Resumo de Sentimental Journey

The bird in his cage pursued me into my room; I sat down
close to my table, and leaning my head upon my hand, I
begun to figure to myself the miseries of confinement. I
was in a right frame for it, and so I gave full scope to my
imagination.
I was going to begin with the millions of
my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery; but
finding, however affecting the picture was, that I could
not bring it near me, and that the multitude of sad groups
in it did but distract me.--
I took a single captive,
and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then look'd
through the twilight of his grated door to take his
picture.
I beheld his body half wasted away with long
expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness
of the heart it was which arises from hope deferr'd. Upon
looking nearer I saw him pale and feverish: in thirty years
the western breeze had not fan n'd his blood--he had seen
no sun, no moon in all that time--nor had the voice of a
friend or kinsman breathed through the lattice--his
children--
--But here my heart began to bleed--and I
was forced to go on with another part of the portrait.

He was sitting upon the ground upon a little straw, in
the furthest corner of his dungeon, which was alternately
his chair and bed: a little calendar of small sticks were
laid at the lead notch'd all over with the dismal days and
nights he had pass'd there--he had one of these little
sticks in his hand, and with a rusty nail he was etching
another day of misery to add to the heap. As I darkened the
little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless eye to the
door, then cast it down--shook his head, and went on with
his work of affliction. I heard his chains upon his legs,
as he turn'd his body to lay his little stick upon the
bundle--He gave a deep sigh--I saw the iron enter into his
soul--I burst into tears--I could not sustain the picture
of confinement which my fancy had drawn--I started up from
my chair, and calling La Fleur, I bid him bespeak me a
remise, and have it ready at the door of the hotel by nine
in the morning.
Yorick's imaginative construction of a
prisoner in his cell illustrates one current in the
tradition of sensibility, in which painful emotions are
cultivated by the man of feeling. Yorick's imagination is
so strong that the "sight" of this prisoner drives him to
tears.
In spite of the fact that the prisoner is a pure
fiction, this passage also illustrates an unpleasant
tendency in the practice of indulging in sympathetic
responses to emotional pain in others. Throughout the
passage, Yorick's language indicates that he works to
increase the prisoner's suffering, for the purpose of
heightening his own experience of it. He treats the
prisoner as a mere source of stimuli for his personal
project of feeling. Similarities between this scene and,
for example, the Maria episode later in the novel, create a
moral tension around the latter episode.
Nevertheless,
this passage also indicates the educative potential of
sensibility. Yorick learns more about the horrors of
imprisonment from his feelings, coupled with and enhanced
by his imagination. The experience drives him to specific,
external action. Of course, the action is one of self-
preservation, but the link between imagined suffering and
action holds out a hope that sensibility can break out of
solipsism into chastened or educated communal action.

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