that her face turned
all those who chanced to catch sight of it to stone. There is a degree
of hideousness which no eyes can endure; and so it came to pass that the
cave wherein she dwelt, and all the woods around it, were full of men
and wild beasts who had been petrified by a glance of her,--grim fossils
immortalised in stone,--while the snakes writhed and the red eyes
rolled, waiting for another victim.

This was not a case into which any hope of redemption could enter, and
there was nothing for it but to slay her. To do this, Perseus set out
upon his long journey, equipped with the magic gifts of swiftness and
invisibility, and bearing on his arm the shield that was also a mirror.
The whole picture is infinitely dreary. As he travels across the dark
sea to the land where the pillars of Atlas are visible far off, towering
into the sky, the light decreases. In the murky and dangerous twilight
he forces the Graiai, those grey-haired sisters with their miserable
fragmentary life, to bestir their aged limbs and guide him to the
Gorgons' den. By the dark stream, where the yellow light brooded
everlastingly, he reached at last that cave of horrors. Well was it then
for Perseus that he was invisible, for the snakes that were Medusa's
hair could see all round. But at that time Medusa was asleep and the
snakes asleep, and in the silence and twilight of the land where there
is "neither night nor day, nor cloud nor breeze nor storm," he held the
magic mirror over against the monster, beheld her in it without change
or injury to himself, severed the head, and bore it away to place it on
Athene's shield.

It is very interesting to notice how Art has treated the legend. It was
natural that so vivid an image should become a favourite alike with
poets and with sculptors, but there was a gradual development from the
old hideous and terrible representations, back to the calm repose of a
beautiful dead face. This might indeed more worthily record the maiden's
tragedy, but it missed entirely the thing that the old myth had said.
The oldest idea was horrible beyond horror, for the darker side of
things is always the most impressive to primitive man, and sheer
ugliness is a category with which it is easy to work on simple minds.
The rudest art can achieve such grotesque hideousness long before it can
depict beauty. Later, as we have seen, Art tempered the face to beauty,
but in so doing forgot the meaning of the story. It was the old st