Canst thou by falsehood or by flattery Make me one moment with myself at peace, Cheat me into tranquillity? Come then And welcome, life's last day. Make me but to the moment say, O fly not yet, thou art so fair, Then let me perish, &c. But this condition is never fulfilled. Faust cannot be content with sensuality, with the charlatanry of ambition, nor with riches. His heart never becomes callous, nor his moral and intellectual perceptions obtuse. He is saved at last. With the progress of an individual soul is shadowed forth that of the soul of the age; beginning in intellectual scepticism; sinking into license; cheating itself with dreams of perfect bliss, to be at once attained by means no surer than a spurious paper currency; longing itself back from conflict between the spirit and the flesh, induced by Christianity, to the Greek era with its harmonious development of body and mind; striving to reembody the loved phantom of classical beauty in the heroism of the middle age; flying from the Byron despair of those who die because they cannot soar without wings, to schemes however narrow, of practical utility,--redeemed at last through mercy alone. The second part of Faust is full of meaning, resplendent with beauty; but it is rather an appendix to the first part than a fulfilment of its promise. The world, remembering the powerful stamp of individual feeling, universal indeed in its application, but individual in its life, which had conquered all its scruples in the first part, was vexed to find, instead of the man Faust, the spirit of the age,--discontented with the shadowy manifestation of truths it longed to embrace, and, above all, disappointed that the author no longer met us face to face, or riveted the ear by his deep tones of grief and resolve. When the world shall have got rid of the still overpowering influence of the first part, it will be seen that the fundamental idea is never lost sight of in the second. The change is that Goethe, though the same thinker, is no longer the same person. The continuation of Faust in the practical sense of the education of a man is to be found in Wilhelm Meister. Here we see the change by strongest contrast. The mainspring of action is no longer the impassioned and noble seeker, but a disciple of circumstance, whose most marked characteristic is a taste for virtue and knowledge. Wilhelm certainly prefers these conditions of existence to their opposites, but there is nothing so decided in his character as to prevent his turning a clear eye on every part of that variegated world-scene which the writer wished to place before us. To see all till he knows all sufficiently to put objects into their relations, then to concentrate his powers and use his knowledge under recognized conditions,--such is the progress of man from Apprentice to Master.