But the ready tears of heroes are soon dried. They cheer Telemachus so far as they may by tales of his father’s craft and courage before Troy; and Helen mixes for him the cup of Nepenthe, which steeps memory in a mist and banishes care and calls a smile to the lips. She does not herself taste of the magic drink, however; she has no wish to forget. Secure now in the peace of home and enfolded by generous forgiveness, she will always remember, until she comes to pass through Lethe on her way to the Elysian fields. And there, when the time came, she was translated ‘where falls not rain, or hail, or any snow.’ A shrine was built to her, and Greek men and maidens worshipped her as one of the immortal gods themselves. _O’er Helen’s shrine the grass is growing green, In desolate Therapnae; none the less Her sweet face now unworshipped and unseen Abides the symbol of all loveliness, Of Beauty ever stainless in the stress Of warring lusts and fears; and still divine, Still ready with immortal peace to bless Them that with pure hearts worship at her shrine._[1] ----- Footnote 1: From Mr Andrew Lang’s _Helen of Troy_ (G. Bell and Sons Ltd.). Footnote 2: From Messrs Lang, Leaf, and Myers’s translation of the _Iliad_ (Macmillan and Co. Ltd.). Footnote 3: From Professor J. W. Mackail’s translation of the _Odyssey_ (John Murray). _Homer: Andromache_ Andromache was the young wife of Hector, Priam’s warrior son and defender of Troy. Over against the figure of Helen in the _Iliad_ her gentle integrity stands in mute reproach. It is as though Homer, whose chivalry to Helen will not permit him to censure her, yet feels the claim of a larger chivalry—to womanhood itself. So he seems impelled to create this type of gracious purity, vindicating wifely honour and motherly tenderness; and proving at the same time that if his race had a high ideal of beauty, it had also a profound regard for domestic ties. Helen and Andromache, therefore, stand side by side in the action of the poem. Their destinies are linked: their lives are passed within the same walls: they own the same relationship to king Priam and to Hecuba the queen; and they are united in suffering. But always they are as far apart in spirit as conscious guilt on the one hand and indignant rectitude on the other ever held two daughters of Eve. Andromache, like all the men and women of heroic poetry, was very human. And we have the feeling that she could not rise to Hector’s generosity toward the Spartan woman for whose sake Paris had brought the war on Ilios. Perhaps the reason was that she had suffered more deeply on Helen’s account. And if she had joined in those reproaches which Helen wailed about in her threnos over Hector’s body, it was from bitter cause.