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 "Speriamo!" and clumped 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.
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