GRETCHEN. _Day?_ Yes--the day is coming! The last day is dawning! It was to have been my wedding day. Woe to my wreath! But what is, must be! We shall see each other again ... but not at the dance! The crowd is thronging.... One hears no word.... The square, the streets, cannot contain them.... The bell is tolling--the staff is broken.... They seize me! They bind me fast! I am being dragged already to the block! Each feels the axe at his own neck as its keen blade flashes down on _mine_ ... and the world lies dark and silent as the grave. FAUST. O that I never had been born! MEPH. (_appears at the door_). Come! or you are lost!... Foolish, useless hesitation--delaying and gossiping! My horses are shuddering and the morning twilight breaks. GRETCHEN (_seeing MEPHISTOPHELES_). What is this that rises from the ground? He! _He!_ Send him away! What does _he_ want at this holy spot? MEPH. (_to FAUST_). Come! come! or I shall leave you in the lurch. GRETCHEN. I am thine, Father--save me! Ye angels, holy cohorts, encamp around me and defend me! (_To FAUST._) Heinrich, I shrink from thee in horror. MEPH. She is judged. VOICE FROM ABOVE. She is saved. MEPH. _to_ FAUST. Here! to me! [_Disappears with FAUST._ [_A VOICE FROM WITHIN--the voice of GRETCHEN--calls on the name of him she once loved--of him who has robbed her of happiness and life itself. Fainter and fainter it calls, then dies away into silence._ III GOETHE'S 'FAUST' PART II The picture which Goethe has given us in _Faust_ is in its main outlines the picture of Goethe's own life. The Faust of Part I is the Goethe of early days--of the Sturm und Drang period--the Goethe of _Werther's Leiden_, of _Götz_, of _Prometheus_, of Gretchen, Lotte, Annette, Friederike and Lili; the Faust of the earlier scenes of Part II is Goethe at the ducal court of Weimar; the Faust of the _Helena_ is Goethe in Italy, Goethe at Bologna, standing in ecstatic veneration before what was then believed to be Raphael's picture of St. Agatha, or wandering through the Colosseum at Rome, or writing his _Iphigenie_ on the shores of the Lago di Garda; and the Faust of the last act of all is Goethe reconciled to life and finding a certain measure of peace and happiness in his home, in the sympathy of his good-natured but unrefined wife and of others whom he loved, as well as in his scientific and philosophical studies--until he seals up the MS. of his great poem and (to use his own words) 'regards his life-work as ended and rests in the contemplation of the past,' and then, a few months later, passes away from earth, murmuring as he dies 'More light!' It will be remembered that at the end of Part I Faust is dragged away by Mephistopheles and leaves poor Gretchen to her doom. The fatal axe has now fallen. Gretchen is dead.