FAUST.

Aye, what is called to understand; but who
Is there dares name the bantling honestly?
Of those who aught have known, the scanty few,
Unwisely keeping watch neglectfully

Upon the fulness of their hearts, who have bared
Their deeper feelings and their loftier view
Before the mass, for them have been prepared
Ever the stake and cross. *

* Before the times of Galileo and Harvey, the world believed in the diurnal immoveability of the earth and the stagnation of the blood, and for denying them the one was persecuted, and the other ridiculed. The intelligence and virtue of Socrates were punished with death. Anaxagoras, when he attempted to propagate a just notion of the Supreme Being, was dragged to prison. Aristotle, after a long series of persecutions, swallowed poison. The great geometricians and chemists, as Gerbert, Roger Bacon, and others, were abhorred as magicians. Virgilius, Bishop of Latzburg, having asserted that there existed antipodes, the Archbishop of Mentz declared him a heretic, and consigned him to the flames; and the Abbot Frithemius, who was fond of improving stenography, or the art of secret writing, having published some curious works on that subject, they were condemned as works full of diabolical mystery. Galileo was condemned at Rome publicly to disavow his statements regarding the motion of the earth, the truth of which

My friend, 'tis late;

Pardon me, we at last must separate.

must have been abundantly manifest. He was imprisoned in the inquisition, and visited by Milton, who tells us he was then poor and old. Cornelius Agrippa, a native of Cologne, and distinguished by turns as a soldier, philosopher, physician, chemist, lawyer, and writer, was believed to be a magician, and to be accompanied by a familiar spirit in the shape of a black dog, and was so violently persecuted, that he was obliged to fly from place to place, and not unfrequently when he walked he found the streets empty at his approach. This ingenious man died in a hospital. When Urban Grandier, another victim of the age, was led to the stake, a large fly settled on his head a monk, who had heard that Beelzebub signifies in Hebrew the god of flies, reported that he saw this spirit come to take possession of him. Even the learned themselves, who had not applied to natural philosophy, seem to have acted with the same feelings as the most ignorant, for when Albertus Magnus, an eminent philosopher of the 13th century, constructed an automaton, or curious piece of mechanism, which sent forth distinct vocal sounds, Thomas Aquinas (a celebrated theologian), imagined it to be the work of the devil, and struck it with his staff, which, to the mortification of the great Albert, annihilated the labours of thirty years. Descartes was horribly persecuted in Holland when he first published his opinions. person of influence, accused him of Atheism, and had even projected in his mind to have the philosopher burned at Utrecht, in an extraordinary fire, which kindled on an eminence, might be observed by the seven provinces. The persecution of

Voetius, a

WAGNER.

Gladly the livelong night I had whiled away,
Converse to hold with one so rich in lore.
But on the morrow, Easter's holy day,
Allow me that I ask a question more.
Studious and diligent I myself may call,
Much I already know, but I would fain know all.

FAUST-alone.

How hope entirely never quits the mind;
* He cleaves to worthless rubbish ceaselessly,
He digs for hidden treasures greedily,
And yet is glad the worms of earth to find.

How dare such merely mortal accents sound,
Where all pervading spirits reigned around.
And yet, alas, yet for once I thank thee, thou
Meanest of all Earth's sons, I thank thee now.

science and genius lasted till the close of the seventeenth cen tury."-D'Israeli.

Quere? Is there nothing of the sort in the nineteenth? No war between theology and geology? No Westminster Abbey closed against Byron? No denouncement of the employment of the voltaic battery? No vituperation of Shelley? * Der, refers rather contemptuously to Wagner.

Thou freedest me from the grasp of hopelessness,*
That well nigh bid my tottering senses reel.
But ah, the giant shadow's boundlessness

The dwarf I am right well might make me feel.† Image of God, myself already deeming

The mirror of eternal truth so nigh;

Revelling in Heaven's light, so brightly gleaming,
The robe that clothes the soul in clay laid by.
I more than cherub, whose enfranchised might
Already prompted its presumptuous flight
Through Nature's very veins, and dreamed it mine
In creative power to taste the life divine.

Vain hopes, for them what penance must I pay,
One thunder-word has swept me far away,

The despair occasioned by the reply of the Spirit of the Earth as it disappeared on Wagner's arrival, the 'thunder word' of the next passage.

"The boundless views of intellectual and moral as well as material relation, which open on him on all hands in the course of these pursuits, the knowledge of the trivial place he occupies in the scale of creation, and the sense continually pressed upon him of his own weakness and incapacity to suspend and modify the slightest movement of the vast machinery he sees in action round him, must effectually convince him that humility of pretension, not less than confidence of hope, is what best becomes his character."-Herschel.

As being of an equal mould,

The more I rate myself with thee;
The power to call, but not to hold,
Was all that e'er was given to me.
Ah! in that holy moment, when

I felt myself so small-so great,
Thou flungest me roughly back again
Upon mankind's uncertain fate.*
Who teaches me, from what I shall forbear ;
Shall I each impulse recklessly obey?

Ah, what we do as well as what we bear,
Checks us each instant on life's weary way.

Some foreign element will still intrude
Upon the spirit's loftiest conception,

"The mind of man is as a mirror or glass, capable of the image of the universal world, and as joyful to receive the impressions thereof, as the eye rejoices to see the light; and not only delighted in beholding the variety of things and the vicissitudes of times, but raised also to discover the inviolable laws and the infallible decrees of nature; but if any man shall think, by view and inquiry into sensible things, to attain that light, whereby he may reveal unto himself the nature and will of God, then is he veiled through vain philosophy; for the sense of man is as the sun, which shines and reveals bodies, but conceals and obscures the stars and bodies celestial."- Bacon.