In the completed poem we are next introduced to the Witches' Kitchen,
where Faust is rejuvenated, and where he sees Margaret's image in a
mirror--the reader being thus prepared for the tragedy that is to
follow. In the _Urfaust_ we pass with no connecting link from the
Scene in Auerbach's Cellar to Faust's meeting with Margaret and the
successive Scenes which depict her self-abandonment to Faust and her
consequent misery and ruin. The content of these Scenes is virtually
the same in both forms--the most important difference being that,
while the concluding Prison Scene is in prose in the _Urfaust_, it is
in verse in the later form. Of the three songs which Margaret sings,
only the first, "There was a King in Thule," was retouched. In the
_Urfaust_ the duel between Valentin and Mephistopheles does not occur,
and we have only Valentin's soliloquy on the ruin of his sister; and
the scenes, _Wald und Hoehle_, the _Walpurgis Nacht_, the
_Walpurgisnachtstraum_, generally condemned by critics as inartistic
irrelevancies, are likewise lacking.[241]
[Footnote 241: The words "[Sie] ist gerettet" are not in the
_Urfaust_.]
The _Urfaust_ is the crowning poetic achievement of the youthful
Goethe, and by general consent, as has already been said, he never
again achieved a similar intense fusion of thought, feeling, and
imagination.
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