Sometimes conscience forces him to listen to its fearful whispers, and then suicide offers its dreadful means as a silencer of their disturbing warnings. Why does he not accept the relief of rope or dagger? --Long ere this I should have done the deed, Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair. Have not I made blind Homer sing to me Of Alexander's love and Oenon's death? And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes With ravishing sound of his melodious harp, Made music with my Mephistophilis? Why should I die, then, or basely despair? I am resolved; Faustus shall not repent. The mood of fear and regret passes. He plunges back to the gratification of his senses. Whilst I am here on earth let me be cloyed With all things that delight the heart of man: My four-and-twenty years of liberty I'll spend in pleasure and in dalliance. The end is drawing near. Appetite is becoming sated: rarer and rarer delicacies are needed to satisfy his craving. Repentance!--that is thrust aside, postponed to a later hour. One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee, To glut the longing of my heart's desire-- That I may have unto my paramour That heavenly Helen which I saw of late, Whose sweet embraces may extinguish clean Those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow. When at last the hour to fulfil his part of the contract arrives, he confesses in bitterness of spirit, 'for the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity.' This man is not one consumed with a thirst of knowledge. Once he asks Mephistophilis a few questions on astrology; at another time he evinces some curiosity concerning Lucifer and Hell, idle curiosity because he regards it all as foolishness. We are _told_ of a journey through the heavens and of voyages about the world, but we _see_ him exercising his supernatural gifts in the most puerile and useless fashion. It is impossible, therefore, to regard his ambition as a lust for knowledge in the usual meaning of that term, differentiating it from sensual experience. If Faustus is to be labelled according to his dominant trait, then let us describe him as the embodiment of sense-gratification. He is a sensualist from the moment that he takes up the book of magic and ponders over what it may bring him. A degraded form of him has been sketched in the Syriac scholar of a modern work of fiction, who cherished, side by side with a world-wide reputation for learning, a bestial appetite for profligacy. The message of _Tamburlaine_ holds as true in the pursuit of pleasure as in that of conquest. Faustus denies that there is a limit to pleasure, and the horror of his career grows darker as his mounting desires bear him further and further on, far beyond the reach of less eager minds, to the impassable point whence he may only see the heaven beyond. That point is the hell which once he laughed at as an old wives' tale.