FAUST. For me this mountain mass rests nobly dumb; I ask not whence it is, nor why 'tis come? Herself when Nature in herself did found This globe of earth, she then did purely round; The summit and abyss her pleasure made, Mountain to mountain, rock to rock she laid; The hillocks down she neatly fashion'd then, To valleys soften'd them with gentle train. Then all grew green and bloom'd, and in her joy She needs no foolish spoutings to employ. MEPHISTOPHELES. So say ye! It seems clear as noon to ye, Yet he knows who was there the contrary. I was hard by below, when seething flame Swelled the abyss, and streaming fire forth came; When Moloch's hammer forging rock to rock, Far flew the fragment-cliffs beneath the shock: Of masses strange and huge the land was full; Who clears away such piles of hurl'd misrule? Philosophers the reason cannot see; There lies the rock, and they must let it be. We have reflected till ashamed we've grown; The common folk can thus conceive alone, And in conception no disturbance know, Their wisdom ripen'd has long while ago: A miracle it is, they Satan honour show. My wanderer on faith's crutches hobbles on Towards the devil's bridge and devil's stone. [138] The great American poet made his pilgrimage to the mountain so beautiful in the distance, thinking to find there the men of equal elevation. Did not Milton describe Freedom as 'a mountain nymph?' To myself I oft recount The tale of many a famous mount,-- Wales, Scotland, Uri, Hungary's dells; Roys, and Scanderbergs, and Tells. Here Nature shall condense her powers, Her music, and her meteors, And lifting man to the blue deep Where stars their perfect courses keep, Like wise preceptor, lure his eye. To sound the science of the sky. But instead of finding there the man using those crags as a fastness to fight pollution of the mind, he searched the region round And in low hut my monarch found: He was no eagle, and no earl;-- Alas! my foundling was a churl, With heart of cat and eyes of bug, Dull victim of his pipe and mug. [139]