Poe Short Story #1: The Domain of Arnheim

Actually more in the nature of an essay than a story, I thought. Beautifully written. Puts forth the premise that what we create artistically -- whether paintings, or poetry, or music, or even gardens -- is in fact more beautiful and more perfect than nature itself. The latter third or so of the story is a description of a fantasy landscape created by the main character, who inherited 450 million pounds and this is how he decides to spend it. Certainly not a Poe story of darkness and murder and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night, as we might expect, but I quite enjoyed it regardless.

A passage worth thinking about: "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 that, other things being equal, the extent of attainable happiness was in proportion to the spirituality of this object."

Read on-line at The Literature Network.