s. Perhaps it is a sufficient definition to say that his
method was the sympathetic. In the end the reader is put in possession
of the luminous and complete idea upon which the author has been
brooding, though he may not be able to say exactly how the impression has
been conveyed to him; and I doubt if the author could have explained his
sympathetic process. He certainly would have lacked precision in any
philosophical or metaphysical theme, and when, in his letters, he touches
upon politics, there is a little vagueness of definition that indicates
want of mental grip in that direction. But in the region of feeling his
genius is sufficient to his purpose; either when that purpose is a highly
creative one, as in the character and achievements of his Dutch heroes,
or merely that of portraiture, as in the "Columbus" and the "Washington."
The analysis of a nature so simple and a character so transparent as
Irving's, who lived in the sunlight and had no envelope of mystery, has
not the fascination that attaches to Hawthorne.

Although the direction of his work as a man of letters was largely
determined by his early surroundings,--that is, by his birth in a land
void of traditions, and into a society without much literary life, so
that his intellectual food was of necessity a foreign literature that was
at the moment becoming a little antiquated in the land of its birth, and
his warm imagination was forced to revert to the past for that
nourishment which his crude environment did not offer,--yet he was by
nature a retrospective man. His face was set towards the past, not
towards the future. He never caught the restlessness of this century,
nor the prophetic light that shone in the faces of Coleridge, Shelley,
and Keats; if he apprehended the stir of the new spirit, he still, by
mental affiliation, belonged rather to the age of Addison than to that of
Macaulay. And his placid, retrospective, optimistic strain pleased a
public that were excited and harrowed by the mocking and lamenting of
Lord Byron, and, singularly enough, pleased even the great pessimist
himself.

His writings induce to reflection; to quiet musing, to tenderness for
tradition; they amuse, they entertain, they call a check to the
feverishness of modern life; but they are rarely stimulating or
suggestive. They are better adapted, it must be owned, to please the
many than the critical few, who demand more incisive treatment and a
deeper consideration of the pro