Thus he rushed into Life. Earthly enjoyment surrounded him, Love enchained him, Desire drove him to sudden, to bad deeds; in the mad _Walpurgisnach_ he reached the summit of waste worldliness. But deeper than the Devil supposed, Faust felt for his Margaret; he desired to save the unfortunate girl, but he was obliged to learn that this was impossible, but that only endurance of the punishment of crime could restore the harassed mind to peace. The simple story of love held everything together here in a dramatic form. The Prologue in Heaven, the Witch-kitchen, the _Walpurgisnacht_, and several contemplative scenes, could be left out, and there still would remain a theatrical Whole of remarkable effect. The relation to Margaret—her death—had elevated Faust above everything subjective. In the continuation of his life, objective relations alone could constitute the motive of action. The living fresh breath of the First Part resulted just from this fact, that everything objective, universal, was seized from the point of subjective interest; in the Second Part the Universal, the Objective, stands out prominently; subjective interests appear only under the presupposition of the Objective; the form becomes allegorical. A story, an action which rounds itself off to completion, is wanting, and therefore the dramatic warmth which pulsates through every scene of the First Part is no longer felt. The unity which is traced through the web of the manifold situations, is the universal tendency of Faust _to create a satisfaction for himself through work_. Mephistopheles has no longer the position of a being superior by his great understanding and immovable coldness, who bitterly mocks Faust’s striving, but he appears rather as a powerful companion who skillfully procures the material means for the aims of Faust, and, in all his activity, only awaits the moment when Faust shall finally acknowledge himself to be satisfied. But the striving of Faust is infinite; each goal, when once reached, is again passed by; nowhere does he rest, not in Society, not in Nature, not in Art, not in War, not in Industry; only the thought of Freedom itself, the presentiment of the happiness of standing with a free people upon a free soil wrung from the sea, thrills the old man with a momentary satisfaction—and he dies. Upon pictures and woodcuts of the middle ages representations of dying persons are found, in which the Devil on one side of the death-bed and angels on the other await eagerly the departing soul to pull it to themselves. Goethe has revived this old idea of a jealousy and strife between the angels and the Devil for Man. Mephistopheles, with his horde of devils, struggles to carry away the soul of Faust to hell, but he forgets himself in unnatural lust, and the angels bear the immortal part of Faust to that height where rest and illumination of the dying begin.