is celebrated annually on the battle-field of Pharsalus in Thessaly.  As 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 vulgar, back to Germany.  His vehicle of cloud lands him on a mountain-summit, where he is soon joined by Mephistopheles, who puts the question, What next?  We are now at the beginning of Act IV.  Faust proceeds to unfold a grand scheme of conflict with the Sea.  On his flight he has observed the tides eternally beating in upon the shore and evermore receding, all to no purpose.  This blind waste of energy has excited in him the spirit of opposition.  He proposes to fight the sea by building dikes which shall hold the rushing water in check and make dry land of the tide-swept area.  Mephistopheles enters readily into his plans.  They help the Emperor to win a critical battle, and by way of reward Faust receives a vast tract of swampy sea-shore as his fief.