cathedral to the Parthenon, or to Paestum.

I know no poet who in any modern language has reproduced as Goethe has
done in his _Iphigenie_ and in the _Helena_ not only the external form
but also the spirit of Hellenic literature. While reading the _Helena_
we feel ourselves under the cloudless Grecian sky; we breathe the
Grecian air with Helen herself.

The scene is laid before the palace of Menelaus at Sparta. Helen,
accompanied by a band of captive Trojan maidens, has been disembarked at
the mouth of the river Eurotas by Menelaus, on his return from Troy, and
has been sent forward to Sparta to make preparation for the arrival of
her husband and his warriors. Once more after those long eventful years
since she had fled to Troy with Paris she stands as in a dream before
her own palace-home, dazed and wearied, her mind distraught with anxious
thoughts; for during the long wearisome return across the Aegean sea her
husband Menelaus has addressed no friendly word to her, but seemed
gloomily revolving in his heart some deed of vengeance. She knows not if
she is returning as queen, or as captive, doomed perhaps to the fate of
a slave.

She enters the palace alone. After a few moments she reappears,
horror-struck and scarce able to tell what she has seen. Crouching
beside the central hearth she has found a terrible shape--a ghastly
haggard thing, like some phantom of hell. It has followed her. It stands
there before her on the threshold of her palace. In terrible accents
this Gorgon-like monster denounces her, recounting all the ruin that by
her fatal beauty she had wrought, interweaving into the story the
various legends connected with her past life--those mysterious legends
that connect Helen not only with Paris and Menelaus but with Theseus and
Achilles and with Egypt--legends of a second phantom-Helen, the 'double'
of that Helen whom Menelaus has carried home from Troy--until alarmed
and distracted, doubting her own identity, overwhelmed by anxiety about
the future and by terror at the grisly apparition, she seems herself to
be in truth fading away into a mere phantom, and sinks senseless to the
ground. After a fierce altercation between the chorus of captive maidens
and the Gorgon-shape (in whom you will have recognized our old friend
Mephistopheles) Helen returns to consciousness. Then the
Phorkyad-Mephistopheles tells her that the preparations which she has
been ordered to make are in view of a sacrifice to be perfor