and there entered a tall lad with an armful of newspapers; after
regarding me curiously, he asked whether I wanted a paper. I took one
with the hope of reading it next morning. Then he began conversation. I
had the fever? Ah! everybody had fever at Cotrone. He himself would be
laid up with it in a day or two. If I liked, he would look in with a
paper each evening—till fever prevented him. When I accepted this
suggestion, he smiled encouragingly, cried “
out of the room.
I had as little sleep as on the night before, but my suffering was
mitigated in a very strange way. After I had put out the candle, I
tormented myself for a long time with the thought that I should never
see La Colonna. As soon as I could rise from bed, I must flee Cotrone,
and think myself fortunate in escaping alive; but to turn my back on
the Lacinian promontory, leaving the cape unvisited, the ruin of the
temple unseen, seemed to me a miserable necessity which I should lament
as long as I lived. I felt as one involved in a moral disaster; working
in spite of reason, my brain regarded the matter from many points of
view, and found no shadow of solace. The sense that so short a distance
separated me from the place I desired to see, added exasperation to my
distress. Half-delirious, I at times seemed to be in a boat, tossing on
wild waters, the Column visible afar, but only when I strained my eyes
to discover it. In a description of the approach by land, I had read of
a great precipice which had to be skirted, and this, too, haunted me
with its terrors: I found myself toiling on a perilous road, which all
at once crumbled into fearful depths just before me. A violent
shivering fit roused me from this gloomy dreaming, and I soon after
fell into a visionary state which, whilst it lasted, gave me such
placid happiness as I have never known when in my perfect mind. Lying
still and calm, and perfectly awake, I watched a succession of
wonderful pictures. First of all I saw great vases, rich with ornament
and figures; then sepulchral marbles, carved more exquisitely than the
most beautiful I had ever known. The vision grew in extent, in
multiplicity of detail; presently I was regarding scenes of ancient
life—thronged streets, processions triumphal or religious, halls of
feasting, fields of battle. What most impressed me at the time was the
marvellously bright yet delicate colouring of everything I saw. I can
give no idea in words of the pure radiance which shone from every
object, which illumined every scene. More remarkable, when I thought of
it next day, was the minute finish of these pictures, the definiteness
of every point on which my eye fell. Things which I could not know,
which my imagination, working in the service of the will, could never
have bodied forth, were before me as in life itself. I consciously
wondered at peculiarities of costume such as I had never read of; at
features of architecture entirely new to me; at insignificant
characteristics of that by-gone world, which by no possibility could
have been gathered from books. I recall a succession of faces, the
loveliest conceivable; and I remember, I feel to this moment the pang
of regret with which I lost sight of each when it faded into darkness.
As an example of the more elaborate visions that passed before me, I
