"The Landscape Garden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

riches merely surpassing those of any citizen, it would have been easy
to suppose him engaging to supreme excess in the fashionable
extravagances of his time; or busying himself with political
intrigues; or aiming at ministerial power, or purchasing increase of
nobility, or devising gorgeous architectural piles; or collecting
large specimens of Virtu; or playing the munificent patron of
Letters and Art; or endowing and bestowing his name upon extensive
institutions of charity. But, for the inconceivable wealth in the
actual possession of the young heir, these objects and all ordinary
objects were felt to be inadequate. Recourse was had to figures; and
figures but sufficed to confound. It was seen, that even at three
per cent, the annual income of the inheritance amounted to no less
than thirteen millions and five hundred thousand dollars; 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.