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.