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inspection will the essential significance of the poem display itself. Perhaps it is even chiefly by following these fainter traces and tokens that the true point of vision for the whole is discovered to us; and we stand at last in the proper scene of Faust; a wild and wonderous region, where in pale light, the primeval Shapes of Chaos, as it were, the Foundations of Being itself, seem to loom forth, dim and huge, in the vague Immensity around us; and the life and nature of Man, with its brief interests, its misery and sin, its mad passion and poor frivolity, struts and frets its hour, encompassed and overlooked by that stupendous All, of which it forms an indissoluble though so mean a fraction. He who would study all this must for a long time, we are afraid, be content to study it in the original."

"Mephistopheles comes before us, not arrayed in the terrors of Cocytus and Phlegethon, but in the natural indelible deformity of wickedness; he is the Devil, not of Superstition, but of Knowledge. Here is no cloven foot, or horns and tail: he himself informs us that, during the late march of intellect, the very Devil has participated in the spirit of the age, and laid these appendages aside.* Doubtless, Mephistopheles 'has the manners of a gentleman;' he knows the world;' nothing can exceed the easy tact with which he manages himself; his wit and sarcasm are unlimited; the cool heartfelt contempt with which he despises all things, human and divine, might make the fortune of half a dozen fellows about town.' Yet, withal,

he is a devil in very deed; a genuine Son of Night. He calls himself the Denier, and this truly is his name; for, as Voltaire did with historical doubts, so does he with all moral appearances; settles them with a N'en croyez rien. The shrewd, allinformed intellect he has, is an attorney intellect; it can contradict, but it cannot affirm. With lynx vision, he descries at a glance the ridiculous, the unsuitable, the bad; but for the solemn, the noble, the worthy, he is blind as his ancient Mother. Thus does he go along, qualifying, confuting, despising; on all hands detecting the false, but without force to bring forth, or even to discern, any glimpse of the true, Poor Devil! what truth should there be for him? To see Falsehood is his only Truth; falsehood and evil are the rule, truth and good the exception which confirms it. He can believe in nothing, but in his own self-conceit, and in the indestructible

This is a mistake; Mephistopheles says he cannot get rid of the cloven foot, but has learned to disguise it by padding-“waden."

baseness, folly, and hypocrisy of men. For him, virtue is some bubble of the blood: 'it stands written on his face that he never loved a living soul.' Nay, he cannot even hate: at Faust himself he has no grudge; he merely tempts him by way of experiment, and to pass the time scientifically. Such a combination of perfect Understanding with perfect Selfishness, of logical Life with moral Death; so universal a denier, both in heart and head,-is undoubtedly a child of Darkness, an emissary of the primeval Nothing; and coming forward, as he does, like a person of breeding, and without any flavor of brimstone, may stand here, in his merely spiritual deformity, at once potent, dangerous, and contemptible, as the best and only genuine Devil of these latter times.

"In strong contrast with this impersonation of modern worldly-mindedness, stands Faust himself, by nature the antagonist of it, but destined also to be its victim. If Mephistopheles represent the spirit of Denial, Faust may represent that of Inquiry and Endeavor: the two are, by necessity, in conflict; the light and the darkness of man's life and mind. Intrinsically, Faust is a noble being, though no wise one. His desires are towards the high and true; nay, with a whirlwind impetuosity he rushes forth over the Universe to grasp all excellence; his heart yearns towards the infinite and the invisible; only that he knows not the conditions under which alone this is to be attained. Confiding in his feeling of himself, he has started with the tacit persuasions, so natural to all men, that he at least, however it may fare with others, shall and must be happy: a deep-seated, though only half-conscious conviction lurks in him, that wherever he is not successful, fortune has dealt with him unjustly. His purposes are fair, nay, generous: why should he not prosper in them? For in all his lofty aspirings, his strivings after truth and more than human greatness of mind, it has never struck him to inquire how he, the striver, was warranted for such enterprises; with what faculty Nature had equipped him; within what limits she had hemmed him in; by what right he pretended to be happy, or could, some short space ago, have pretended to be at all. Experience, indeed, will teach him, for Experience is the best of schoolmasters; only the school-fees are heavy.' As yet, too, disappointment, which fronts him on every hand, rather maddens than instructs. Faust has spent his youth and manhood, not as others do, in the sunny crowded paths of profit, or among the rosy bowers of pleasure, but darkly and alone in the scarch of Truth: is it

fit that Truth should now hide herself; and his sleepless pilgrimage towards Knowledge and Vision, end in the pale shadow of Doubt? To his dream of a glorious higher happiness, all earthly happiness has been sacrificed; friendship, love, the social rewards of ambition were cheerfully cast aside, for his eye and his heart were bent on a region of clear and supreme good; and now in its stead, he finds isolation, silence, and despair. What solace remains? Virtue once promised to be her own reward; but because she does not pay him in the current coin of worldly enjoyment, he reckons her too a delusion; and, like Brutus, reproaches as a shadow, what he once worshiped as a substance. Whither shall he now tend? For his loadstars have gone out one by one; and as the darkness fell, the strong steady wind has changed into a fierce and aimless tornado. Faust calls himself a monster, without object, yet without rest.' The vehement, keen, and stormful nature of the man is stung into fury, as he thinks of all he has endured and lost; he broods in gloomy meditation, and, like Bellerophon, wanders apart, eating his own heart;' or, bursting into fiery paroxysms, curses man's whole existence as a mockery; curses hope and faith, and joy and care, and what is worst, curses patience more than all the rest.' Had his weak arm the power, he could smite the Universe asunder, as at the crack of Doom, and hurl his own vexed being along with it into the silence of Annihilation."

