Scene III.
Witches’ Kitchen.
A caldron is seen boiling on a low hearth. Numbers of strange fantastic figures tumbling up and down in the smoke. A Mother-Cat-Ape[n8] sits beside the caldron, taking off the scum, and keeping it from boiling over. An Old Cat-Ape beside her warming himself with his young ones. Roof and walls are covered over with a strange assortment of furniture, and implements used by witches.
Enter Faust and Mephistopheles.
Faust.
I cannot brook this brainless bedlam stuff!
And must it be that I shall cast my slough
In this hotbed of all unreasoned doing?
Shall an old beldam give me what I lack?
And can her pots and pans, with all their brewing,
Shake off full thirty summers from my back?
Woe’s me, if thou canst boast no better scheme!
My brightest hopes are vanished as a dream.
Has Nature then, and has some noble Spirit,
No balsam for the body to repair it?
Mephistopheles.
My friend, with your great sense I cannot but be smitten!
Nature, too, boasts a plan to renovate your age;
But in a wondrous volume it is written,
And wondrous is the chapter and the page.
Faust.
But I must know it.
Mephistopheles.
Good! the poorest man may try it,
Without or witch, or quack, or gold to buy it;
And yet it works a certain cure.
Go take thee with the peasant to the moor,
And straight begin to hew and hack;
Confine thee there, with patient mood,
Within the narrow beaten track,
And nourish thee with simplest food;
Live with the brute a brute, and count it not too low
To dung the corn-fields thine own hands shall mow;
Than this I know on earth no med’cine stronger,
To make, by fourscore years, both soul and body younger!
Faust.
I was not trained to this—was never made
To labor with the pick-axe and the spade;
Such narrow round of life I may not brook.
Mephistopheles.
Then you must look into another book,
And be content to take the witch for cook.
Faust.
But why this self-same ugly Jezebel?
Could you not brew the drink yourself as well?
Mephistopheles.
A precious pastime that indeed! meanwhile
I had built bridges many a German mile.
Not art, and science strict, are here enough,
But patience too, and perseverance tough.
