ot
up and left the house. It is evidence with what romantic tenderness
Irving cherished the memory of this early love, that he kept by him
through life the Bible and Prayer-Book of Matilda. He lay with them
under his pillow in the first days of keen and vivid anguish that
followed her loss, and they were ever afterward, in all changes of
climate and country, his inseparable companions.'

The scene at the house of Mr. Hoffman, to which the biographer alludes,
took place after Irving's second return from Europe, and after an
absence of nearly twenty years from his native land. During this time he
had become famous as an author, and had been conceded the position of
the first American gentleman in Europe. He had been received at Courts
as in his official position (Secretary of Legation) and had received the
admiration of the social and intellectual aristocracy of England.
Returning full of honors, he became at once the lion of New-York, and
was greeted by a public dinner at the City Hotel. How little could it
have been imagined, that amid all this harvest of honors, while he stood
the cynosure of a general admiration, he should still be under the power
of a youthful attachment, and that outliving all the glories of his
splendid success, a maiden, dead thirty years, held him with undying
power. While others thought him the happy object of a nation's
popularity, his heart was stealing away from noise and notice to the
hallowed ground where Matilda lay.

'Oh! what are thousand living loves To that which can not quit the
dead?'

The biographer observes that 'it is in the light of this event that we
must interpret portions of 'Rural Funerals,' in the _Sketch-Book_, and
'Saint Mark's Eve,' in _Bracebridge Hull_.' From the former of these, we
therefore make an extract, which is now so powerfully illustrated by the
experience of its author:

'The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to
be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal; every other
affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep
open; this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude. Where
is the mother that would willingly forget the infant that perished
like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang?
Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of
parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who in the hour of
agony would f