Such an hour, it is destined, shall arrive, after many long and miserable years, when, aware of the beneficence of living for others and in the imagined prospect of leading, guiding, and guarding a free people upon a free land, Faust shall be willing to say to the moment: "Stay, thou art so fair"; and Mephistopheles shall harshly cry out: "The clock stands still"; and the graybeard shall sink in the dust; and the holy angels shall fly away with his soul, leaving the Fiend baffled and morose, to gibe at himself over the failure of all his infernal arts. But, meanwhile, it remains true of the man that no pleasure satisfies him and no happiness contents, and "death is desired, and life a thing unblest." The man who puts out his eyes must become blind. The sin of Faust is a spiritual sin, and the meaning of all his subsequent terrible experience is that spiritual sin must be--and will be--expiated. No human soul can ever be lost. In every human soul the contest between good and evil must continue until the good has conquered and the evil is defeated and eradicated. Then, when the man's spirit is adjusted to its environment in the spiritual world, it will be at peace--and not till then. And if this conflict is not waged and completed now and here, it must be and it will be fought out and finished hereafter and somewhere else. It is the greatest of all delusions to suppose that you can escape from yourself. Judgment and retribution proceed within the soul and not from sources outside of it. That is the philosophic drift of the poet's thought expressed and implied in his poem. It was Man, in his mortal ordeal--the motive, cause, and necessity of which remain a mystery--whom he desired and aimed to portray; it was not merely the triumph of a mocking devil, temporarily victorious through ministration to animal lust and intellectual revolt, over the weakness of the carnal creature and the embittered bewilderment of the baffled mind. Mr. Irving may well say, as he is reported to have said, that he will consider himself to have accomplished a good work if his production of Faust should have the effect of invigorating popular interest in Goethe's immortal poem and bringing closer home to the mind of his public a true sense of its sublime and far-reaching signification.