almost totally wanting in the passional propensities which waste the
force of the faculties, and divert the man from his principal object.
As the spectator stands midway between the two busts, at some distance
from both, Irving has the larger and the kinglier air, and the face of
Astor seems small and set. It is only when you get close to the bust
of Astor, observing the strength of each feature and its perfect
proportion to the rest,--force everywhere, superfluity nowhere,--that
you recognize the monarch of the counting-room; the brain which
nothing could confuse or disconcert; the purpose that nothing could
divert or defeat; the man who could with ease and pleasure grasp and
control the multitudinous concerns of a business that embraced the
habited and unhabited globe,--that employed ships in every sea, and
men in every clime, and brought in to the coffers of the merchant the
revenue of a king. That speechless bust tells us how it was that this
man, from suffering in his father's poverty-stricken house the
habitual pang of hunger, arrived at the greatest fortune, perhaps,
ever accumulated in a single lifetime; you perceive that whatever
thing this strong and compact man set himself to do, he would be
certain to achieve unless stopped by something as powerful as a law of
nature.

The monument of these two gifted men is the airy and graceful interior
of which their busts are the only ornament. Astor founded the Library,
but it was probably his regard for Irving that induced him to
appropriate part of his wealth for a purpose not in harmony with his
own humor. Irving is known to us all, as only wits and poets are ever
known. But of the singular being who possessed so remarkable a genius
for accumulation, of which this Library is one of the results, little
has been imparted to the public, and of that little the greater part
is fabulous.

A hundred years ago, in the poor little village of Waldorf, in the
duchy of Baden, lived a jovial, good-for-nothing butcher, named Jacob
Astor, who felt himself much more at home in the beer-house than at
the fireside of his own house in the principal street of the village.
At the best, the butcher of Waldorf must have been a poor man; for, at
that day, the inhabitants of a German village enjoyed the luxury of
fresh meat only on great days, such as those of confirmation, baptism,
weddings, and Christmas.

The village itself was remote and insignificant, and though situated
in the vall