But when he who has said so much beholds her face to face, he is stricken dumb.

Beatrice receives Dante from his guide and herself unveils to him the mysteries of life.  Similarly Margaret beseeches the Virgin: 

     To guide him, be it given to me
     Still dazzles him the new-born day!

and receives from on high the command which the symbolically burdened Beatrice knows intuitively: 

     Ascend, thine influence feeleth he,
     He’ll follow on thine upward way.

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.  In the soul of these two men metaphysical love, the longing for the eternal in woman, which they did not find on earth, gradually awoke to life.  Both place the glorified mistress by the side of another woman, the Catholic Queen of Heaven.  In Dante’s, as well as in Goethe’s Paradise two women, a personal one and a universal one, are loved and adored.  The second woman, too, has her exclusive, ecstatic worshipper.  St. Bernard, the Doctor Marianus of Dante, prostrating himself before her, addresses to her the sublime prayer which begins: 

     Oh, Virgin!  Mother!  Daughter of thy Son!

and in Faust we meet again the Doctor Marianus burning—­as the representative of the totality of her worshippers—­with the “sacred joy of love” (Dante says

     The Queen of Heaven for whom my soul
     Burns with love’s rapture)

and pronouncing the most beautiful prayer to the Madonna which the world possesses, and which is almost identical with Dante’s: 

     Virgin, pure from taint of earth,
     Mother, we adore thee,
     With the Godhead one by birth,
     Queen, we bow before thee!

And, prostrated before her: 

     Penitents, her saviour-glance
     Gratefully beholding,
     To beatitude advance,
     Still new pow’rs unfolding! 
     Thine each better thought shall be,
     To thy service given! 
     Holy Virgin, gracious be,
     Mother, Queen of Heaven!