The most important work of his old age is the Second Part of “Faust.” Some portions of it had been written even before the appearance of the First Part; but the work belongs in the main to his latest period. He finished it before his last birthday, and told Eckermann that, this task being done, he would regard the rest of his life as “a pure gift.” “Faust,” therefore, had accompanied him during the entire course of his literary career. In it he had represented all the various phases of evolution through which his thought and character had passed. As a work of art, the Second Part is far inferior to the First. It lacks the unity which is to some extent given to the First Part by Faust’s relation to Gretchen; and it contains a multitude of symbolical ideas, the meaning of which it is hard to unravel. We miss, too, the fire and glow of the scenes conceived in Goethe’s early days, when “Faust” served as the direct imaginative expression of his own tumultuous thoughts and longings. Nevertheless, there are individual passages, especially in the scenes relating to Helen of Troy, full of splendid power; and the idea in which all is summed up is in every way worthy even of the grandest of the original elements of Goethe’s scheme. Before dying, Faust feels that a moment might come to which, with all his heart, he could say, “Oh, stay! thou art so fair!” But it is a moment which Mephistopheles, the representative of the evil in his nature, could never have secured for him. It is a moment of pure delight springing from the contemplation of the results of disinterested labour in the service of humanity. This was Goethe’s last word to the world; the expression of his deepest and most settled conviction. To make selfish joy, as Faust had done, the supreme object of existence--that way lie perpetual evil and misery; to sacrifice self, to bring the will into harmony with ideal law, in all things to think and act in a spirit of love and brotherhood, as Faust, after fierce struggle, learns to do--in that, and in that alone, can man find a life truly fitted to his nature and capable of satisfying his deepest, inmost wants. The idea with which Goethe seeks to solve the problem of “Faust” is the old, yet ever new, doctrine--“He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”