ready for a paroxysm of enthusiasm on the THE HISTORY OF IRVING'S EARLY ATTACHMENT. advent of any great novelty, whether a great "In the first volume of my work I had alsinger, a great dancer, a great novelist, or a ready introduced some affecting passages from great patriot; and it is not often it has so this memorial bearing upon the history of worthy an object to run mad about. I have his early attachment, and had supposed that heard and seen Kossuth both in public and I had given all that would be of interest to private, and he is really a noble fellow, quite the general reader; but as the London pubthe beau-ideal of a poetic hero. There seems lisher of the biography, to whom the adto be no base alloy in his nature. All is ele- vance sheets were sent, has taken the survated, generous, intellectual, and refined, and prising liberty of introducing two whole with his manly and daring spirit there is chapters, making seventy-nine additional mingled a tenderness and sensibility of the pages, at the end of the third volume, withgentlest kind. He is a kind of man that you out my knowledge or consent, giving some would idolize. Yet, poor fellow! he has further particulars of the author's life at come here under a great mistake, and is Dresden, I feel it necessary again to recur doomed to be disappointed in the high- to the subject. This new matter, to which wrought expectations he had formed of co- the bookseller has resorted as a device to oboperation on the part of our government in tain a copyright, consists mainly of the jourthe affairs of his unhappy country. Admira-nals of Mrs. Fuller and Mrs. Dawson, the tion and sympathy he has in abundance from Emily and Flora of those days. While there individuals; but there is no romance in coun- is much that is of interest in their record of cils of state or deliberative assemblies. There cool judgment and cautious policy must restrain and regulate the warm impulses of feeling, I trust we are never to be carried away by the fascinating eloquence of this second Peter the Hermit into schemes of foreign interference that would rival the wild enterprises of the Crusades." IRVING ON TABLE-TIPPING. Alive to all the novelties of the day, Mr. Irving had an experience in "table-tipping" at the time when that was the popular pastime here. Writing from Washington in February, 1853, in answer to a letter which contained an allusion to a party in New York where the amusement of the evening was moving tables, he says: those pleasant days,' as Mr. Irving calls them in a letter which is to follow,-the last he ever wrote to the family,-there are some things in the journal of Mrs. Dawson a little calculated, though no doubt unintentionally, to mislead, or rather to be misunderstood. "A notice of the English edition of my work, which met my eye in the London Quarterly before I had been able to see the nature of the additions intruded upon it, English copy, or had any intimation of the mentioned, to my surprise, that Mr. Irving had aspired to the hand of Miss Emily Foster, at Dresden, and met with a friendly but decided rejection of his addresses.' On receiving the English copy, I find that Mrs. kind; but, while she claims for her sister, Dawson makes no positive assertion of the from Mr. Irving, a degree of devotion amounting to a hopeless and consuming attachment,' she goes on to say, 'It was fortunate, perhaps, that this affection was returned by the warmest friendship only (the italics are her own), since it was destined that the accomplishment of his wishes yas impossible, for many obstacles which lay in his way.' "I see you are in the midst of hocus-pocus with moving tables, etc. I was at a party last evening where the grand experiment was made on a large table, round which were seated upward of a dozen young folks of both sexes. The table was for a long time obdurate. At length a very pretty, brighteyed girl, who in England would have passed for a Lancashire witch, gave the word Tip, "While I am not disposed to question for table!' whereupon the table gradually raised a moment the warmth or sincerity of his adon two legs until the surface was at an an-miration for the lady, that he ever thought gle of forty-five degrees, and was not easily of matrimony at this time is utterly disto be put down again, until she gave the word 'Down, table!' It afterward rose and sank to a tune, performed gyrations about the room, etc.; all which appeared very mysterious and diabolical. Unfortunately, two or three of us tried an after experiment, and found that we could tip table, and make it move about the room without any very apparent exertion of our hands; so we remain among the unconverted-quite behind the age.' proved by a passage of the very manuscript to which the sister refers, as addressed to her mother, and of which she errs in supposing that I had in possession only the first and last sheets. A more careful reference to the first volume of the biography will show her that only the first and last sheets were missing, and that there remained sixteen consecutive pages. In that manuscript, after recounting the progress and catastrophe of his early love, forever hallowed to his memory, and glancing at other particulars | lished on the banks of the Hudson, which, of his life, with which the reader has already in fact, has been my home for twenty years been made familiar, all given with the frank- past. I am in a beautiful part of the counness and unreserve of perfect confidence, he closes by saying : "You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was not long since. When I had sufficiently recovered from that loss I became involved in ruin. It was not for a man broken down in the world to drag down any woman to his paltry circumstances. I was too proud to tolerate the idea of ever mending my circumstances