WASHINGTON IRVING.

WERE the fabled temple of Fame for once to become a reality, and rear its cloud-piercing walls upon American soil, on its corner-stone, on its pillared arches, and on its loftiest pinnacle, would be inscribed the name of WASHINGTON IRVING. He is one of the few individuals in the world whose fortunate lot it has been to impose weighty obligations upon a whole nation. The American people are his acknowledged debtors, and amid that glowing list of writers to whom they are beholden for the elevated character of their national literature, his name maintains a conceded pre-eminence, as distinct and decided, as the unanimity with which it is accorded is singular and unprecedented. Seldom if ever has it been the fortune of an individual, known to the public only by his writings, to ingratiate himself so fully in their affections. What magician shall unfold to us the secret of his mysterious power, and define that wonderful charm which pervades his writings, and holds the spirit spell-bound beneath its influence? The most careful analysis of his productions would probably fail to unmask the laughing fairy that lurks among the lines, and flies mocking at our approach. Like the philosopher of old, famed for his toilsome search after an abstract idea, we should be rewarded at best for such an investigation, by only a faint and unsatisfactory glimpse of the retiring fugitive.

Humor, natural, pure and sparkling, is evidently the prevailing characteristic of his mind, and one which tinges with its light every other emotion. Not the coarser wit of a Cervantes, a Le Sage, or a Hood, exacting the tribute of frequent and boisterous laughter, but that quiet and subdued spirit of mirthfulness which holds the features perpetually relaxed, banishes care and vexation from the mind, and forces even Misanthropy to look upon the follies and crimes of the world, rather with the smile of pity, than the scowl of hate.

Washington Irving, Diedrich Knickerbocker, Geoffrey Crayon, Fray Antonio Agapida, or by whatever other name thou choosest to be known, a million of grateful hearts extend to thee the glad voice of welcome, whenever, from thy wanderings among the flowery fields of fiction, or in the soberer paths of real life, rendered scarcely less gorgeous by the sunlight of a brilliant imagination, thou returnest, bearing choice treasures to their hands. We welcome thee! Once more, and again, we welcome thee to our homes and our firesides. We know thee not, save in thy writings, aud in the mul tiplied counterfeits of thy countenance which adorn our parlors, stare at us from our gift-books, and occasionally, in no Raphael tints, swing, creaking, before our village inns. But we are not unmindful of those intellectual repasts to which we have been heretofore bidden, nor of the savory dishes served up to us in days of yore. We are enchanted travellers in the classic vale of Sleepy Hollow. We are listening to the sound of the spirit howling among the lofty peaks of the Catskill. Side by side with the perplexed and bewildered sleeper we are descending its rugged steeps, mingling with the astonished throng who gaze in awe at his snowy locks and pendant beard, and in the midst of mirth, ready to give a tear to the "poor, weak, infirm old man," who seeks in vain among the representatives of a new generation for the companions of his former years, and exclaims, in the plenitude of despair, "Does nobody know poor Rip Van Winkle?" We are at the village school, and in company with the village pedagogue. The hive-like

hum comes from the open casements, and the long-drawn voice of the teacher is heard afar upon the still summer air. The village church is before us, with its deacons devoutly nodding in their pews, and its droning preacher, as he dwells complacently upon his "twenty-ninthly," mocking with his monotonous voice the murmuring streamlet that rattles without; and with the listening spheres we are again silent before the harmony of a choir, to whom the perfection of melody is the nasal twang of its immortalized leader, the straight haired, lantern-jawed, and slab-sided Ichabod Crane.

Katrina Van Tassel, with her dimpled cheek and roguish smile, is before us, and the circle of spell-bound Mynheers, listening, beneath their cloudy canopy of smoke, to tales oft told of ghosts and goblins dire. We hear the midnight shouts of Brom Pones and his dare-devil crew, and the rattling hoofs of the spectral steed are sounding in our ears. The ancient governors of New Amsterdam are about us. Like Banquo's shadowy train they come, linger awhile before our admiring eyes, and depart, leaving behind them a mingled remembrance of rubicund visages, pendulous chins, vast peripherys, half-acre waistcoats, multitudinous breeches, duck legs, flamingo hose, and broad buckled shoes. Peter the Headstrong, Walter the Doubtful, and William the Testy, come back to do homage to the faithful chronicler of their chivalrous deeds, and to threaten with objurgations, happily unknown to the present age, and scarcely less efficacious than their paper proclamations of old, the luckless wight who should impeach their own valor, or their historian's truth. The great Ramm Rapelye is here. His chair of state in the village inn, and his thronging satellites are seen. His oracular voice, preceded by the earthquake like heavings of his mountainous frame, and accompanied by volcanic smoke from his undying pipe, struggles huskily upward. Peechy Prauw, Wolfert Webber, and Dirk Waldron pass smilingly before us, followed by that "little dark mouldy man of medicine," less diminutive in name than in stature-the learned Doctor Knypperhausen. see again the Black Fisherman, the midnight delvers after the goblin-guarded treasures of the Hudson, Dolph Heyliger, now with his spirit-guide, peering by moonlight into the haunted well, and now gloating over his stores of disinterred gold.

