Mr. William Morris's Helen, in the "Earthly Para-
dise," charms at the time of reading, but, perhaps, leaves
little abiding memory. The Helen of "Troilus and
Cressida" is not one of Shakespeare's immortal women,
and Mr. Rossetti's ballad is fantastic and somewhat
false in tone -- a romantic pastiche. Where Euripides
twice failed, in the "Troades" and the "Helena," it
can be given to few to suceed. Helen is best left
to her earliest known minstrel, for who can recapture the
grace, the tenderness, the melancholy, and the charm
of the daughter of Zeus in the "Odyssey" and "Iliad"?
The sightless eyes of Homer saw her clearest, and Helen
was best understood by the wisdom of his unquestioning
simplicity.

As if to prove how entirely, though so many hands
paltered with her legend, Helen is Homer's alone, there
remains no great or typical work of Greek art which
represents her beauty, and the breasts from which were
modelled cups of gold for the service of the gods. We
have only paintings on vases, or work on gems, which,
though graceful, is conventional and might represent
any other heroine, Polyxena, or Eriphyle. No Helen
from the hands of Phidias or Scopas has survived to
our time, and the grass may be growing in Therapnae
over the shattered remains of her only statue.

As Stesichorus fabled that only an eidolon of Helen
went to Troy, so, except in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey,"
we meet but shadows of her loveliness, phantasms
woven out of clouds, and the light of setting suns.

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