-second birthday--"I caught myself bounding upstairs three steps
at a time, to the astonishment of the porter, and checked myself,
recollecting that it was not the pace befitting a minister and a man
of my years." His mental life had, however, caught the sober tone of
age. "I am now at that time of life when the mind has a stock of
recollections on which to employ itself; and though these may
sometimes be of a melancholy nature, yet it is a 'sweet-souled
melancholy,' mellowed and softened by the operation of time, and has
no bitterness in it.... When I was young, my imagination was always
in the advance, picturing out the future, and building castles in the
air; now memory comes in the place of imagination, and I look back
over the region I have traveled. Thank God, the same plastic feeling,
which used to deck all the future with the hues of fairyland, throws a
soft coloring over the past, until the very roughest places, through
which I struggled with many a heartache, lose all their asperity in
the distance."

In July, 1846, his successor arrived, and Irving was free to leave
Europe for the last time. His services in Spain had brought nothing
but honor to himself and his country; he had earned a right to the
quiet years that followed in his favorite home nook at Sunnyside.

Soon after his return he began to busy himself with the revised
edition of his works which he had projected in Spain. It was
disheartening to find his old publishers dubious about undertaking the
republication, and for a time the work went hard. "I am growing a sad
laggard in literature," he wrote to his nephew, "and need some one to
bolster me up occasionally. I am too ready to do anything else rather
than write." For more than a year his time was largely devoted to
overseeing an enlargement of the cottage, and a renovation of the
grounds, at Sunnyside. At last he got it all into satisfactory order.
"My own place has never been so beautiful as at present. I have made
more openings by pruning and cutting down trees, so that from the
piazza I have several charming views of the Tappan Zee and the hills
beyond, all set, as it were, in verdant flames; and I am never tired
of sitting there in my old Voltaire chair of a long summer morning
with a book in my hand, sometimes reading, sometimes musing, and
sometimes dozing, and mixing all up in a pleasant dream." As for New
York, "For my part, I dread the noise and turmoil of it, and visit it
but now and t