advice, and partly because he is about to celebrate a great feast. Afterwards they go to Proteus, who at first is also reticent, but soon takes an interest in Homunculus, as he beholds his shining brilliancy, for he feels that he is related to the changing fire, and gives warning that as the latter can become everything, he should be careful about becoming a man, for it is the most miserable of all existences. In the meanwhile, the Peneios roars; the earth-shaking Seismos breaks forth with a loud noise; the silent and industrious mountain-spirits become wakeful. But always more clearly the water declares itself as the womb of all things; the festive train of the Telchines points to the hoary Cabiri; bewitchingly resound the songs of the Sirens; Hippocamps, Tritons, Nereids, Pselli and Marsi arise from the green, pearl-decked ground; the throne of Nereus and Galatea arches over the crystalline depths; at their feet the eager Homunculus falls to pieces, and all-moving Eros in darting flames streams forth. Ravishing songs float aloft, celebrating the holy elements, which the ever-creating Love holds together and purifies. Thales is just as little in the right as Anaxagoras; together, both are right, for Nature is kindled to perpetual new life by the marriage of Fire and Water. The difference between this _Walpurgisnacht_ and the one in the First Part lies in the fact, that the principle of the latter is the relation of Spirit to God. In the Christian world the first question is, what is the position of man towards God; therefore there appear forms which are self-contradictory, lacerated spiritually, torn in pieces by the curse of condemnation to all torture. Classic Life has for its basis the relation to Nature; the mysterious Cabiri were only the master-workmen of Nature. Nature finds in man her highest goal; in his fair figure, in the majesty of his form she ends her striving; and therefore the contradictions of the classic _Walpurgisnacht_ are not so foreign to Mephistopheles, who has to do with Good and Bad, that he does not feel his contact with them, but still they are not native to him. The general contradiction which we meet with, and which also in Mephistopheles expresses itself by the cloven foot at least, is the union of the human and animal frame; the human is at first only half existent, on earth in Sphinxes, Oreads, Sirens, Centaurs; in water, in Hippocamps, Tritons, Nymphs, Dorids, etc. For the fair bodies of the latter still share the moist luxuriance of their element. Thus Nature expands itself in innumerable creations in order to purify itself in man, in the self-conscious spirit, in order to pacify and shut off in him the infinite impulse to formation, because it passes beyond him to no new form. He is the embodied image of God. The inclosed Homunculus, with his fiery trembling eagerness to pass over into an independent actuality, is, as it were, the serio-comic representation of this tendency, until