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THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN

The garden like a lady fair was cut
That lay as if she slumbered in delight,
And to the open skies her eyes did shut;
The azure fields of heaven were ’sembled right
In a large round set with flow’rs of light: 
The flowers de luce and the round sparks of dew
That hung upon their azure leaves, did show
Like twinkling stars that sparkle in the ev’ning blue. 
                   —­ GILES FLETCHER

NO MORE remarkable man ever lived than my friend, the young Ellison.  He was remarkable in the entire and continuous profusion of good gifts ever lavished upon him by fortune.  From his cradle to his grave, a gale of the blandest prosperity bore him along.  Nor do I use the word Prosperity in its mere wordly or external sense.  I mean it as synonymous with happiness.  The person of whom I speak, seemed born for the purpose of foreshadowing the wild doctrines of Turgot, Price, Priestley, and Condorcet —­ of exemplifying, by individual instance, what has been deemed the mere chimera of the perfectionists.  In the brief existence of Ellison, I fancy, that I have seen refuted the dogma —­ that in man’s physical and spiritual nature, lies some hidden principle, the antagonist of Bliss.  An intimate and anxious examination of his career, has taught me to understand that, in general, from the violation of a few simple laws of Humanity, arises the Wretchedness of mankind; that, as a species, we have in our possession the as yet unwrought elements of Content, —­ and that even now, in the present blindness and darkness of all idea on the great question of the Social Condition, it is not impossible that Man, the individual, under certain unusual and highly fortuitous conditions, may be happy.

With opinions such as these was my young friend fully imbued; and thus is it especially worthy of observation that the uninterrupted enjoyment which distinguished his life was in great part the result of preconcert.  It is, indeed evident, that with less of the instinctive philosophy which, now and then, stands so well in the stead of experience, Mr. Ellison would have found himself precipitated, by the very extraordinary successes of his life, into the common vortex of Unhappiness which yawns for those of preeminent endowments.  But it is by no means my present object to pen an essay on Happiness.  The ideas of my friend may be summed up in a few words.  He admitted but four unvarying laws, or rather elementary principles, of Bliss.  That which he considered chief, was (strange to say!) the simple and purely physical one of free exercise in the open air.  “The health,” he said, “attainable by other means than this is scarcely worth the name.”  He pointed to the tillers of the earth —­ the only people who, as a class, are proverbially more happy than others —­ and then he instanced the high ecstasies of the fox-hunter.  His second principle was the love of woman.  His third was the contempt of ambition.  His fourth was an object of unceasing pursuit; and he held that, other things being equal, the extent of happiness was proportioned to the spirituality of this object.