orget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, when the
tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he
feels his heart, as it were, crushed, in the closing of its portal,
would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness?
No; the love that survives the tomb is one of the noblest
attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its
delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into
the gentle tear of recollection; when the sudden anguish and the
convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved
is softened away into pensive meditation on all that it was in the
days of its loveliness, who would root out such a sorrow from the
heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the
bright hour of gayety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of
gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure or
the burst of revelry? No; there is a voice from the tomb sweeter
than song; there is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even
from the charms of the living.... But the grave of those we love,
what a place for meditation! There it is that we call up in long
review the whole history of virtue and goodness, and the thousand
endearments lavished upon us almost unheeded in the daily
intercourse of intimacy; there it is that we dwell upon the
tenderness, the solemn, awful tenderness of the dying scene. The
bed of death, with all its stifled griefs, its noiseless
attendance, its mute, watchful assiduities. The last testimonies of
expiring love! The feeble, fluttering, thrilling--oh! how
thrilling--pressure of the hand! The last fond look of the glazing
eye turned upon us even from the threshold of existence! The
faint, faltering accents struggling in death to give one more
assurance of affection!'

How truly is this passage 'to be interpreted in the light of the event
in Irving's history', when it is evident from a comparison of it with
the memoranda, that it is a sketch of that scene which wrecked his
brightest hopes, and that here he is renewing in this unequaled
description of a dying-bed, the last hours of Matilda Hoffman. The
highly-wrought picture presents a complete detail to the eye, and yet
still more powerful is that simple utterance in the memoranda: '_I was
the last one she looked upon_.'