by matrimony. My time has now gone by; and I have growing claims upon my thoughts and upon my means, slender and precarious as they are. I feel as if I had already a family to think and provide for.' "The reader will perceive from this passage, addressed to Mrs. Foster, at Dresden, after months of intimate friendship, what color there is for the assertion that Mr. Irv-| ing ever made advances for the hand of Miss Emily Foster, however great or undisguised may have been his admiration for her." Miss Emily Foster afterwards became Mrs. Fuller, and that the warmest friendship existed between her and Mr. Irving for many years after their meeting at Dresden is proved by letters (written in 1856), which now first see the light in this volume. We copy the following passage from a letter of Irving to Mrs. Fuller, dated at Sunnyside, July 2d, 1856: "MY DEAR MRS. FULLER, You can scarcely imagine my surprise and delight on opening your letter and finding that it came from Emily Foster. A thousand recollections broke at once upon my mind of Emily Foster as I had known her at Dresden, young and fair and bright and beautiful; and I could hardly realize that so many years had elapsed since then, or form an idea of her as Mrs. Emily Fuller, with four boys and one little girl. I wish you had given me a few more particulars about yourself, and those immediately connected with you whom I have known. After so long an interval one fears to ask questions, lest they should awaken painful recollections. 6 try, in an agreeable neighborhood, and on the best of terms with my neighbors, and have a house full of nieces, who almost make me as happy as if I were a married man. Your letter was put into my hand just as I was getting into the carriage to drive out with some of them. I read it to them in the course of the drive, letting them know that it was from Emily Foster, the young lady of whom they had often heard me speak; who had painted the head of Herodias, which hangs over the piano in the drawing-room, and who, I had always told them, was more beautiful than the head which she had painted; which they could hardly believe, though it was true. You recollect, I trust, the miniature copy of the head of Herodias which you made in the Dresden Gallery. I treasure it as a precious memorial of those pleasant days.' IRVING TO PAULDING. Here is a genial passage from a letter to James K. Paulding, written when Irving was seventy-two years old :— "I am glad to receive such good accounts as you give of yourself and your brother, 'jogging on together in good humor with each other and with the world.' Happy is he who can grow smooth as an old shilling as he wears out; he has endured the rubs of life to some purpose. "You hope I am sliding smoothly down the hill.' I thank you for the hope. I am better off than most old bachelors are, or deserve to be. I have a happy home; the happier for being always well stocked with womenkind, without whom an old bachelor is a forlorn, dreary animal. My brother, the general,' is wearing out the serene evening of life with me; almost entirely deaf, but in good health and good spirits, more and more immersed in the study of newspapers (with which I keep him copiously supplied), and, through them, better acquainted with what is going on in the world than I am, who mingle with it occasionally and have ears as well as eyes open. By the tenor of your letter I should "I have had many vivid enjoyments in the judge that, on the whole, the world has course of my life, yet no portion of it has gone smoothly with you. Your children, been more equably and serenely happy than you tell me, are all so good and promising that which I have passed in my little nest in as to add much to your happiness.' How the country. I am just near enough to town much of what is most precious in life is con- to dip into it occasionally for a day or two, veyed in those few words! You ask me to give my mind an airing, keep my notions a tell you something about myself. Since my little up to the fashion of the times, and then return, in 1846, from my diplomatic mission return to my quiet little home with reto Spain, I have been leading a quiet life in doubled relish." a little rural retreat I had previously estab-I From The Saturday Review, 28 Nov. and it kindles the hopes of continental nations, when they find a centre of resistance to Louis Napoleon which does not fail them in the hour of their need. Nor is it unimportant that Englishmen should themselves learn their own strength, and gain that confidence which comes with doing as seems wisest and best, in spite of the consequences that may ensue, and the remonstrances that may be provoked. emperor proposes, but England disposes. He suggests, and we judge whether his suggesAN English Cabinet has seldom thought tions are worth anything; and it cannot be itself called on to make a more momentous doubted that it is of great advantage to Eudecision than that at which the present min- rope that there should be a power capable of istry has arrived this week in declining alto-acting with this independence of France. It gether the French project for a Congress. animates the courage, it fixes the principles, There is much to be said for the course taken. Every one foresaw the danger and difficulties to which a Congress would give rise. On one supposition, nothing would have been done, and then the only issue would have been fresh heart-burnings. and jealousies and enmities. Resolutions might have been come to of a vague and inoperative kind, which might nevertheless have fixed a slur on the powers against which they had been directed, and which would have left behind them a But, on the other hand, it must be allowed sting that nothing but war could have taken that we may have forced France to think she away. It is not to be supposed