As Beatrice approaches, the angels sing:
Oh! Turn
Thy saintly eyes to this thy faithful one,
Who to behold thee many a wearisome pace
Hath measured.
And with the fundamental feeling of Dante's _Divine Comedy_ Faust
concludes:
The ever-womanly
Draws us above.
The earthly love of his youth is fulfilled in the dream of metaphysical
love, in the dream of a divine woman. The genius creates, at the
conclusion of his life, the fulfilment of all longing. It may sound
paradoxical, but Faust--like Dante and Peer Gynt--unconsciously sought
Margaret in the hurly-burly of the world; not the young girl whom he had
seduced and deserted, but the _Eternal-Feminine_, the purely spiritual
love, which in his youth he divined, but destroyed, bound by the
shackles of desire. To Dante, to whom life and poem were one, as well as
to Goethe-Faust, the memory of first love remained typical of all
genuine, profound feeling; with Dante love and Beatrice are identical.
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