as this.  I afterwards sent him the companion, “Christus Remunerator”; and the pair remained his daily companions till the day of his death.  To me, the picture of Irving, amid the noise and bustle of noon in Broadway, shedding tears as he studied that little print, so feelingly picturing human sorrow and the source of its alleviation, has always remained associated with the artist and his works.  If Irving could enjoy wit and humor and give that enjoyment to others, no other writer of books had a heart more tenderly sensitive than his to the sufferings and ills which flesh is heir to.

Of his later days,—­of the calmly received premonitions of that peaceful end of which only the precise moment was uncertain,—­of his final departure, so gentle and so fitting,—­of that “Washington-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