that Austria has undergone a serious humiliation, and we would have allowed herself to be voted out of must certainly have mortified and irritated Venetia; and yet, if a strong expression of the emperor. We do not at all object to this European opinion had been recorded against if the occasion called for so strong a measure her, she would have seemed to be branded as at our hands. It is not the business of Enga public wrong-doer. On the other hand, if land to avoid giving France offence if France the Congress had fulfilled its nominal purpose, displays too much ambition and desire of agthere would have been a general remodelling grandizement, nor ought we to be too tender of the map of Europe, and kingdoms would of disappointing the schemes and baffling the have been bartered, or seized on, or given at intrigues of the crowned adventurer who is Paris as they were in the days of the First now the sole representative of France. But Napoleon. England, too, would have run a it may be questioned whether it was quite great risk of being dragged into war against necessary or right that, in this case, the reher will. As things stand now, there might buff should have come from us. It appears possibly be a continental war from which we that, when the Congress was first proposed, might hope to keep aloof; but if we had taken England asked what would be the subjects of a part in a prolonged and angry discussion, discussion. We did not object to a Congress had given much offence and thought ourselves altogether, as in its nature fruitless and perinjured, or had been called on to see the bal-nicious. We did not explain that any Conance of power disturbed, and some great gress must entail the very danger of war wrong or robbery planned and carried out, we should have been very liable to be carried away by our own indignation, and should perhaps have been the first to set the torch to Europe. Then, again, by boldly declining the Congress, and thus terminating the scheme, we have asserted our position in the European scale. No other nation would have dared singly to run the risk of affronting France, and to thwart the emperor. We have shown Europe that there is a power still left which considers itself in no way second to France. If the emperor can call princes and kings together that he may cajole and frighten them at his pleasure, England can step to the rescue, and tell them that they need not trouble themselves to come. The which it sought to avoid. But we asked what the Congress was to deal with. The emperor would scarcely have answered any other power, but he felt himself obliged to answer England. He had to expose his plans, and to say whose possessions were to be called in question. He had more especially to announce that the state of Italy required immediate attention, and that Austria must submit to have her tenure of Venetia disputed. Then we turned round upon him, and told him that this would never do. The Congress, we pointed out, must fail, because Russia would be as deaf at Paris as she is at St. Petersburg to all remonstrances about Poland; because the German Duchies have already been assigned to Denmark by treaty; because, above all things, Austria would never attend a Congress at which it was to be discussed whether she should hold Venetia or the traditions of the past, would still wish to fight for Turkey; but it is obvious that, unless the interests of England are very directly not. We assumed the office of judge, and de-threatened, it will be as difficult to pronounce, cided what it would be wisest for France and Austria to do, and told them that a Congress would only lead to war between them, and that therefore a Congress should not be held. None of these questions touched England, except very remotely, but we did not wait for those whom they did affect to decline attending. We saved them the trouble at the outset. We have not left it to Austria to say that she could not come, now that her position in Italy is declared to be one of the most prominent topics of discussion. We have not given the Emperor of the French that last chance of averting war which he, at any rate, affected to think was opened by inviting Russia to a friendly investigation of the situation and hopes of Poland. We have not given the Italians that measure of advantage which they could scarcely have failed to derive from the French occupation of Rome being submitted to the consideration of Europe. We have chosen to bear all the burden ourselves, to shield Austria, and to save Russia the necessity of again repelling the overtures of France. The French will, we may guess, resent this, and perhaps it is only natural that they should resent it. They have complained loudly, and not without reason, of the mode in which England, after all the magniloquent despatches of Earl Russell about Poland, has fettered the action of France, and left Poland to its fate. Now they may also complain that, when the emperor proposed the hopeless project of a Congress as a last means of keeping off war, England was not content with leaving Russia and Austria to act for themselves, and with showing how hopeless the prospect of a Congress really was, but went out of her way to make the scheme a conspicuous and mortifying failure from the fight to keep the Turks in Europe, as it is to when the next occasion arises, why we should say why we should trouble ourselves to keep Germany in or out of the Duchies, or to prevent or aid France in getting the left bank of the Rhine. Nor, if we keep out of continental wars when they do not touch Turkey, will it be so easy to persuade other powers to dangered. The real consequences of England help us when the integrity of Turkey is enresolutely withdrawing from continental wars have yet to be ascertained. A coalition between France and Russia might