e
incomplete, especially for the young readers of this generation, if it
did not contain some more extended citations from those works upon which
we have formed our estimate of his quality. We will take first a few
passages from the--"History of New York".

It has been said that Irving lacked imagination. That, while he had
humor and feeling and fancy, he was wanting in the higher quality,
which is the last test of genius. We have come to attach to the word
"imagination" a larger meaning than the mere reproduction in the mind of
certain absent objects of sense that have been perceived; there must be
a suggestion of something beyond these, and an ennobling suggestion, if
not a combination, that amounts to a new creation. Now, it seems to me
that the transmutation of the crude and heretofore unpoetical materials
which he found in the New World into what is as absolute a creation
as exists in literature, was a distinct work of the imagination. Its
humorous quality does not interfere with its largeness of outline, nor
with its essential poetic coloring. For, whimsical and comical as is the
Knickerbocker creation, it is enlarged to the proportion of a realm,
and over that new country of the imagination is always the rosy light of
sentiment.

This largeness of modified conception cannot be made apparent in such
brief extracts as we can make, but they will show its quality and the
author's humor. The Low-Dutch settlers of the Nieuw Nederlandts are
supposed to have sailed from Amsterdam in a ship called the Goede Vrouw,
built by the carpenters of that city, who always model their ships on
the fair forms of their countrywomen. This vessel, whose beauteous model
was declared to be the greatest belle in Amsterdam, had one hundred feet
in the beam, one hundred feet in the keel, and one hundred feet from the
bottom of the stern-post to the taffrail. Those illustrious adventurers
who sailed in her landed on the Jersey flats, preferring a marshy
ground, where they could drive piles and construct dykes. They made a
settlement at the Indian village of Communipaw, the egg from which was
hatched the mighty city of New York. In the author's time this place had
lost its importance:

"Communipaw is at present but a small village, pleasantly situated,
among rural scenery, on that beauteous part of the Jersey shore
which was known in ancient legends by the name of Pavonia,
--[Pavonia, in the ancient maps, is given to a t