Page:Kickerbocker Feb 1833 vol 1 no 2.djvu/20

Their adventures now begin. The first is a tavern scene, with which Faust is forthwith disgusted; the next is a visit to a witch, where he drinks the liquor of rejuvenescence, and falls in love with a magic figure in a mirror, and shortly upon this follows his introduction to Margaret. Her character is beautiful beyond comparison, far beyond imitation or any attempts at translating. Her devoted love for Faust—her instinctive horror of his companion—her misfortunes, madness, crimes, and imprisonment, from which she refuses to be released by the instrumentality of the fiend, and the supernatural voice which proclaims to the baffled lover and tempter, as they retire, that she is saved, though we are left to infer that she dies upon the scaffold, all these make a moving and mighty picture; but bold indeed must be the hand that would copy it. In the action of the piece few other characters are introduced, and those that are, besides these three principal ones, though original certainly and masterly, do not belong to that characteristic order of thought which pervades those of Faust and Mephistopheles, and which distinguishes this poem from all the other productions of men. The scene on the Blocksberg has nothing to do with the main action of the piece, it is a sort of independent interlude, and besides it has been translated by Shelley. The present article, therefore, will be dismissed with a few extracts from the second number of the Foreign Review, where the general scope of the poem and these two principal characters are admirably touched on, by a writer whose Germanized tastes and habits of thought, give a peculiar zest and interest to his eloquent contributions to that able, but now extinct periodical, and to the Foreign Quarterly in which it is merged.

"Faust is emphatically a work of Art; a work matured in the mysterious depths of a vast and wonderful mind: and bodied forth with that truth and curious felicity of composition, in which this man is generally admitted to have no living rival. To reconstruct such a work in another language; to show it in its hard yet graceful strength; with those slight witching traits of pathos or of sarcasm, those glimpses of solemnity or terror, and so many reflexes and evanescent echoes of meaning, which connect it in strange union with the whole Infinite of Thought,—were business for a man of different powers than has yet attempted German translation among us. In fact, Faust is to be read not once but many times, if we would understand it: every line, every word has its purport; and only in such minute