Faust. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

feeling, thou great man, must thou

      Receive the people’s honest veneration!

      How lucky he, whose gifts his station

      With such advantages endow!

      Thou’rt shown to all the younger generation:

      Each asks, and presses near to gaze;

      The fiddle stops, the dance delays.

      Thou goest, they stand in rows to see,

      And all the caps are lifted high;

      A little more, and they would bend the knee

      As if the Holy Host came by.

      FAUST

      A few more steps ascend, as far as yonder stone!–

      Here from our wandering will we rest contented.

      Here, lost in thought, I’ve lingered oft alone,

      When foolish fasts and prayers my life tormented.

      Here, rich in hope and firm in faith,

      With tears, wrung hands and sighs, I’ve striven,

      The end of that far-spreading death

      Entreating from the Lord of Heaven!

      Now like contempt the crowd’s applauses seem:

      Couldst thou but read, within mine inmost spirit,

      How little now I deem,

      That sire or son such praises merit!

      My father’s was a sombre, brooding brain,

      Which through the holy spheres of Nature groped and wandered,

      And honestly, in his own fashion, pondered

      With labor whimsical, and pain:

      Who, in his dusky work-shop bending,

      With proved adepts in company,

      Made, from his recipes unending,

      Opposing substances agree.

      There was a Lion red, a wooer daring,

      Within the Lily’s tepid bath espoused,

      And both, tormented then by flame unsparing,

      By turns in either bridal chamber housed.

      If then appeared, with colors splendid,

      The young Queen in her crystal shell,

      This was the medicine–the patients’ woes soon ended,

      And none demanded: who got well?

      Thus we, our hellish boluses compounding,

      Among these vales and hills surrounding,

      Worse than the pestilence, have passed.

      Thousands were done to death from poison of my giving;

      And I must hear, by all the living,

      The shameless murderers praised at last!

      WAGNER

      Why, therefore, yield to such depression?

      A good man does his honest share

      In exercising, with the strictest care,

      The art bequeathed to his possession!

      Dost thou thy father honor, as a youth?

      Then may his teaching cheerfully impel thee:

      Dost thou, as man, increase the stores of truth?

      Then may thine own son afterwards excel thee.

      FAUST

      O happy he, who still renews

      The hope, from Error’s deeps to rise forever!

      That which one does not know, one needs to use;

      And what one knows, one uses never.

      But let us not, by such despondence, so

      The fortune of this hour embitter!

      Mark how, beneath the evening sunlight’s glow,