Chapter 163

AND OTHER STORIES 151 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 locale would suit me. The thoroughness of its insulation and seclusion, and the difficulty of ingress and egress would in such case be the charm of charms; but as yet I am not Timon. I wish the composure but not the depression of solitude. There must remain with me a certain control over the extent and duration of my repose. There will be frequent hours in which I shall need, too, the sympathy of the poetic in what I have done. Let me seek, then, a spot not far from a populous city — whose vicinity, also, will best enable me to execute my plans." In search of a suitable place so situated Ellison traveled for several years, and I was permitted to accompany him. A thousand spots with which I was enraptured he rejected without hesitation for reasons which satisfied me in the end that he was right. We came at length to an elevated table-land of wonderful fertility and beauty, affording a panoramic prospect very little less in extent than that of ^Etna, and, in Ellison's opinion as well as my own, surpassing the far-famed view from that mountain in all the true elements of the picturesque. “I am aware," said the traveler, as he drew a sigh of deep delight, after gazing on this scene, entranced, for nearly an hour — “I know that here, in my circumstances, nine-tenths of the most fastidious of men would rest content. This panorama is indeed glorious, and I should rejoice in it but for the excess of its glory. The taste of all the architects I have ever known leads them, for the sake