The next morning he goes through the “ingresso” to Pompeii and, after taking leave of the guide, roams aimlessly through the city, notably, however, without remembering that he has been present in a dream some time before at the destruction of Pompeii. Therefore in the “hot, holy” hour of noon, which the ancients, you know, considered the ghost-hour, when the other visitors have taken flight and the heap of ruins, desolate and steeped in sunlight, lies before him, there stirs in him the ability to transport himself back into the buried life, but not with the aid of science. “What it taught was a lifeless, archæological view and what came from its mouth was a dead, philological language. These helped in no way to a comprehension with soul, mind and heart, as the saying is, but he, who possessed a desire for that, had to stand alone here, the only living person in the hot noonday silence, among the remains of the past, in order not to see with physical eyes nor hear with corporeal ears. Then—the dead awoke, and Pompeii began to live again.” (_G._ p. 48.) While thus, by means of his imagination, he endows the past with life, he suddenly sees, indubitably, the Gradiva of his bas-relief step out of a house and buoyantly cross the lava stepping-stones, just as he had seen her in the dream that night when she had lain down to sleep on the steps of the Apollo temple. “With this memory he became conscious, for the first time, of something else; he had, without himself knowing the motive in his heart, come to Italy on that account, and had, without stop, continued from Rome and Naples to Pompeii to see if he could here find trace of her—and that in a literal sense—for, with her unusual gait, she must have left behind in the ashes a foot-print different from all the others.” (_G._ p. 50.)