“It was in the midst of one of his most licentious songs, that my companion suddenly paused. He gazed about him for some time; and faint and dismal as the light was by which we beheld each other, I thought I could observe an extraordinary expression overshadow his countenance. I did not venture to notice it. “Do you know where we are?” he whispered. “Too well;--in the vault of a convent, beyond the help or reach of man,--without food, without light, and almost without hope.”--“Aye, so its last inhabitants might well say.”--“Its last inhabitants!--who were they?”--“I can tell you, if you can bear it.”--“_I cannot bear it_,” I cried, stopping my ears, “I will not listen to it. I feel by the narrator it must be something horrid.”--“It was indeed a horrid night,” said he, unconsciously adverting to some circumstance in the narrative; and his voice sunk into mutterings, and he forbore to mention the subject further. I retired as far from him as the limits of the vault admitted; and, burying my head between my knees, tried to _forbear to think_. What a state of mind must that be, in which we are driven to wish we no longer had one!--when we would willingly become “as the beasts that perish,” to forget that privilege of humanity, which only seems an undisputed title to superlative misery! To sleep was impossible. Though sleep seems to be only a necessity of nature, it always requires an act of the mind to concur in it. And if I had been willing to rest, the gnawings of hunger, which now began to be exchanged for the most deadly sickness, would have rendered it impossible. Amid this complication of physical and mental suffering, it is hardly credible, Sir, but it is not the less true, that my principal one arose from the inanity, the want of occupation, inevitably attached to my dreary situation. To inflict a suspension of the action on a being conscious of possessing the powers of action, and burning for their employment,--to forbid all interchange of mutual ideas, or acquirement of new ones to an intellectual being,--to do this, is to invent a torture that might make Phalaris blush for his impotence of cruelty.