This conception of Hanold’s trip, as a flight from the erotic desire for the beloved, who is so near, which is awakening in him, harmonizes, however, with the frame of mind portrayed in him during his stay in Italy. The rejection of the eroticism, which dominates him, expresses itself there in his abhorrence of honeymoon travellers. A little dream in the “albergo” in Rome, caused by the proximity of a couple of German lovers, “Augustus” and “Gretchen,” whose evening conversation he is forced to overhear through the thin partition, casts a further light on the erotic tendencies of his first great dream. The new dream transports him again to Pompeii where Vesuvius is just having another eruption, and thus refers to the dream which continues active during his trip; but among the imperilled people he sees this time—not as before himself and Gradiva—but Apollo Belvedere and the Capitoline Venus,—doubtless ironic exaltation of the couple in the adjoining room. Apollo lifts Venus, carries her away, and lays her on an object in the dark, which seems to be a carriage or a cart, for a “rattling sound” comes from it. Otherwise the dream needs no special skill for its interpretation. (_G._ p. 32.) Our author, whom we have long relied on not to make a single stroke in his picture idly and without purpose, has given us another bit of testimony for the non-sexual force dominating Hanold on the trip. During hours of wandering in Pompeii, it happens that “remarkably, it did not once appear in his memory that he had dreamed some time ago that he had been present at the destruction of Pompeii by the volcanic eruption of 79.” (_G._ p. 42.) At sight of Gradiva he first suddenly remembers this dream, and at the same time the motive of the delusion for his puzzling journey becomes conscious. Then what other meaning could there be for forgetting the dream, this repression-boundary between the dream and the psychic condition of the journey, than that the journey is not the result of the direct instigation of the dream, but of the rejection of this latter, as the emanation from a psychic force which desires no knowledge of the secret meaning of the dream?