“The stranger was too intent on his description to heed her. “To these cities they resort nominally for security and protection, but really for the sole purpose to which their existence is devoted,--that of aggravating its miseries by every ingenuity of refinement. For example, those who live in uncontrasted and untantalized misery, can hardly feel it--suffering becomes their habit, and they feel no more jealousy of their situation than the bat, who clings in blind and famishing stupefaction to the cleft of a rock, feels of the situation of the butterfly, who drinks of the dew, and bathes in the bloom of every flower. But the people of the _other worlds_ have invented, by means of living in cities, a new and singular mode of aggravating human wretchedness--that of contrasting it with the wild and wanton excess of superfluous and extravagant splendour.” “Here the stranger had incredible difficulty to make Immalee comprehend how there could be an unequal division of the means of existence; and when he had done his utmost to explain it to her, she continued to repeat, (her white finger on her scarlet lip, and her small foot beating the moss), in a kind of pouting inquietude, “Why should some have more than they can eat, and others nothing to eat?”--“This,” continued the stranger, “is the most exquisite refinement on that art of torture which those beings are so expert in--to place misery by the side of opulence--to bid the wretch who dies for want feed on the sound of the splendid equipages which shake his hovel as they pass, but leave no relief behind--to bid the industrious, the ingenious, and the imaginative, starve, while bloated mediocrity pants from excess--to bid the dying sufferer feel that life might be prolonged by one drop of that exciting liquor, which, wasted, produces only sickness or madness in those whose lives it undermines;--to do this is their principal object, and it is fully attained. The sufferer through whose rags the wind of winter blows, like arrows lodging in every pore--whose tears freeze before they fall--whose soul is as dreary as the night under whose cope his resting-place must be--whose glued and clammy lips are unable to receive the food which famine, lying like a burning coal at his vitals, craves--and who, amid the horrors of a houseless winter, might prefer its desolation to that of the den that abuses the name of home--without food--without light--where the howlings of the storm are answered by the fiercer cries of hunger--and he must stumble to his murky and strawless nook over the bodies of his children, who have sunk on the floor, not for rest, but despair. Such a being, is he not sufficiently miserable?”