Free The Slender Poe Anthology by Edgar Allan Poe Page B

Gentleman’s Magazine.
    Ellison is one of the most intriguing of all Poe characters; “In the widest and noblest sense he was a poet.” I was first introduced to Ellison’s four elementary conditions for bliss— free exercise in the open air, love of woman, detachment from ambition, and creation of novel beauty—in an old paperback of Baudelaire’s poetry and criticism translated by Wallace Fowlie; it was from a passage in Edgar Poe, His Life and Works , with the French en face . I was in my 20s; I never forgot them, though I hadn’t read this tale until beginning to work on the book now in your hands. I’m glad I got around to it.
    There is a trip downriver that has a psychedelic feel to it, and when you get to where it’s going, a palace hovers, made possible by the magic of elemental agencies.
    A marvelous painting by the Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte, bears the title of this tale. Magritte, like many of the surrealists, thought very highly of Poe; in fact, during his only visit to New York for a major exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, Magritte made a beeline to Poe’s house in Fordham: a grateful, reverent pilgrim.

THE DOMAIN OF ARNHEIM
    â€œThe 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 the flowers of light.
The flowers de luce, and the round sparks of dew.
That hung upon their azure leaves did shew
Like twinkling stars that sparkle in the evening blue.”
    â€”Giles Fletcher
    From his cradle to his grave a gale of prosperity bore my friend Ellison along. Nor do I use the word prosperity in its mere worldly sense. I mean it as synonymous with happiness. The person of whom I speak seemed born for the purpose of foreshadowing the doctrines of Turgot, Price, Priestley, and Condorcet—of exemplifying by individual instance what has been deemed the chimera of the perfectionists. In the brief existence of Ellison I fancy that I have seen refuted the dogma, that in man’s very nature lies some hidden principle, the antagonist of bliss. An anxious examination of his career has given 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 darkness and madness of all thought 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 my young friend, too, was fully imbued, and thus it is worthy of observation that the uninterrupted enjoyment which distinguished his life was, in great measure, 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 success of his life, into the common vortex of unhappiness which yawns for those of pre-eminent endowments. But it is by no means my object to pen an essay on happiness. The ideas of my friend may be summed up in a few words. He admitted but four elementary principles, or more strictly, conditions 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 is scarcely worth the name.” He instanced the ecstasies of the fox-hunter, and pointed to the tillers of the earth, the only people who, as a class, can be fairly considered happier than others. His second condition was the love of woman. His third, and most difficult of realization, was the contempt of ambition. His fourth was an object of unceasing pursuit; and he held