INSCRIPTION
Reading edition
Pale Goethe, Marlowe, Lessing—calm your fears! None plots to steal your laurel wreaths away. Approach; take tickets: you shall witness here The unromantic Faustus of to-day— A Faustus whom no mystic choirs sustain, No wizard fiends blind with prodigious spell. The mortal earth shall serve him as domain Whether he mount to Heaven or sink to Hell. Yet, mount or sink, your lights around him shine. And there shall flow, bubbling with woe or mirth, From these new bottles your familiar wine, As ancient as man's rule upon the earth.