The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

TALES OF NATURAL BEAUTY

volved is made to assume the air of an intermediate or
secondary nature: a nature which is not God, nor an
emanation from God, but which still is nature in the
sense of the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God."
It was in devoting his enormous wealth to the
embodiment of a vision such as this, in the free exercise in the open air insured by the personal superintendence of his plans, in the unceasing object which
these plans afforded, in the high spirituality of the
object, in the contempt of ambition which it enabled
him truly to feel, in the perennial springs with which
it gratified, without possibility of satiating, that one
master passion of his soul, the thirst for beauty;
above all, it was in the sympathy of a woman, not
unwomanly, whose loveliness and love enveloped his
existence in the purple atmosphere of Paradise, that
Ellison thought to find, and found, exemption from
the ordinary cares of humanity, with a far greater
amount of positive happiness than ever glowed in the
rapt day-dreams of De Stael.
I despair of conveying to the reader any distinct
conception of the marvels which my friend did actually accomplish. I wish to describe, but am disheartened by the difficulty of description, and hesitate
between detail and generality. Perhaps the better
course will be to unite the two in their extremes.
Mr. Ellison's first step regarded, of course, the
choice of a locality; and scarcely had he commenced
thinking on this point, when the luxuriant nature of
the Pacific Islands arrested his attention. In fact, he
had made up his mind for a voyage to the South Seas,
when a night's reflection induced him to abandon the
idea. " Were I misanthropic," he said, "such a localo
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