“Ah, Faustus, Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damned perpetually! Stand still, ye ever-moving spheres of Heaven, That time may cease and midnight never come; Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make Perpetual day; or let this hour be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul! The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned. Oh, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down? See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul--half a drop; ah, my Christ! Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ! Yet will I call on Him. Oh, spare me, Lucifer! Where is it now? ’T is gone; and see where God Stretcheth out His arm and bends His ireful brows! Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me, And hide me from the heavy wrath of God! No? No? Then will I headlong run into the earth. Earth, gape! Oh no, it will not harbor me! * * * * * Ah! half the hour is past; ’t will all be past anon. O God, If Thou wilt not have mercy on my soul, Yet, for Christ’s sake, whose blood hath ransomed me, Impose some end to my incessant pain; Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years-- A hundred thousand--and at last be saved! Oh, no end’s limited to damnèd souls. Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? Or why was this immortal that thou hast? Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true, This soul should fly from me, and I be changed Unto some brutish beast! All beasts are happy, For when they die Their souls are soon dissolved in elements; But mine must live still to be plagued in Hell! Cursed be the parents that engendered me! No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer, That hath deprived thee of the joys of Heaven. Oh, it strikes! it strikes! Now, body, turn to air, Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to Hell. O soul, be changed to little waterdrops And fall into the ocean; ne’er be found! My God, my God, look not so fierce on me! Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile. Ugly Hell, gape not. Come not, Lucifer! I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistophilis!” It remains to say a few words of Marlowe’s poem of “Hero and Leander,” for in translating it from Musæus he made it his own. It has great ease and fluency of versification, and many lines as perfect in their concinnity as those of Pope, but infused with a warmer coloring and a more poetic fancy. Here is found the verse that Shakespeare quotes somewhere. The second verse of the following couplet has precisely Pope’s cadence:-- “Unto her was he led, or rather drawn, By those white limbs that sparkled through the lawn.”