We

Lady Lillycraft, Master Simon, the gentle Julia, Ready-money Jack, and Starlight Tom, are among us. The pale student of Salamanca again lies bleeding among his sheltered retreats, the beautiful Inez is rescued once more by her gallant lover from the dread familiars of the Inquisition, and sweet Annette De Larbre, with returning reason, smiles again upon her lover and upon us. Buckthorne, his booby cousin, and his tattered inamorata, are here, and here the romantic and erudite bandit of Crackscull Common. Nor is the Stout Gentleman absent from this shadowy assemblage. He passes, it is true, with averted face, yet displaying his drab-colored indispensables liberally to our view.

The East too, the region of chivalry, the land of enchantment, the home of the genii, unfolds at thy bidding its fairy treasures to our gaze. With thee we dive into the iron-bound caves of the earth, to revel amid unimagined splendors and wealth; we float through the air on the silken carpet of Solomon; we are whisked on enchanted steeds across measureless tracts of land; we watch the mystic sentinel on the lofty towers of the Alhambra, still poising his spear toward the distant invader, and we behold whole armies discomfited, and mighty victories achieved, by the simple touch of a lance on the magical chess-board of the Arabian Sage.

Nor is there need of fear lest, departing from these bright gardens of the imagination, filled with beautiful colors and fragrant odors and grateful sounds, into the utilitarian fields of real life, we shall find our guide and

companion dull or unprofitable. With him we have followed the fortunes of the derided and humble Genoese, seeking through a dozen courts the grudged and scanty aid of an enterprise, the glory of which shall endure when the name of king and monarch shall have become obsolete and unmeaning sounds. And even the readers of fiction, with all their gorgeous beauty, are for once surpassed in wild and romantic interest, by truths scarcely less wonderful than the tales of enchantment, as displayed in the pictures of one who disposes the lights and shades of history with a skilful hand, and enlivens the whole with the coloring of fresh and genuine feeling. With him and with his hero, we stand in imagination upon the darkened deep of the Santa Maria, amid the threatening billows of an unknown sea, a thousand leagues beyond the abodes of civilized man, where the very laws of nature seem to be changing around us, and the mutinous mariners, with pallid lips and trembling voice, beseech, entreat, demand an abandonment of the mighty project. We hear the extorted promise which purchases a little further forbearance. We watch the furrowed countenance and anxious eye of Columbus, as, in the solitude of the night and the sea, he sends his earnest gaze over measureless tracts of water, with all the energy of a hope long fruitlessly indulged, and destined now either to immediate and brilliant success, or to a failure complete, perfect and irretrievable. With him we catch the first faint glimmer of that distant light, flickering like a fire-fly across the distant waters, now hidden and now revealed by the rolling of the intervening waves. With suspended breath, with fast-beating heart, with giddy brain, we watch that beacon light, as the outcast Peri may be supposed to have watched the bursting effulgence from the opened gates of Paradise, proclaiming his trials and probations at an end. A stormy train of hopes and fears sweep lightning-like across the brain, and merge in the certainty of an overwhelming bliss, as from ship to ship the hoarse shout of "Landland, land," rings through the silent watches of the night. We see the awakened sleepers come thronging to the deck,—we hear the tumultuous cheers that shake the pennant on the lofty peak, and rouse the frightened sea-bird from his sleep upon the rocking billows; and amidst all we behold Columbus, the master spirit of this sublime achievement, who holds, as it were, the keys of a world in his hand, in the devotion of a silent, fervent and unutterable gratitude, dropping upon his bended knees, and turning his tearful eyes to Heaven.

