ith these words.]

With him to Weimar Goethe bore two manuscripts to which, during his
last years in Frankfort, he had, at one time and another, committed
his deepest feelings as a man, his profoundest thoughts as a thinker,
and his finest imaginations as a poet. The one contained the first
draft of the drama which, as we have seen, was written in those days
of torturing suspense preceding his final departure from his paternal
home, and which, subsequently recast, was to take its place among the
best known of his works--the tragedy of _Egmont_. Of far higher moment
for the world, however, was the matter contained in the other of these
manuscripts. Therein were set down the original portions of a poem
which was eventually to fructify into one of the great imaginative
products of all time--the drama of _Faust_.

Beyond all other of Goethe's productions previous to his settling in
Weimar, these original scenes of _Faust_ bring before us his deepest
and truest self. In all the other longer works of that period, in
_Goetz_, in _Werther_, in _Clavigo_, and the rest, one side--the
emotional side--of his nature had been predominantly represented; but
in what he wrote of _Faust_ we have all his mind and heart as he had
them from nature, and as they had been schooled by time. It is one of
the fortunate incidents in literary history that we now possess these
fragments in which the genius of Goethe expressed itself with an
intensity of imaginative force which he never again exemplified in the
same degree. The original text was unknown till 1887, when Erich
Schmidt found it in the possession of a grandnephew of a lady of the
Court of Weimar,[240] who had copied it from the manuscript received
by her from Goethe. It is uncertain whether the manuscript thus
discovered exactly corresponds to the manuscript which Goethe took
with him to Weimar, but the probability is that their contents are
virtually identical.

[Footnote 240: Fraeulein Luise von Goechhausen.]

As in the case of _Der Ewige Jude_, _Prometheus_, and other fragments
of the Frankfort period, the successive scenes of the _Urfaust_ were
thrown off at different times on the inspiration of the moment, and
the exact date of their production can only be a matter of conjecture.
What we do know is that the figure of the legendary Faust had early
attracted his attention. As a boy he had read at least one of the
chap-books which recorded the wondrous history of the scholar who ha