hen the hardy plant is rifted
by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils, and
bind up its shattered boughs, so is it beautifully ordered by
Providence that woman, who is the mere dependent and ornament of man in
his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with
sudden calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses of his
nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the
broken heart."

Irving's gifts were sentiment and humor, with an imagination
sufficiently fertile, and an observation sufficiently acute to support
those two main {414} qualities, but inadequate to the service of strong
passion or subtle thinking, though his pathos, indeed, sometimes
reached intensity. His humor was always delicate and kindly; his
sentiment never degenerated into sentimentality. His diction was
graceful and elegant--too elegant, perhaps; and in his modesty he
attributed the success of his books in England to the astonishment of
Englishmen that an American could write good English.

In Spanish history and legend Irving found a still newer and richer
field for his fancy to work upon. He had not the analytic and
philosophical mind of a great historian, and the merits of his
_Conquest of Granada_ and _Life of Columbus_ are rather
_belletristisch_ than scientific. But he brought to these undertakings
the same eager love of the romantic past which had determined the
character of his writings in America and England, and the
result--whether we call it history or romance--is at all events
charming as literature. His _Life of Washington_--completed in
1859--was his _magnum opus_, and is accepted as standard authority.
_Mahomet and His Successors_, 1850, was comparatively a failure. But
of all Irving's biographies, his _Life of Oliver Goldsmith_, 1849, was
the most spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did not impose it upon
himself as a task, but wrote it from a native and loving sympathy with
his subject, and it is, therefore, one of the choicest literary memoirs
in the language.

{415}

When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he was the recipient of
almost national honors. He had received the medal of the Royal Society
of Literature and the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford University, and had
made American literature known and respected abroad. In his modest
home at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river over which he had been the
first to throw the witchery of poetry and romance