But then, again to something new.
Faust.
You might employ your time some better way
Than thus to plague me on a happy day.
Mephistopheles.
Well, well! I do not grudge you quiet,
You need my aid, and you cannot deny it.
There is not much to lose, I trow,
With one so harsh, and gruff, and mad as thou.
Toil! moil! from morn to ev’n, so on it goes!
And what one should, and what one should not do,
One cannot always read it on your nose.
Faust.
This is the proper tone for you!
Annoy me first, and then my thanks are due.
Mephistopheles.
Poor son of Earth! without my timed assistance,
How had you ever dragged on your existence?
From freakish fancy’s fevered effervescence,
I have worked long ago your convalescence,
And, but for me, you would have marched away,
In your best youth, from the blest light of day.
What have you here, in caves and clefts, to do,
Like an old owl, screeching to-whit, to-whoo?
Or like a torpid toad, that sits alone
Sipping the oozing moss and dripping stone?
A precious condition to be in!
I see the Doctor sticks yet in your skin.
Faust.
Couldst thou but know what re-born vigor springs
From this lone wandering in the wilderness,
Couldst thou conceive what heavenly joy it brings,
Then wert thou fiend enough to envy me my bliss.
Mephistopheles.
A supermundane bliss!
In night and dew to lie upon the height,
And clasp the heaven and earth in wild delight,
To swell up to the godhead’s stature,
And pierce with clear miraculous sight
The inmost pith of central Nature,
To carry in your breast with strange elation,
The ferment of the whole six days’ creation,
With proud anticipation of—I know
Not what—to glow in rapturous overflow,
And melt into the universal mind,
Casting the paltry son of earth behind;
And then, the heaven-sprung intuition
[With a gesture.] To end—I shall not say in what—fruition.
Faust.
Shame on thee!
