As it hovers above the sleeper it begins to sing--to describe ravishing dreamland scenery--inspiring Faust with visions of sensuous loveliness. It then bids Mephistopheles wrap Faust in his magic mantle and prepare for an aerial flight.... 'Whither?' asks Mephistopheles. '_To Greece!_' is the answer: to the Pharsalian plain in Thessaly; and in spite of the protests of Mephistopheles (who has no taste for the land of classic art) he is forced to obey. The sleeping form of Faust is borne aloft, the Mannikin leading the way like a will-o'-the-wisp, gleaming within his glass retort. '_Und ich?_' exclaims poor old Wagner in piteous accents. '_Ach, du!_' says Homunculus, '_Du bleibst zu Hause--!_' 'You just stop at home, and grub away among your musty manuscripts, and work away at your protoplasms and your elixirs of life.' Thus, guided by the Homunculus, Faust and Mephistopheles set forth on their aerial journey to ancient Greece--to the land where the ideals of art have found their highest realization--in quest of Helen, the supreme type of all that the human mind has conceived as beautiful. It is often asked, and I think _we_ may fairly ask, what Goethe meant to symbolize by his Homunculus. You will have noticed that his material components (as the carbonic acid and ammonia of Professor Huxley's protoplasm) are supplied by his scientific 'Daddy,' but that the 'tertia vis,' that third power or 'spiritual bond' which combines his material components, is supplied by the supernatural presence of Mephistopheles. I believe this Homunculus to be a symbol of poetic genius or imagination, which uses the material supplied by plodding pedantry--by critical research, antiquarianism, scholarship, and science--slips from the hands of its poor enamoured Daddy, and flies off to the land of idealism. Here, as we shall see, the Mannikin breaks free from his glass retort and is poured out like phosphorescent light on the waves of the great ocean. But the quest for Helen, for ideal beauty, leads through scenes haunted by forms of weird and terrible nature--those forms in which the human imagination, as it gradually gains a sense of the supernatural and a sense of art, first incorporated its conceptions--forms, first, of hideous and terrific character: monstrous idols of Eastern and Egyptian superstition, Griffins, and Sphinxes, and bull-headed Molochs, and horned Astartes, and many-breasted Cybeles, till in the Hellenic race it rose to the recognition of the beautiful and bodied forth divinity in the human form divine, and found its highest ideal of beauty in Helen, divinely fair of women. This phase in Faust's development--this stage in his quest for beauty and truth--this delirium of his 'divine madness,' as Plato calls our ecstasy of yearning after ideal beauty, is symbolized by the classical _Walpurgisnacht_. (You remember the other _Walpurgisnacht_--that on the Blocksberg--which I described before.)