He calls upon this Earth-spirit, the Spirit of human life. He bends all the might of his human will to draw him down from his sphere. 'Come!' he exclaims. 'Thou must! Thou must!--e'en should it cost my life!' Enveloped in blinding flame the Spirit of life appears. At the apparition Faust cowers back terrified and turns his face away. But it is only for the moment. Stung by the contemptuous words of the phantom he answers: 'Shall I yield to _thee_, Spectre of flame? 'Tis I, 'tis Faust, thine equal!' The human Mind claims equality with the Spirit of earthly life. But the phantom exclaims: 'Thou art akin to the spirit that thou comprehendest--not to me!'--and disappears. Faust has yet to learn a lesson that the mind of man can never learn of itself, the real nature and meaning of human life. But he has beheld the vision of life, he has received the baptism of fire. Henceforth he is to fight his way through the storms of life and passion--to pass onward and upward and at last to rise to 'higher spheres'; and amidst the fierce and insidious assaults of flesh and devil we shall see that he looks for strength and guidance to this Spirit that appeared to him in the blinding vision of living empyreal flame. Scarcely has the Earth-spirit vanished when, with a timid knock, there enters Faust's _famulus_, or assistant, Wagner. He has heard Faust's voice and from its excited tones has concluded that he is practising declamation--reciting perhaps a Greek play. The poor amiable dryasdust literary and scientific worm-grubber, whose maxim of life is _Zwar weiss ich viel, doch möcht' ich Alles wissen_ (I know indeed a good deal, but I want to know _Everything_), wishes to profit from a lesson in elocution. A scene follows in which the contrast is graphically depicted between this half lovable, half contemptible scientific bookworm and Faust's Titanic heaven-storming aspirations after absolute truth. When he is once more left alone, longing to face the mystery of life but crushed by the contempt of the Earth-spirit, Faust is seized by despair. He shrinks from encountering life, with its delusive joys, its pitiless injustice and its arbitrary fate. He resolves to seek certainty--to solve the riddle of life by death. As he moves the cup of poison to his lips there comes floating through the air the chime of bells and, perhaps from some near chapel, the hymn of Easter morn: Joy unto mortals! Christ is arisen! He pauses. Memories of childhood sweep over him, and he yields to the sweet voices that call him back from the threshold of the unseen. Sound on sweet hymns of heaven! As gentle rain My tears are falling. Earth hath me again. Thus Faust escapes the cowardly act of suicide and gains new strength through the awakening, for a time at least, of the consciousness, which had slumbered within him since the unreasoning days of childhood, that there is that beyond life which alone makes life worth having.