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AN INKLING OF AN ADVENTURE.

[BY A TOURIST IN KENTUCKY.]

"IF a naturally romantic country were all that novel writers required in pitching the scene of their fictious narratives, the plot of many a story would be laid in Kentucky.

You are quite right, my dear K, in supposing that there is a great deal of romantic and picturesque scenery in the lower and eastern parts of the state, and much to repay the lover of Nature, who is willing to bear fatigue and exposure, for the sake of seeing her untrammeled by the fetters of art. Some admire the court beauty, others the peasant; my own admiration belongs to her who holds a middle station. Such is my taste in nature, I like to see art her hand

maid, though not her mistress: with your romantic feelings utility has hardly its due weight, and I suppose you would consider it profanation if even a small portion of the mountain stream were withdrawn from the leaping cascade, though many a family might look to it for sustenance. With such moderat

ed feelings as mine, you must not expect a very glowing description of mountain, rock, and bosky dell. Fifteen years have tamed even my recollections, yet even at that time I remember it was only the prosperous and onward look which every thing wore in this western world, that prevented a sensation of loneliness from creeping over me, when threading my way through the vast forests I was obliged to cross in order to reach Seneca. Occasionally, however, I found much that was inspiration in the hap-hazard life of a backwoods traveler of that day, and even caught with eagerness at each object that seemed to be characteristic of the scenes and people among whom I moved; and among other vivid reminiscences of the indulgence of this feeling, is the following:

I was staying for a day or two at the house of a gentleman in the lower part of the state, who interested me by his description of several caverns, resembling the celebrated 'mammoth cave,' but much to the east of it. I suppose you will not allow me romance, but I had some enterprise and more curiosity; my location was not decided on; I felt myself more of a traveler than a man of business, and the twenty or thirty miles these caves were out of my way, was a matter of no moment; indeed such a distance is a trifle hardly worth counting in the west. My host, with true western hospitality, would have accompanied me, but he was detained at home by sickness. I had been long enough in the west to feel independent of roads and sign-boards, and with many thanks for uncalled for and unlimited hospitality, set out on the journey that was to introduce me to one of mother Earth's most private apartHere and there a blased tree formed my sole means of direction, but my eye was sufficiently practised to find such marks readily, and I willingly surrendered myself to the peculiar feelings which crowd the mind on finding one's-self alone in a vast forest.

ments.

The silence of a forest has always struck me as the most imposing form in which nature manifests herself; in every thing which has motion and change there is a resemblance to ourselves, which softens the effect: the foaming torrent is an emblem of passion, breaking through all barriers, even the living

rock of God's command and our own conscience; like time it hurries by and is gone, and like time, with many of us it leaves but a wreck behind: the tornado and the volcano are apt and common-place emblems-but in the imposing stillness of the forest man is but reminded of passion to feel its folly. Those noble stems shooting up on all sides as if aspiring to a nearer approach to heaven, seem offering silent adoration he feels his own insignificance-but that beautifully tinted flower he had nearly crushed beneath his foot, reminds him that the meanest is an object of care, and if he feels himself alone, it is with God.

I was indulging in such thoughts when, with a motion so sudden and violent that I was nearly thrown off my saddle, my horse sprang aside, and before I could control him, I found myself at the bottom of a ravine near which our path had been. I had hardly time to observe the creature was trembling under me, as if from excessive fright, when my ear was struck by a rushing sound, followed by a tremendous crash-a tree had fallen. I dismounted, for the sides of the ravine were too steep to ride up, and leading my panting horse, regained the path: the tree had fallen, as nearly as I could judge, exactly on the spot on which I should have been, had not the senses of my sagacious beast, more quick than my own, warned him of the danger. It is a curious fact that horses, accustomed to the woods, acquire a quickness of perception much superior to man's, and I doubt not many lives have been saved, as I think mine was, by their sagacity. Notwithstanding the interest of my reflections, and the exciting accident which had broken in upon them, I was not sorry when an opening in the forest gave to view the little hut which I had been told stood near the principal cave, and whose inmate was to be my guide.

Various superstitions and surmises had been connected with these caves by the ignorant, and a sufficient number of visitors had been attracted to the spot to make my new acquaintance feel himself of some consequence, and claim the right of doing the honors; a right, for the resistance of which, one man paid dearly, having been left for several days in the labyrinths of the place. The hut offered few temptations for a long sojourn, and upon signifying my desire to proceed immediately, my entertainer and guide produced a suit of clothes for my use, of an appearance so appaling, that I positively declined; but upon his assurance that the entrance was so narrow we should be obliged to crawl for a great distance on our hands and

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