In Act V the great scheme has all been carried out.  What was a watery desolation has been converted into a potential paradise.  Faust is a great feudal lord, with a boundless domain and a fleet of ships that bring him the riches of far-away lands.  But thus far he has simply been amusing himself on a grand scale.  He has thought always mainly of himself.  He has courted experience, among other things the experience of putting forth his power in a contest with the sea and performing a great feat of engineering.  But it has not brought him a satisfaction in which he can rest.  And he has not become a saint.  An aged couple, who belong to the old regime and obstinately refuse to part with the little plot of ground on which they have lived for years, anger him to the point of madness.  He wants their land so that he may build on it a watch-tower from which to survey and govern his possessions.  He sends his servitor to remove them to a better home which he has prepared for them.  But Mephistopheles carries out the order with reckless brutality, with the consequence that the old people are killed and their cottage burned to the ground.  Thus Faust in his old age—­by this time he is a hundred years old—­has a fresh burden on his conscience.  As he stands on the balcony of his palace at midnight, surveying the havoc he has unintentionally wrought, the smoke of the burning cottage is wafted toward him and takes the form of four gray old women.  One of them, Dame Care, slips into the rich man’s palace by way of the keyhole and croons in his ear her dismal litany of care.  Faust replies in a fine declaration of independence, beginning—­

  The circle of the Earth is known to me,
  What’s on the other side we can not see.

As Dame Care leaves him she breathes on his eyelids and makes him blind.  But the inner light is not quenched.  His hunger for life still unabated, he summons up all his energy and orders out an army of workmen to complete a great undertaking on which he has set his heart.  On the edge of his domain, running along the distant foot-hills, is a miasmatic swamp which poisons the air and renders the land uninhabitable.  He proposes to drain the swamp and thus create a home for millions yet to come.

His imagination ranges forward, picturing a free, industrious, self-reliant people swarming on the land that he has won from the sea and made fit for human uses.  In the ecstasy of altruistic emotion he exclaims:  “Such a throng I would fain see, standing with a free people on a free soil; I might say to the passing moment, ’Pray tarry, thou art so fair.’  The traces of my earthly life can not pass away in eons.”  That same instant he sinks back to earth—­dying.

Is there in all literature anything finer, grander, more nobly conceived?  What follows—­the conflict of the angels and devils for the final possession of Faust’s soul—­need not detain us long.  We know how that will turn out.  Indeed, the shrewd old Devil, while he goes through the form of making a stiff fight for what he pretends to think his rights, knows from the first that his is a losing battle.  While he is watching the body of Faust to see where the soul is going to escape, the angels appear in a glory, bearing roses as their only weapon.  With these they put the Devil and his minions to rout and bear away the dead man’s soul to the Holy Mountain, singing their triumphal chant—­