Part of ajax responseText

Question

Can you please tell me how to obtain a certain part from ajax responseText?

Example:

<div id="first">Text1<div>
<div id="second">I want to use this text<div>
<div id="third">Text 3<div>

I thought about passing the responseText to a div, and then accessing it with document.getElementById('id'), but i thing there are better ways.