clings
to its fresh and original productions, generation after generation,
finding room for them in its accumulating literary baggage, while more
"important" tomes of scholarship and industry strew the line of its
march.

I feel that this study of Irving as a man of letters would be
incomplete, especially for the young readers of this generation, if it
did not contain some more extended citations from those works upon which
we have formed our estimate of his quality. We will take first a few
passages from the "History of New York."

* * * * *

It has been said that Irving lacked imagination. That, while he had
humor and feeling and fancy, he was wanting in the higher quality, which
is the last test of genius. We have come to attach to the word
"imagination" a larger meaning than the mere reproduction in the mind of
certain absent objects of sense that have been perceived; there must be
a suggestion of something beyond these, and an ennobling suggestion, if
not a combination, that amounts to a new creation. Now, it seems to me
that the transmutation of the crude and theretofore unpoetical
materials, which he found in the New World, into what is as absolute a
creation as exists in literature, was a distinct work of the
imagination. Its humorous quality does not interfere with its largeness
of outline, nor with its essential poetic coloring. For, whimsical and
comical as is the "Knickerbocker" creation, it is enlarged to the
proportion of a realm, and over that new country of the imagination is
always the rosy light of sentiment.

This largeness of modified conception cannot be made apparent in such
brief extracts as we can make, but they will show its quality and the
author's humor. The Low-Dutch settlers of the Nieuw Nederlandts are
supposed to have sailed from Amsterdam in a ship called the Goede Vrouw,
built by the carpenters of that city, who always model their ships on
the fair forms of their countrywomen. This vessel, whose beauteous model
was declared to be the greatest belle in Amsterdam, had one hundred feet
in the beam, one hundred feet in the keel, and one hundred feet from the
bottom of the stern-post to the taffrail. Those illustrious adventurers
who sailed in her landed on the Jersey flats, preferring a marshy
ground, where they could drive piles and construct dykes. They made a
settlement at the Indian village of Communipaw, the egg from which was
hatched the