soon as Faust's feet touch classic soil he recovers his senses and
sets out with enthusiasm to find Helena. After some wandering about
among the classic fantoms he falls in with Chiron the Centaur, who
carries him far away to the foot of Mount Olympus and leaves him with
the wise priestess Manto, who escorts him to the Lower World and
secures the consent of Queen Persephone to a temporary reappearance of
Helena on earth.

Meanwhile Mephistopheles, delighted to find on classic ground
creatures no less ugly than those familiar to him in the far
Northwest, enters, seemingly by way of a lark, into a curious
arrangement with the three daughters of Phorkys. These were imagined
by the Greeks as hideous old hags who lived in perpetual darkness and
had one eye and one tooth which they used in common. Mephistopheles
borrows the form, the eye, and the tooth of a Phorkyad and transforms
himself very acceptably into an image of the Supreme Ugliness. In that
shape he-she manages the fantasmagory of the third act. As for the
third member of the expedition to Thessaly, Homunculus, he is
possessed by a consuming desire to "begin existence," that is, to get
a body and become a full-fledged member of the genus Homo. His
wanderings in search of the best place to begin take him out into the
Aegean Sea, where he is entranced by the beauty of the scene. In an
ecstasy of prophetic joy he dashes his bottle to pieces against the
shell-chariot of the lovely sea-nymph Galatea and dissolves himself
with the shining animalculae of the sea. There he is now--coming up to
the full estate of manhood by the various stages of protozoon, amoeba,
mollusc, fish, reptile, bird, mammal, Man. It will take time, but he
has no need to hurry.

Then follows the third act, a classico-romantic fantasmagoria, in
which Faust as medieval knight, ruling his multitudinous vassals from
his castle in Arcadia, the fabled land of poetry, is wedded to the
classic Queen of Beauty. It is all very fantastic, but also very
beautiful and marvelously pregnant in its symbolism. But at last the
fair illusion comes to an end. Euphorion, the child of Helena and
Faust, the ethereal, earth-spurning Genius of Poesy, perishes in an
attempt to fly, and his grief-stricken mother follows him back to
Hades. Nothing is left to Faust but a majestic, inspiring memory. He
gathers the robe of Helena about him, and it bears him aloft and
carries him, high up in the air and far above all that is vu