Faust: The Tragedy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Part II, Act II: LABORATORY
(After the style of the Middle Ages: extensive, unwieldy apparatus, for fantastical purposes.)
WAGNER (at the furnace).
The solemn bell shakes with its boom
The sooty walls in dread vibration.
Soon must uncertainty assume
Some form, to greet long expectation.
[...]
(He turns to his hearth.)
Look! There's a gleam!--Now hope may be fulfilled,
That hundreds of ingredients, mixed, distilled-
And mixing is the secret-give us power
The stuff of human nature to compound;
If in a limbeck we now seal it round
And cohobate with final care profound,
The finished work may crown this silent hour.
(Turning again to the hearth.)
It works! The substance stirs, is turning clearer!
The truth of my conviction presses nearer:
The thing in Nature as high mystery prized,
This has our science probed beyond a doubt;
What Nature by slow process organized,
That have we grasped, and crystallized it out.
[...]
A flash, a mantling, and the ferment rises,
Thus, in this moment, hope materializes.
A mighty project may at first seem mad,
But now we laugh, the ways of chance foreseeing:
A thinker then, in mind's deep wonder clad,
May give at last a thinking brain its being.
(He looks at the phial enraptured.)
Now chimes the glass, a note of sweetest strength,
It clouds, it clears, my utmost hope it proves,
For there my longing eyes behold at length
A dapper form, that lives and breathes and moves.
My mannikin! What can the world ask more?
The mystery is brought to light of day.
Now comes the whisper we are waiting for:
He forms his speech, has clear-cut words to say.
HOMUNCULUS (speaking to Wagner from the phial).
Well, Father, what's to do? No joke, I see.
Come, take me to your heart, and tenderly!
But not too tight, for fear the glass should break.
That is the way that things are apt to take:
The cosmos scarce will compass Nature's kind,
But man's creations need to be confined....
