ndation of that philosophy, which,
however, has little or nothing in common with the materialistic and
dogmatic evolutionism of the last century. The work sprung from that
philosophy is full of the new sense of mystery, which makes the men of
to-day realize that the one attitude leading nowhere is that of
denial. Faith and doubt walk hand in hand, each one being to the other
check and goad alike. And with this new freedom to believe as well as
to question, man becomes once more the centre of his known universe.
But there he stands, humbly proud, not as the arrogant master of a
"dead" world, but merely as the foremost servant of a life-principle
which asserts itself in the grain of sand as in the brain of man.

Yet "Mr. Faust" is by no means a philosophical or moral tract. It is,
first of all and throughout, a living, breathing work of art, instinct
with beauty and faithful in its every line to the principle laid down
by its author in the preface to one of his earlier volumes: "Poetical
imagination must fail altogether if it descends from its natural
sphere and assumes work which is properly that of economic or
political experience. Nor can it usefully urge its own peculiar
intuitions as things of practical validity."

Mr. Ficke was born in 1883 at Davenport, Iowa, and there he is still
living, although I understand that he has since then been wandering in
so many other regions, physical and spiritual, that he can hardly call
it his home. He graduated from Harvard in 1904 and spent the next
travelling in all sorts of strange and poetic places--Japan, India,
the Greek mountains, the Aegean Islands. Returning to the United
States, he studied law and was admitted to the Bar in 1908. While
studying, he taught English for a year at the University of Iowa,
lecturing on the history of the Arthurian Legends.

He was a mere boy when he began to write, turning from the first to
the metrical form of expression and remaining faithful to it in most
of his subsequent efforts. His poems and essays have been printed in
almost all the leading magazines. So far he has published five volumes
of verse: "From the Isles," a series of lyrics of the Aegean Sea; "The
Happy Princess," a romantic narrative poem; "The Earth Passion," a
series of poems which may be characterized as the effort of a
star-gazer to find satisfaction in the things of the earth; "The
Breaking of Bonds," a Shelleyan drama of social unrest, where he has
tried to formulat