Euphorion Author:Vernon Lee Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. Faiistus is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the Middlt Ages—/Vt fajsiflnnte aspiration, its conscience-stricken desire, its fet... more »tered curiosity amid M- cmmping limits of imperfect knoiuledge and irrational dogmatism. The intlt sintctiblc beauty of Greek art, whereof Helen was an emblem, became, througk tfu discovery of classic poetry and sculpture, the possession of the modem world. JH'filitrvalism took this Helen to "fife, and their offspring, the Kupliorion o,' Goethe s drama, is the spirit of the modem world.—J. A. Svmonus, " Renaissance in Italy," vol. ii. p. 54. EUPHORION is the name given by Goethe to the marvellous child born of the mystic marriage of Fausi and Helena. Who Faust is, and who Helena, we all know. Faust, of whom no man can remember the youth or childhood, seems to have come into the world by some evil spell, already old and with the faintness of body and of mind which are the heritage of age ; and every additional year of mysterious study and abortive effort has made him more vacillating of step and uncertain of sight, but only more hungry of soul. Postponed and repressed by reclusion from the world, and desperate tension over insoluble problems ; diverted into the channels of mere thought and vision ; there boils within him the energy, the passion, ofretarded youth : its appetites and curiosities, which, cramped by the intolerant will, and foiled by many a sudden palsy of limb and mind, torment him with mad visions of unreal worlds, mock him with dreams of superhuman powers, from which he awakes in impotent and apathetic anguish. But these often- withstood and often-baffled cravings are not those merely of scholar or wizard, they are those of soldier and poet and monk, of the mere man : lawless desires which he seeks to div...« less