Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/226

210 I should only like to know whether there are people here who are really happy. Is not the spirit that is sensitive to happiness at the same time so sensitive to unhappiness that its environment here turns everything into bitterness? Who, indeed, can be happy in walking over this battlefield of insensibility where hearts are broken like glass, and human happiness trampled upon like vermin! How many a soul perishes in this country, friendless and unknown, how many a one carries its woe in silence to the grave, because it has once for all resigned itself not to find here any sympathy or appreciation! Every ship that plows the waters, every railway carriage, every log cabin in the forest, every garret in the cities, but especially every hospital, every insane asylum, and every graveyard, harbors a world of pain, without sympathy, and it seems to me as if the only means by which humanity here could bear the consciousness of individual and general misfortune is by becoming callous to it. You might as well write an article on the art of becoming callous as on the art of despairing.

I cannot learn this art; on the contrary, my sensibility increases in the same degree as I see the