that,
while the concluding Prison Scene is in prose in the _Urfaust_, it is
in verse in the later form. Of the three songs which Margaret sings,
only the first, "There was a King in Thule," was retouched. In the
_Urfaust_ the duel between Valentin and Mephistopheles does not occur,
and we have only Valentin's soliloquy on the ruin of his sister; and
the scenes, _Wald und Hoehle_, the _Walpurgis Nacht_, the
_Walpurgisnachtstraum_, generally condemned by critics as inartistic
irrelevancies, are likewise lacking.[241]

[Footnote 241: The words "[Sie] ist gerettet" are not in the
_Urfaust_.]

The _Urfaust_ is the crowning poetic achievement of the youthful
Goethe, and by general consent, as has already been said, he never
again achieved a similar intense fusion of thought, feeling, and
imagination. Apart from the opening Scenes, which have no dramatic
connection with it, the Gretchen tragedy constitutes an artistic whole
which by its perfection of detail and overwhelming tragic effect must
ever remain one of the marvels of creative genius. Not less
astonishing as a manifestation of Goethe's youthful power is the
creation in all their essential lineaments of the three figures,
Faust, Mephistopheles, and Margaret--figures stamped ineffaceably on
the imagination of educated humanity. Be it said also that from the
_Urfaust_ mainly come those single lines and passages which are among
the memorable words recorded in universal literature. Such, to specify
only a few, are the Song of the Earth-Spirit; the lines commenting on
man's vain endeavour to comprehend the past, and on the dreariness of
all theory,[242] contrasted with the freshness and colour of life;
Faust's confession of his religious faith, and Margaret's songs. To
have added in this measure to the intellectual inheritance of the race
assures the testator his rank among the great spirits of all time.

[Footnote 242:

Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und gruen des Lebens goldner Baum.]

With the _Urfaust_, marking as it does the highest development which
Goethe attained in the years of his youth, this record of these years
may fitly close. His characteristics as they present themselves during
that period are certainly in strange contrast to the conception of
the matured Goethe which holds general possession of the public mind,
at least in this country. In that conception the world was for the
later Goethe "a palace of art," in which he moved--