Mazzini, we know, struck a note of melancholy out of that proud exultation. Italy, if she lives, lives among ruins, and for the most part she is careless of her decay. [Illustration: THE CLOCK TOWER.] Murano, like Torcello, is bound by one glorious link with her Byzantine past, and this one of the noblest monuments, not of the lagoons only, but of all Italy; simple, stern, august. San Donato has not, indeed, gone unscathed by time, nor by modernity. The wonders of its pavement are becoming blackened and obscured; holes are being worn in it, missing cubes leave gaps in the design. In winter it is constantly flooded by high tide, and even in other seasons the damp is ruining a pavement which rivals, if it does not surpass, that of San Marco. It is impossible to describe the beauty of the designs, the exquisite harmonics of its precious marbles, porphyry and verd-antique, Verona, serpentine and marmo greco, with noble masses of colour among the smaller fragments, and a most precious gem of chalcedony, which, if we may believe the poor old sacristan, whose complaints concerning his precious floor wake no response, an English visitor would have wished to steal. The sacristan can show to all who will lament with him the ruin wrought by sacrilegious man. But no profane hand has dared to raise itself against the Madonna of the apse. This Madonna of San Donato is even grander, more august, than that other who in Torcello conquers Time, and surely it is not without reason that we have called her the goddess of the lagoons. In perfect aloofness and secrecy she stands, but with luminous revelation in her strangely significant eyes; her white hands uplifted, her white face shining out of the darkness, the long, straight folds of her dark robe worked with gold, her feet resting, it seems, upon a golden fire. The gaze of this marvellous Madonna seems to comprehend the world. She is a sphinx who holds the key of every mystery. In her presence we are overcome by the impulse to kneel and worship. She is not, like many Byzantine Madonnas, grotesque, forbidding in her immensity, in her aloofness; for even while she rebukes and subdues our littleness of soul, she draws all our senses as a being of absolute, inexplicable beauty. She holds us rapt and will not let us go. The memory of the Duomo of San Donato is concentrated in the single magical figure of her Madonna, leaning in benediction from the golden apse.