speedily settle a vast variety of questions. Nations are generally guided by great interests, and not on the larger schemes of their policy, and by slight and personal motives, in embarking therefore so minor an event as the refusal of England to join the Congress will not, probably, affect very largely the course which the emperor will think it prudent to adopt; yet it must be acknowledged that the step we have just taken may conduce greatly to alienate him and France from the English alliance. It is a bold and striking, but it certainly is not a friendly, act to damp the project of France for a Congress, by refusing altogether to discuss questions affecting Austria, and declining to wait until the views of Austria herself are declared. It is a new rebuff to the emperor; and he has had so many rebuffs lately that he may think he has scarcely any prospect of retrieving his position except by war. He has had to endure the sarcasms and the challenge of Russia. He has had to accept a domestic defeat at the hands of his own Parisians, and his Chamber is now so nearly insubordinate that the opinions of those who might easily guide France into a new path can only be stifled by directing the majority to make a ceaseless noise while an Opposition orator is addressing them, and then by permitting the reporters only to report what they hear. Lastly, EngBut the necessity is so strong of showing land has added a new humiliation, not so a bold front to France, and of avoiding the much by refusing to attend the Congress as least ground for suspecting that, voluntarily by the manner and time of her refusal. or involuntarily, we are accomplices of the War, therefore, is the natural resource to emperor in his schemes for disturbing Eu- which he can look to extricate him from his rope, that a ministry that errs on the side of embarrassments; and if he wishes for an enopposition to France may expect to be for-emy close at hand, the Germans seem bent on given, and may, perhaps, not be disappointed. He must be cheered The continental nations, however, will not and stimulated by learning that the enthufail to perceive that one great cause of our siastic supporters of the Danes in England decisive conduct at this early stage of the have come to the conclusion that the possesaffair has been our dread of being dragged sion of the whole left bank of the Rhine would into a war. We have let the world know not be too splendid a reward for an emperor that, unless in the last extremity, we will not who drew his sword in so holy a cause as that meddle with the quarrels of the Continent. of compelling the Holsteiners to live under Lord Palmerston, and the older inheritors of the rule of Christian IX. of Denmark. outset. providing him with one. > From The Spectator. Sometimes he is tempted by the imaginative purity of a subject (as was Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his poem of " Balder Dead") to forget that he has not adequate vigor for its grasp, as in the series in this volume on the Saga of King Olaf, which is, in his hands, only classical, while by its essence it ought to be forceful. But, on the whole, every volume he has published has been filtered into purer and brighter beauty than the last, MR. LONGFELLOW'S NEW POEMS.* It is rather a remarkable fact that the most striking characteristic common to all the more eminent American authors is not one of substance but one of form, and that, too, one which we should have supposed scarcely attainable amidst the rougher society of a new world, a certain limpid purity and fluent refinement of expression. If we number up the great American names, Hawthorne, Low-and-if we except "Hiawatha," where his ell, Longfellow, Bryant, Washington Irving, Prescott, Channing,-almost all, indeed, of any note, except, perhaps, Dr. Holmes, whose style is sufficiently clear, but not exactly refined-(with Edgar Poe the turbidness is not in the expression but the heart), the one common characteristic is the grace and ease and simplicity of style which makes their words run like a flowing stream across the mind, rising in Hawthorne and Longfellow to the silver music of a fountain's flow and fall. Probably this great ease and simplicity of style arises in some degree from the easc and uniformity of the conditions of life in a country where wide social extremes, and the puzzle which great social miseries bring with them, are almost unknown. No doubt a great social uniformity presents fewer obstacles to the harmonizing and refining effort of the intellect than the complexities of English | society, and the comparatively unpuzzled mind runs off in comparatively easy and harmonious speech. It is always easier to give a high polish to the grain of a single substance than to a surface thickly inlaid with various distinct substances, and we think this is more than a mere illustrative simile. But however that may be, the fact is certain, that American literature has attained at a single bound a style as graceful and polished as that of Addison. subject was peculiarly suited to the graceful 66 Had rocked and wrestled with the blast." And the musician himself is finely described heart of his instrument before he can educe as listening to the music that haunts the Longfellow is certainly chiefly characterized by the crystal grace of his poems. Nor is it mere refinement of style by which he is principally distinguished; for that would tell us little of him as a poet. Even in subjects there is a greater and a less capacity for what we may call the crystal treatment; and Long-itfellow always selects those in which a clear, still, pale beauty may be seen by a swift, delicate vision, playing almost on the surface. "Tales of a Wayside Inn." By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge. "Before the blazing fire of wood |