Irving-day"
so dreamily, blandly still, and almost fragrant, December though it was,
when with those simple and appropriate obsequies his mortal remains were
placed by the side of his brothers and sisters in the burial-ground of
Sleepy Hollow, while thousands from far and near silently looked for the
last time on his genial face and mourned his loss as that of a personal
friend and a national benefactor, yet could hardly for _his_ sake desire
any more enviable translation from mortality,--of the many beautiful
and eloquent tributes of living genius to the life and character and
writings of the departed author,--of all these you have already an ample
record. I need not repeat or extend it. If you could have "assisted"
at the crowning "Commemoration," on his birthday, (April 3d,) at the
Academy of Music, you would have found it in many respects memorably in
accordance with the intrinsic fitness of things. An audience of five
thousand, so evidently and discriminatingly intelligent, addressed for
two hours by Bryant, with all his cool, judicious, deliberate criticism,
warmed into glowing appreciation of the most delicate and peculiar
beauties of the character and literary services he was to
delineate,--and this rich banquet fittingly _desserted_ by the periods
of Everett,--such an evening was worthy of the subject, and worthy to
be remembered. The heartiness and the genial insight into Irving's best
traits which the poet displayed were peculiarly gratifying to the nearer
friends and relatives. His sketch and analysis, too, had a remarkable
completeness for an address of that kind, while its style and manner
were models of chaste elegance. Speaking of Irving's contemporaries and
predecessors, he warms into poetry, thus:--

"We had but one novelist before the era of the 'Sketch-Book': their
number is now beyond enumeration by any but a professed catalogue-maker,
and many of them are read in every cultivated form of human speech.
Those whom we acknowledge as our poets--one of whom is the special
favorite of our brothers in language who dwell beyond the sea--appeared
in the world of letters and won its attention after Irving had become
famous. We have wits and humorists and amusing essayists, authors of
some of the airiest and most graceful contributions of the present
century,--and we owe them to the new impulse given to our literature
in 1819. I look abroad on these stars of our literary firmament,--some
crowded together with