which was one million and one hundred and twenty-five thousand per month; or thirty-six thousand, nine hundred and eighty-six per day, or one thousand five hundred and forty-one per hour, or six and twenty dollars for every minute that flew.  Thus the usual track of supposition was thoroughly broken up.  Men knew not what to imagine.  There were some who even conceived that Mr. Ellison would divest himself forthwith of at least two-thirds of his fortune as of utterly superfluous opulence; enriching whole troops of his relatives by division of his superabundance.

I was not surprised, however, to perceive that he had long made up his mind upon a topic which had occasioned so much of discussion to his friends.  Nor was I greatly astonished at the nature of his decision.  In the widest and noblest sense, he was a poet.  He comprehended, moreover, the true character, the august aims, the supreme majesty and dignity of the poetic sentiment.  The proper gratification of the sentiment he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of Beauty.  Some peculiarities, either in his early education, or in the nature of his intellect, had tinged with what is termed materialism the whole cast of his ethical speculations; and it was this bias, perhaps, which imperceptibly led him to perceive that the most advantageous, if not the sole legitimate field for the exercise of the poetic sentiment, was to be found in the creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness.  Thus it happened that he became neither musician nor poet; if we use this latter term in its every —­ day acceptation.  Or it might have been that he became neither the one nor the other, in pursuance of an idea of his which I have already mentioned —­ the idea, that in the contempt of ambition lay one of the essential principles of happiness on earth.  Is it not, indeed, possible that while a high order of genius is necessarily ambitious, the highest is invariably above that which is termed ambition?  And may it not thus happen that many far greater than Milton, have contentedly remained “mute and inglorious?” I believe the world has never yet seen, and that, unless through some series of accidents goading the noblest order of mind into distasteful exertion, the world will never behold, that full extent of triumphant execution, in the richer productions of Art, of which the human nature is absolutely capable.

Mr. Ellison became neither musician nor poet; although no man lived more profoundly enamored both of Music and the Muse.  Under other circumstances than those which invested him, it is not impossible that he would have become a painter.  The field of sculpture, although in its nature rigidly poetical, was too limited in its extent and in its consequences, to have occupied, at any time, much of his attention.  And I have now mentioned all the provinces in which even the most liberal understanding of the poetic sentiment has declared this sentiment capable of expatiating.