ht suffice.
To grasp at empty shades was his endeavour.
The latest, poorest emptiest moment--this--
Poor fool, he tried to hold it fast for ever.
Me he resisted in such vigorous wise;
But Time is lord--and there the old man lies!
The clock stands still.

'Stands still,' repeats a voice from heaven, 'still, silent, as the
midnight.' 'It is finished,' says Mephistopheles. 'Nay. 'Tis but past,'
answers the voice. 'Past!' exclaims Mephistopheles; 'how _past_ and yet
not _finished_?' ... He is enraged at the suspicion that life, though
past, may not be _finished_--that Faust's human soul may _yet_ elude
that hell to which he destines it ... that of annihilation.

The Lemurs group themselves round the grave and chant with hollow
voices, such as skeletons may be supposed to have, a funeral dirge.
Meantime Mephistopheles is busy summoning his demons to keep watch over
the dead body, lest the soul should escape like a mouse, or flicker up
to heaven in a little flamelet. Hideous forms of demons, fat and thin,
with straight and crooked horns, tusked like boars and with claws like
vultures, come thronging in, while the jaw of hell opens itself, showing
in the distance the fiery city of Satan.

At this moment a celestial glory is seen descending from heaven and
voices of angels are heard singing a song of triumph and salvation. They
approach ever nearer--Mephistopheles rages and curses, but in vain. They
come ever onward, casting before them roses, the flowers of Paradise,
which burst in flame and scorch the demons, who, rushing at their
angelic adversaries with their hellish prongs and forks and launching
vainly their missiles of hell-fire, are hurled back by an invisible
power and gradually driven off the stage, plunging in hideous ruin and
combustion down headlong into the jaws of hell.

Mephistopheles alone remains, foaming in impotent rage. He is surrounded
by the choir of white-robed angels. He stands powerless there, while
they gather to themselves Faust's immortal part and ascend amidst songs
of triumph to heaven.

Some of us, perhaps most of us--in certain moods at least--feel
inclined to close the book here, as we do with _Hamlet_ at the words
'the rest is silence.' And this feeling is all the stronger when we have
witnessed the stage decorator's pasteboard heaven, where Apostles and
Fathers are posed artistically in rather perilous situations amid rocks
and pine-trees, or balance themselves