Helen, to be sure, leaves some relics behind, by which we may understand that the influence of Greek history, literature, and sculpture may still avail to cultivate the mind and give it an air of distinction. Perhaps in the commonwealth he is about to found, Faust would wish to establish not only dykes and freedom, but also professorships of Greek and archaeological museums. And the lyre of Euphorion, which is also left us, may signify that poems like Byron’s _Isles of Greece_, Keats’s _Grecian Urn, Die Götter Griechenlands_ of Schiller, and Goethe’s own classical pieces will continue to enrich European literature. This is something, but not enough to lift Faust’s immense enthusiasm for Helen above a crass illusion. That dream of a perfect beauty to be achieved, of a perfect life to be lived according to nature and reason, would have ended in a little scholarship and a little pedantry. Faust would have won Helen in order to hand her over to Wagner. Helen was queen of Sparta; and although of course the Doric Sparta of Lycurgus was something much later, and had nothing to do with the Sparta of Homer, yet taken symbolically it is the happiest accident that Helen, the type of Greek perfection in beauty, should have been queen of Sparta, the type of Greek perfection in discipline. A Faust that had truly deserved and understood Helen would have built her an Hellenic city; he would have become himself an _ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν_, a master of men, one of those poets in things, those shapers of well-bred generations and wise laws, of which Plato speaks, contrasting them with Homer and other poets in words only. For the beauty of mind and body that fascinates the romantic classicist, and which inspired the ancient poets themselves, was not a product of idleness and sentimentality, nor of material and forced activity; it was a product of orderly war, religion, gymnastics, and deliberate self-government.