who, being more learned than other races, busy ourselves more from youth upwards with Homer's songs. The beautiful Helen is our first love, and even in our boyhood's days, when we sit on the school-bench and the master explains to us the exquisite Greek verses in which the Trojan grey-beards were enraptured at the sight of Helen, the most enchanting feelings beat in our young inexperienced breasts—with blushing cheeks and stammering tongues we answer the questions in grammar put by our preceptor. Later in life, when we are older and fully taught, and have ourselves become wizards, and can raise the very devil himself, then we exact from our attendant sprite that he shall obtain for us the beautiful Helen from Sparta. I have already said[1] that John Faust is the true representative of the Germans, of the people, who satisfy their deepest longing in knowledge and not in life. Although this famed doctor—the normal German—craves and yearns for sensual pleasure, he by no means seeks the subject of his gratification in the flowery fields of reality, but in the learned mould of the world of books ; and while a French or Italian necromancer would have demanded of Mephistopheles the fairest woman living, the German wants one who died thousands of years
- ↑ In referring to Goethe's Faust. Romantic School, first book.—Note by the German Publisher.
