even suggested; at least, I remember but one passage in which it could be anticipated how the poet solves the difficulties which, in his drama, are still more complicated, than in the poems I have just mentioned, by his hero becoming the victim of every artifice of the tempter. In that passage it seems to be obscurely intimated that the victim will finally escape from the toils that while the desire for good continues, man cannot utterly fall that sin is but the error of one wandering in permitted darkness - that evil known as evil will cease to be that increase of light is, in fact, all that man wants to release him from error and perplexity; for if I rightly understand my author, it cannot properly be called sin. If this be Goethe's creed, I have little hesitation in describing it as "vain wisdom all, and false philosophy." The in