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How far my pen has been fatigued like those of other travellers, in this journey of it, over so barren a track—the world must judge—but the traces of it, which are now all set o’ vibrating together this moment, tell me ’tis the most fruitful and busy period of my life; for as I had made no convention with my man with the gun as to time—by stopping and talking to every soul I met who was not in a full trot—joining all parties before me—waiting for every soul behind—hailing all those who were coming through cross roads—arresting all kinds of beggars, pilgrims, fiddlers, fryars—not passing by a woman in a mulberry-tree without commending her legs, and tempting her into conversation with a pinch of snuff——In short, by seizing every handle, of what size or shape soever, which chance held out to me in this journey—I turned my plain into a city—(VII, xliii, 429)

Sterne seizes every handle, whether typographical, narrative, or empirical. It is this humanizing through sympathy—the frequent use of the term vibrate should serve to remind us that this important emotion begins as a metaphor drawn from physics—that is at the heart of A Sentimental Journey. Yorick apostrophizes the “great SENSORIUM of the world! which vibrates, if a hair of our heads but falls upon the ground, in the remotest desert of thy creation” (6:155). This passage joins the Sensorium of that most pious of great physicists, Newton, to Matthew 10:31 and other biblical passages (“… the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not, therefore …”), and to eighteenth-century physiology. The closest analogue to Tristram’s “Plain Stories” in A Sentimental Journey employs the same desert image:

I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ’Tis all barren—and so it is; and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers. I declare, said I, clapping my hands chearily together, that was I in a desart, I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections—If I could not do better, I would fasten them upon some sweet myrtle, or seek some melancholy cypress to connect myself to—I would court their shade, and greet them kindly for their protection—I would cut my name upon them, and swear they were the loveliest trees throughout the desart: if their leaves wither’d, I would teach myself to mourn, and when they rejoiced, I would rejoice along with them. (6:36–37)

If the connection with myrtles and cypresses seems too much to smack of solipsism, Yorick’s desire to be at one with some other is best conveyed by the source of his biblical allusion: “Then all the children of Israel went out, and the congregation was gathered together as one man, from Dan even to Beersheba” (Judges 20:1). This image may also serve as a model of the ideal Sternean audience. In a letter to Robert Foley, Sterne presents his “Shandean philosophy”: “We must bring three parts in four of the treat along with us—in short we must be happy within—and then few things without us will make much difference—” (Letters, 234). Tristram, in representing his conversational method of writing, promised “to halve this matter amicably.” Sterne sets up more solipsistic proportions here, a tendency that may explain Yorick’s readiness in A Sentimental Journey to project the self into a nonhuman or inanimate other in the desert (the “myrtle” or “cypress,” the latter a sentimental favorite) or his fantasy of a captive triggered when he hears a starling cry in English among the French, “I can’t get out.” Sterne’s treatment of sentimentalism has sometimes been regarded as totally satirical, and it’s not hard to see why from such episodes as the death of Le Fever or the madness of Maria. But in fact they seem more characteristic of his moving “from jesting to seriousness and back to jesting,” as his adaptation of the Latin epigraph to Volume III of Tristram Shandy may be translated. The serious (or in this case, the sentimental) is not simply devalued.

The hobbyhorse, that emblem of the book’s action, is a creature