The Lemurs group themselves round the grave and chant with hollow voices, such as skeletons may be supposed to have, a funeral dirge. Meantime Mephistopheles is busy summoning his demons to keep watch over the dead body, lest the soul should escape like a mouse, or flicker up to heaven in a little flamelet. Hideous forms of demons, fat and thin, with straight and crooked horns, tusked like boars and with claws like vultures, come thronging in, while the jaw of hell opens itself, showing in the distance the fiery city of Satan. At this moment a celestial glory is seen descending from heaven and voices of angels are heard singing a song of triumph and salvation. They approach ever nearer--Mephistopheles rages and curses, but in vain. They come ever onward, casting before them roses, the flowers of Paradise, which burst in flame and scorch the demons, who, rushing at their angelic adversaries with their hellish prongs and forks and launching vainly their missiles of hell-fire, are hurled back by an invisible power and gradually driven off the stage, plunging in hideous ruin and combustion down headlong into the jaws of hell. Mephistopheles alone remains, foaming in impotent rage. He is surrounded by the choir of white-robed angels. He stands powerless there, while they gather to themselves Faust's immortal part and ascend amidst songs of triumph to heaven. Some of us, perhaps most of us--in certain moods at least--feel inclined to close the book here, as we do with _Hamlet_ at the words 'the rest is silence.' And this feeling is all the stronger when we have witnessed the stage decorator's pasteboard heaven, where Apostles and Fathers are posed artistically in rather perilous situations amid rocks and pine-trees, or balance themselves with evident anxiety mid-air on pendent platforms representing clouds. Altogether this stage-heaven is a very uncomfortable and depressing kind of place. But when read in Goethe's poem and regarded as an allegorical vision the scene has a certain impressive grandeur, and some of the hymns of adoration and triumph are of exceeding beauty. This Scene in Heaven opens with the songs of the three great Fathers, the Pater Ecstaticus, Pater Profundus, and Pater Seraphicus, symbolizing the three stages of human aspiration, namely ecstasy, contemplation and seraphic love. The Seraphic Father is of course St. Francis of Assisi. In heaven, as he did on earth, he sings of the revelation of Eternal Love. Angels are now seen ascending and bearing Faust's immortal part, and as they rise they sing: The noble spirit now is free And saved from evil scheming. Whoe'er aspires unweariedly Is not beyond redeeming, And if he feels the grace of Love That from on high is given The blessed hosts that wait above Shall welcome him to heaven. His yet unawakened soul is greeted by the heavenly choirs and by the three penitents, the Magdalene, the woman of Samaria and St. Mary of Egypt.