The first meeting of the inhabitants of the two hemispheres, as astonishing perhaps to each as would be the commingling of the citizens of different worlds, the miracles of art that delighted and appalled the one party, the wonders and novelties of Nature which enraptured the other, and the wild and magnificent imaginations which distorted the perceptions of both, were fit and aptly chosen themes for the romantic mind of Irving. While to the simple natives of the isles, the voyagers were transformed into gods, visiting with celestial armory the abodes of men-the pseudo deities themselves, scarcely less simple than their admiring companions, discovered more wonders and prodigies than were ever known to Prospero's haunted isle. The summer seas, and summer skies of this island world, its exuberant and beautiful vegetation, its new and luscious fruits, the unrivalled brilliancy and beauty of its birds, flashing the sunlight from their plumage as they fitted among the fragrant groves, its boundless stores of wealth in gold and precious stones glittering in every stream, and begging to be garnered, were all subjects fraught with the true spirit of Poesy. The chivalry of the Spanish cavaliers, their mingled devotion, patriotism, cruelty and avarice, the fortitude of the Indian martyrs, the world-like ransoms of their princes, their conquest, submission, slavery, and decline, and the marked vengeance of

Deity upon their oppressors, were all themes fruitful of intense and exciting interest. Who reads, without a gratifying sense of its retributive justice, the fate of Bovadilla, the tyrant foe of Columbus, and his guilty coadjutors? While homeward bound, gloating over his stores of heart-stained gold, he heard afar the moaning of the rushing tornado, saw his whole fleet with flowing sail successively go down, and in the midst of treasures incalculably vast, yet powerless to save him, perished beneath that vengeance-gale of Heaven. That so signal a punishment should have overtaken the guilty, that Columbus himself should have rode out the same storm in safety, and that of the few vessels belonging to the shipwrecked fleet which also escaped its fury, one should have been preserved as it were by the sacred character of the treasures which it bore, being freighted with the wealth of the Discoverer, was too marked an interposition of Heaven to be overlooked by the most careless observer. Nor will those who are fond of tracing the finger of Providence in the outline of the world's history, fail to discover the national retribution which has overtaken once haughty Spain, and rendered her a by-word to the modern age. Once the mightiest and wealthiest empire of the civilized world, now shorn of her colonial strength, impoverished in treasury, torn by intestine feuds, forced but yesterday to behold a plebeian monarch on the throne of her Ferdinands, she stands before us a pitiable spectacle of decayed grandeur, leading us to exclaim in the language of the prophetic proverb against ancient Babylon, "How art thou fallen from Heaven, oh Lucifer, son of the morning!"

If the discovery, conquest, and early settlement of a new world have been thus happily delineated by the pen best fitted for their portrayal, the history by the same hand of stirring personal adventures, and vast individual enterprise in our own age and land, has also proven a fruitful source of interest. The narrative of the several expeditions by land and sea to the mouth of the Columbia, the settlement of Astoria, the hardships endured, the fortitude displayed by the actors in that eventful drama, are subjects that will not readily be effaced from the mind of the reader. Ever conspicuous among these reminiscences must be the melancholy yet not ignoble fate of the Tonquin and her gallant officer, whom we seem to see, with unflinching hand, applying the brand to the magazine of his captured ship, and terminating at once his own existence and that of a hecatomb of foes. Mr. Astor's herculean enterprise was one well worthy of its historian, and deserving the monument "more durable than brass," which he has erected in its commemoration. He who views great undertakings with a philosophic eye, will judge of them less by their results than by the motives which induced them, the genius displayed in their design, and the proper adaptation of means to the required end. And whether we travel in imagination forty years back, and, standing beside one of the merchant princes of the metropolis, look forward with him upon his gigantic scheme of trade and colonization, or whether, with the added lights of half a century, we look back upon the same mighty enterprise, we behold one in which the magnitude of the personal and national interests involved, the clear conception, the bold design, and the lofty courage displayed in its attempted accomplishment, make us forget the failure to which, in common with many of the proudest efforts of human wisdom, it was subjected. Yet we may not pronounce that enterprise a failure which has had an important bearing upon the subsequent settlement of a great national controversy, and which, by a noble example of perseverance under difficulties, has animated millions of the humbler pioneers of freedom in the great task of settling and civilizing the boundless regions of the West.

One of the most useful, if not the most common traits of genius, is the