can live only in the glass retort, the outer world is too rough for him, and still he has the greatest desire to be actually born. A longing, universal feeling for natural life sparkles from him with clear brilliancy, and cousin Mephistopheles takes him along to the classic _Walpurgisnacht_, where Homunculus hopes to find a favorable moment. Mephistopheles is related to the little man for this reason, because the latter is only the product of nature, because God’s breath has not been breathed into him as into a real man. After these ironical scenes, the fearful night of the Pharsalian Fields succeeds, where the antique world terminated its free life. This plain, associated with dark remembrances and bloody shadows, is the scene of the Classical _Walpurgisnacht_. Goethe could choose no other spot, for just upon this battle-field the spirit of Greek and Roman antiquity ceased to be a living actuality. As an external reason, it is well known that Thessaly was to the ancients the land of wizards, and especially of witches, so that from this point of view the parallel with the German Blocksberg is very striking. Faust, driven by impatience to obtain Helen, is in the beginning sent from place to place to learn her residence, until Chiron takes him upon the neck which had once borne that most loving beauty, and with a passing sneer at the conjectural troubles of the Philologist, tells him of the Argonauts, of the most beautiful man, of Hercules, until he stops his wild course at the dwelling of the prophetic Manto, who promises to lead Faust to Helen on Olympus. Mephistopheles wanders in the meanwhile among Sphinxes, Griffons, Sirens, etc. To him, the Devil of the Christian and Germanic world, this classic ground is not at all pleasing; he longs for the excellent Blocksberg of the North, and its ghostly visages; with the Lamiæ indeed he resolves to have his own sport, but is roguishly bemocked; finally, he comes to the horrible Phorcyads, and after their pattern he equips himself with one eye and a tusk for his own amusement; that is, he becomes the absolutely Ugly, while Faust is wooing the highest Beauty. In the Christian world the Devil is also represented as fundamentally ugly and repulsive; but he can also, under all forms, appear as an angel of light. In the Art-world, on the contrary, he can be known only as the Ugly. In all these scenes there is a mingling of the High and the Low, of the Horrible and the Ridiculous, of vexation and whimsicality, of the Enigmatical and the Perspicuous, so that no better contradictions could be wished for a _Walpurgisnacht_. The Homunculus on his part is ceaselessly striving to come to birth, and betakes himself to Thales and Anaxagoras, who dispute whether the world arose in a dry or wet way. Thales leads the little man to Nereus, who, however, refuses to aid the seeker, partly because he has become angry with men, who, like Paris and Ulysses, have always acted against his