Page:Kickerbocker Feb 1833 vol 1 no 2.djvu/17
But sip and nibble where you will,
Give each caprice in turn its fill,
And help yourself to what you crave,
Only, set to at once, I want employment—
Mephistopheles.Faust. Listen, I do not ask thee for enjoyment;
I ask for agitation, I would know
Pain, hate, and love, the stimulus of wo.
My love of science cured hath left a void,
Where every passion is a welcome guest,
And all man ever suffered or enjoyed,
I would embrace within my single breast.
His spirits heights and depths attain and sound
His joys concentrate, all his anguish bear,
Expand my soul to his extremest bound,
And wreck'd at last, his endless ruin share.
Mephistopheles.Meph. Oh, trust to me, for ages year by year
I've fed to fulness on these fruits unblest.
No man between the cradle and the bier
This ancient leaven ever can digest.
Believe me, friend, for God alone
Was this great universe design'd—
Eternal light surrounds his throne,
But we in darkness are confined,
Senseless of day and night and blind.
It is worthy of remark, that the character of Mephistopheles is in general represented as absolutely passionless, and this exclamation, "oh trust to me," &c. is the only instance in which he shows any thing like pathos or gentle feeling. This was the moment, perhaps, when goodness might have taken the evil one at advantage—might have breathed with a warm and kindly breath on his frozen sympathies, and favored the incipient thaw, by whispering in his ear those well known words of Nature's sweetest spokesman.
Oh wad ye tak a thot an men',
Ye aiblins might, I dinna ken,
Still hae a stake.
I'm wae to think upon yon den
Even for your sake.
These ideas may be erroneous, but it is not amiss to indulge them, for with such grains of allowance should evil always be represented, and we ought not to admit into our minds even its abstract idea undiluted. Satan, in his own right, may be entitled to no indulgence; but for humanity's sake we ought to show him some; and if we must paint him, we should as much as possible flatter the resemblance. Southey's painter in this respect was decidedly wrong, who set him off for the multitude,
And that, the identical curl of his tail,
Till he had the old wicked one quite.