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