and of triumphs which had
made him world-renowned, purchased on the banks of the river, not far
from the city, a little estate which it was the joy as well as the
care of his closing years to adorn with everything that a taste so
peculiarly and variously schooled could suggest. He had made it a
pleasing gate-way to the unknown world, with beautiful walks leading
down to the river whose depth and calmness and solemn grandeur
symboled the waves through which he should pass to the reward of a
life of such toil and enviable glory. He had promise of an evening
worthy of his meridian--when the surveyors and engineers, with their
charter-privileges, invaded his retreat, built a road through his
garden, destroyed forever his repose, and--the melancholy truth is
known--made of his mind a ruin.

WASHINGTON IRVING--now sixty-seven years of age--had found a
resting-place at _Wolfert's Roost_, close by the scenes which lie in
the immortal beauty that radiates from his pages, and when he thought
that in this Tusculum he was safe from all annoying, free to enjoy
the quietness and ease he had earned from the world, the same vandals
laid the track through his grounds, not only destroying all their
beauty and attraction, but leaving fens from which these summer heats
distilled contagion. He has therefore been ill for some weeks, and
as he had never a strong constitution, and has preserved his equable
but not vigorous health only by the most constant carefulness, his
physicians and friends begin to be alarmed for the result. Heaven
avert the end they so fearfully anticipate. He cannot go alone: The
honest Knickerbocker, the gentle Crayon, and the faithful brother
Agapida, with Washington Irving will forever leave the world, which
cannot yet resign itself to the loss of either.

* * * * *

Mr. SEBA SMITH, so well known as the author of the "Letters of Major
Jack Downing," and to a different sort of readers for his more serious
contributions to our literature, has just completed the printing of
an original and very remarkable work, upon which he has been engaged
about two years, entitled "New Elements of Geometry," and it will soon
be published in this city by Putnam, and in London by Bentley. It will
probably produce a sensation in the world of science. Its design is
the reconstruction of the entire methods of Geometry. All geometers,
from the dawn of the science, have built their systems upon these
defin