already passed one man by, as he stands stroking his beard, while tears and sorrow await him in the form of the woman on his right in mourning guise and posture; the stalwart man on the left is he who faces Time and takes him by the forelock, and for him the crown and palm of victory are in waiting. But Professor Cattaneo seems to give a needlessly limited significance to the idea of Time. It is to him the Time which God offers to man that he may do what is just and combat his own evil passions; this seems to him to be expressed by the scales and the stick he grasps in his hand. Perhaps it is enough to think merely of the club as that with which a more familiar Time is wont to deal back-handed blows at those who are so idle or so sluggish as to let him pass. At any rate the men of Torcello could comprehend this language of the rough stone. What matter if the oracles were dumb? Which of them had not wept to see the face of Time averted, which of them had not felt the weight of his backward blow? And yet this symbol of old Time must have been mute to them before the great solemn Madonna in the dusky, golden circle of the apse; she looks beyond all fortunes and vicissitudes of man. How should they dare to pray to her? Worship they may, and rise with strength to contend with Time and conquer him, with a weapon to face the mystery of life; but they meet here no smile of comfort, no companionable grace. To those men who dreamed this figure, to us who look upon her and worship, the dominion of Time is a forgotten thing; we ask no pity for our human woes; they have passed, they have crumbled: she gives us a better gift than pity, insight into the hidden things of life and of art; she wings with hope, if with stern hope, our dream of beauty. The mosaics on the west wall of the cathedral have the same stern character, with less of beauty than the Madonna of the apse: the great angels on either side the weird central Christ in the upper division have a strangely oriental effect. They might be Indian gods. They hold the Christian symbols, but with how abstracted, how remote a gaze they look out from their aureoles! They are at one with the noble simplicity and strength and greatness of the spirit of the building they adorn. Somehow they seem to us the oldest thing within it; we begin to be drawn by them into mysteries older than the caves of Greece whence the pillars of this duomo came; we begin to share their watch over a vast desert where all the faiths and imaginings of men may move and mingle, and find a common altar under the dome of the evening sky.